Alexa Flash Briefings: What Marketers Need to Know

Want to reach people regularly via their smart speakers?

Wondering how Alexa flash briefings work?

To explore how marketers can benefit from Alexa flash briefings, I interview Chris Brogan.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Chris Brogan, a digital marketing advisor for large businesses. He specializes in customer experience marketing with a focus on emerging technology. He's also host of the new podcast, Making the Brand.

Chris explains why now is the time to tap into the Alexa platform.

You'll also discover how to save time developing flash briefing content and managing your audio.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Alexa Flash Briefings
Chris's Start With Smart Speakers

Chris says he's never on the bleeding edge of anything. The first time he encountered a smart speaker, he wasn't impressed. You could ask it to play a song, but he doesn't play music nonstop in his house and has nicer speakers than that device.

However, when Chris learned about Alexa flash briefings and similar technologies on other platforms, he saw a business application for a conversational interface. For example, when Chris bought a Windows laptop to play a game with his son, he set up the laptop through Cortana, the Windows conversational interface.

In retail shopping, to compete with Amazon, Google Home partnered with Walmart and eBay. Apple has Siri. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, just announced he's trying to make a conversational interface for doctors so they can do prescriptions and patient care through an audio device as well.

As the major technology companies come out with their own conversational interfaces, the increasing competition suggests these companies know something about this technology that regular folks don't. As the technology continues to emerge, Chris thinks the current opportunities mean that now is the right time for marketers and companies to start thinking about how to use it.

Listen to the show to hear Chris discuss how conversational interfaces are like Jarvis from the movie, Iron Man.

The Potential for Alexa Flash Briefings

As artificial intelligence and voice recognition technologies continue to improve, natural language processing allows people to interact with a device without using perfect syntax. The software doesn't have to hear all of the words perfectly. It can guess the meaning from context.

For instance, any of these devices can respond to a user who says, "Blank product, tell me about the weather," or "Blank product, is Ed Asner still alive?", or "Blank product, when is the next time Avengers: Infinity War is playing in my neighborhood?" In all sorts of cases, you can use this technology instead of looking at your screen.

Chris believes voice technology is in the same place as mobile several years ago, when people were saying, "Mobile's coming. Mobile's coming." After mobile truly arrived, websites that didn't prioritize mobile stopped appearing in Google search results. Similarly, because voice technology can now understand what we say regardless of inflection, accent, and so on, magical things are happening.

Industry leaders are talking about the increased adoption of smart speakers. A very recent article from PSFK said 65% of people age 25 to 49 interact with an AI assistant (which is another term for a smart speaker) at least once a day. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, says voice and conversational AI represent a new age of computing.

However, PwC notes that people's misunderstanding of what smart speakers do or lack of trust in the technology has slowed adoption.