Why did we pause interviewing guests on this show? Plus Emily’s top six podcast recs and a sampler from the five most popular Voice Marketing episodes this month.
058 - Amy Summers. Voice: A Faster Way to Publish
Writing a book has long been considered a rite of passage in establishing industry authority and a personal brand. Books are powerful. But the traditional publishing industry moves slowly and leaves much to be desired for writers without time to spare or whose content is time sensitive. How can voice technology establish a platform and thought leadership faster - and maybe even better?
Amy Summers shares her experiment of creating an Alexa Flash Briefing instead of writing a book. The results may surprise you.
Flash Briefing Beat Writing a Book
“If it’s really just about getting information out there, why does it have to be this slow?”
Amy Summers is President of Pitch Publicity in New York. Amy launched her company in 2003 and over 20 years her campaigns have resulted in billions of media impressions worldwide. She produces one of the highest ranked Alexa Flash Briefings about PR, management, and communications, The Pitch with Amy Summers.
The Pitch is a Flash Briefing about PR and communications
Amy Summers launched Pitch Publicity in 2003, in the face of a rapidly changing climate for communication and media relations. She has 20 years of experience in securing publicity and developing communication strategies for influential experts in medicine, science, tech, finance and international corporations and nonprofit organizations.
Summers’ campaigns have resulted in billions of media impressions worldwide and she’s credited as the first to strategize live media interviews at both the deepest and highest points of the planet (scientific laboratory, 63 feet beneath the sea and Mount Everest summit, 21,000 feet above sea level).
Topics:
How is the book publishing industry behind the times?
What can go wrong with a book deal?
Why didn’t Amy write a book?
How Amy established a platform for herself as a PR and communications expert on a new medium (voice) using Alexa Flash Briefing
People assume that Amy has written a book - hear why!
What advice Amy gives clients who want to write a book
Get in Touch with Amy:
Instagram: @amysummersnyc
Alexa skill: The Pitch with Amy Summers
050 - TD Ameritrade Alexa Skills: Brevity, Levity, and Familiarity - Dani Fava
Voice is a powerful medium for a relationship-centric business like wealth management. In fact, one of the Flash Briefings that Dani Fava launched, TD Ameritrade for Advisors, just won the Custodians: Thought Leadership category of the 2019 Wealth Management Industry Awards. This daily briefing provides RIAs (Registered Investment Advisors) and financial advisors with tips on running their business and helping clients invest.
Play it everywhere:
TD Ameritrade for Advisors is the award-winning Flash Briefing Dani Fava launched for RIAs and financial advisors (Institutional)
Hear about Dani's experience launching Alexa Flash Briefing skills for TD Ameritrade. With apps across voice assistants like Alexa and Google on both on the institutional and brokerage (retail) sides of their business, TD Ameritrade is a leader in voice for the banking category. And as Director of Innovation, Dani is leading that charge!
Dani Fava, Director, Institutional Innovation, TD Ameritrade
Plus Dani shared one financial advisor’s emotionally moving story about how the TD Ameritrade Alexa skill empowered a longtime client to once again feel control over her finances through voice.
TD Ameritrade Alexa Skill features market updates, account summary, and place a trade
Powerful Banking and Trading Skill: TD Ameritrade is the first company ever to create an Alexa Skill where you can place trades with just your voice.
You can enable the skill and get started by saying, “Alexa, ask TD Ameritrade…”
Stay updated on the markets, and after you link your TD Ameritrade account, get updates on your balances, positions, and more.The TD Ameritrade skill provides quotes for all U.S.-traded stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, and major U.S. indices, which amounts to over 75,000 securities.
Latest news: TD Ameritrade announced that it has launched a new Google Assistant Action to complement their existing Alexa skill.
Starting today, once authenticated, TD Ameritrade clients can simply ask their Assistant by saying ‘Hey Google, check my TD Ameritrade portfolio’ to gain insight into their current holdings, hands-free,” according to the announcement.
The new Action offers a number of features such as:
Ask for a market update
Find out how a sector (such as Technology) is doing
Get your account balance
Find out how your portfolio is performing
TD Ameritrade launched a new Google Action in September 2019
Get in Touch with Dani Fava:
Twitter: @Dani_FavaTDA
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049 - The Killer Voice App - Dave Isbitski, Chief Evangelist Alexa - Pt. 2 of 2
Dave Isbitski, Chief Evangelist, Alexa at Amazon
Guest: Dave Isbitski, Chief Evangelist, Amazon Alexa. We discussed Alexa Flash Briefing and the future of AI and how it will teach us about ourselves. The killer app is the connection. Part 2 of 2. (Listen to Part 1.)
We also answered a top question among marketers: how do you overcome discoverability challenges with early voice to get your Alexa skill found?
Friendly reminder: please mute your Alexa device before listening.
SHOW NOTES:
1:05 Flash Briefing - a consistent way to engage your customers. Beats a silly CEO email no one opens. This is a better company update.
2:00 "I want to engage and connect on a human level”
Cross modalities to drive engagements
2:45 Teri Fisher - Voice First Health Podcast: using SEO to share and promote all his Flash Briefings (Alexa in Canada, the top briefing in Canada). Put all the briefings onto a blog. This is how to harness Flash Briefing across modalities and web as well as helping your SEO.
3:20 You offer customers value. You must give. Pippa.io is a good tool to get your briefings embedded into your site with a simple widget which is also search-friendly (thanks for sponsoring our show, Pippa!) Here’s how it looks for the Voice Marketing Flash Briefing:
Get a $25 Amazon Gift Card when you sign up for Pippa to host your podcast or Flash Briefing!
4:00 What do you see coming down the pike as far as interaction within Flash Briefing? How do we move from passive to interactive, if we do at all - in voice experiences?
4:30 Dave: I’m a product person. I love consumer devices. I feel strongly that you want someone to get a new idea or understand how something will work, it must be a physical product. That was Echo. People want devices that work with Alexa. That customer sentiment has evolved - the future will be similar.
7:50 Alexa Conversations
8:00 The future of voice
8:20 We as humans don't think in terms of TASKS but in terms of scenarios, ideas, and things we want to get done (re:MARS example)
9:35 Burn your current ideas down. AI will help. Existentialism.
11:00 There is no killer voice app. The killer thing is the relationship and context with AI. Like a long friendship - it’s not any one aspect that makes it meaningful, it’s the entire relationship.
045 - Hearables and the Future of Audible Social Media - Dave Kemp
Dave Kemp from Oaktree Products is an expert on hearables, which are smart, wireless in-ear devices such as AirPods. And they’re probably the future of voice, more so than smart speakers.
Dave and Emily talked about ambient computing from Alexa to wearables to the connected car. And interestingly we touched on the dire need for curated content to replace the noisy and overwhelming experience of social media today. Plus, hear how Alexa Flash Briefing might be the first iteration of that improved content experience.
AirPods are Apple's most popular accessory product, with 35 million units sold in 2018 alone.
Topics and timestamps:
Hearables including AirPods and competitor products such as Samsung Galaxy Buds, Pixel Buds, Microsoft Surface headset
5:10 Amazon hearables in late half of 2019 (competitor to AirPods)
Apple's new H1 chip in v2 AirPods shows that Apple is dedicated to AirPods for the long term (beyond using the W1 chip from Apple Watch), now AirPods have their own chip architecture just for hearables
First application is "Hey Siri" activation (no tapping required)
7:10 Bret Kinsella helped people visualize importance of the smart speaker as training wheels, a conditional device to make people comfortable with the voice assistant, offloading smartphone related tasks to VAs. But hearables are really riding the bike.
The near-field voice assistant is key (smart speakers like the Amazon Echo and Google Home and Apple HomePod are far field)
9:00 We have to recognize there has been a dramatic behavioral shift since 2016
It has becomes socially acceptable to wear in-ear devices all the time
9:20 Form factors are developing: earrings (fashionable hearables) and Bose AR frames with speakers near the ear could be the future
9:40 Hearing aids as a form factor allow for usage that is super discreet - moving away from stigma today and to all-day usage
Passively consuming content while synced to digital environment - all day usage is plausible
10:30 Emily's Bluetooth headache - how can we minimize exposure to EMFs from a health standpoint?
11:00 AirPods case could become the receiver vs streaming content from phone to AirPods. Content could be housed in the AirPod case and streamed in a lower bandwidth from the edge vs the cloud.
11:20 Outfitting our bodies with technology - what are the health implications for heavy EMFs (Electric and magnetic fields (EMFs) are invisible areas of energy, often referred to as radiation) - hear a quick Flash Briefing about why EMFs are a problem - TBD…
12:25 Flash Briefing and passive consumption of content
Flash Briefing is a gem
Dave’s Flash Briefing (Future Ear Radio) is his daily blog post on futurear.co then the briefing is a 60 second tease about the blog post (a promotional vehicle to his blog post)
Flash Briefing should be the star of the smart speaker - such a powerful use case
14:00 This is the precursor to audio social media, consuming on demand the content you want to consume from your favorite sources (curated feed)
Amazon should be featuring Flash Briefing more but now it's relegated to the Settings area of the Alexa app
How can we put the Flash Briefing idea on other platforms?
15:15 We are so overwhelmed with social media- what if you could Google Reader / RSS all that content?
Ways to better curate your attention and cut out the noise
We love Twitter but it requires so much parsing - what does the future hold and how can voicefirst make passive content consumption better?
Get in touch with Dave Kemp:
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