What Happened Following its 19 billion-dollar acquisition by Facebook in 2014, WhatsApp has so far held onto its no-advertising policy , focusing instead on steadily growing its user base. Now, with its user base approaching the milestone of one billion global users, WhatsApp seems finally ready to develop some business-friendly features, starting with testing business accounts which brands can use to connect with customers right in the popular messaging app. The app will also drop the $0.99 yearly subscription fee it charges users after the first year, which underscores the company’s shift in monetization focus and will decrease friction for users and help maximize growth.
What Brands Need To Do Facebook has been making great progress in making its Messenger app more useful and brand-friendly, with one of the most successful use cases so far being helping brands, such as Hyatt Hotels, to provide customer service via messaging. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that Facebook is bringing similar features to WhatsApp.
Although it seems unlikely that Facebook would be drastically revamping WhatsApp to add advertisements or third-party app integration any time soon, the announcement signifies the opportunities to come for brands to connect with WhatsApp’s predominantly international audience. Therefore, brands with a heavy dependence on international markets need to recalibrate their mobile communications strategies and take WhatsApp into consideration.
What Happened Facebook introduced Messenger for Business at its F8 conference in March to facilitate communication between customers and businesses. Now, Hyatt Hotels is one of the first brands to start using it. The international hotel chain now employs of a team of 60 across three global locations to help guests with their customer service needs via various social channels, including Messenger. Besides real-time conversations with its customers, Hyatt is looking to securely share transaction receipts and booking details via Messenger in the future.
What Brands Need To Do By moving its customer service to a text-based platform like Facebook Messenger, Hyatt makes it easier for customers to reach out and start conversations. Moreover, it also gives Hyatt a voice – a personality, even – that resides inside the Facebook ecosystem and adds accountability to its customer service. As texting and messaging apps take over phone calls as the primary means of modern communication for a growing population segment, brands need to adapt to the changing consumer behavior and start to use messaging apps, such as Messenger, as a tool.
What Happened Without much fanfare, Tumblr has rolled out a crucial feature that has been missing from its platform – private instant messaging. The microblogging platform has long offered an inbox feature for its users to ask and answer each other’s questions, but now it supports threaded one-on-one messaging as well. This new feature is available in Tumblr’s mobile apps on iOS and Android, as well as its desktop website.
What Brands Need To Do Tumblr has been growing its platform as a content and social marketing channel following Yahoo’s billion-dollar acquisition in 2013, and some brands have gotten on board. Nescafé, for instance, opted to move its traditional website to Tumblr in hopes of “building stronger relationships with younger consumers” earlier this year. The existing Ask Inbox feature on Tumblr works great for repurposing those Q&As as user-generated branded content, and the addition of a messaging feature can help facilitate deeper communication between users and brands. For brands on Tumblr, this new chat tool should come in handy for customer relationship management.
What Happened Snapchat is having a good week as it welcomes three new brands on board. The popular messaging app just signed the National Football League as a formal partner to bring photos and videos from games into its Live Stories feature. As part of this one-year deal, Snapchat will create a story for each game leading to this year’s Super Bowl, sell ads in these stories, and split revenue with NFL. Besides helping NFL reach younger audiences, Snapchat is also hosting a runway show for Burberry to launch new clothing lines via Live Stories. Moreover, Goldman Sachs is turning to Snapchat’s Campus Stories channel to target college students with short video ads.
What Brands Should Do From sports to fashion to banking, Snapchat’s new partners come from diverse industry verticals, which demonstrates its versatility as an emerging media channel. Brands that seek to reach mobile consumers, especially those in younger generations, need to consider putting their content on Snapchat.
Your guide to tech-driven changes in the media landscape by IPG Media Lab. A fast read for you and a forward for your clients and team.
• Facebook started testing its own improved, human-assisted version of Siri
• More than just making suggestions, it will also complete tasks on users’ behalf
• Brands need to explore the new functional layer that many messaging apps are adding to their platform for transactions, customer service, and reaching new customer
What Facebook Announced Over a month after initial reports suggesting Facebook started preparing a human-staffed personal assistant service, the social network announced on Wednesday that it has started testing a new service for its Messenger mobile chat app called M that handles user queries and requests in a text-based interface that looks similar to other conversations on the platform. The service is currently available for a few hundred users in the Bay Area, and will eventually be rolled out to all Messenger users.
Unlike rival virtual assistants Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, or Google’s Google Now, Facebook claims that M will take it one step further and actually complete tasks on users’ behalf, such as purchasing items, getting gifts delivered, booking restaurants, making travel arrangements and appointments, and more. In addition to AI-powered responses, Facebook also has a team of so-called “M trainers” to handle the requests that AI can’t, ensuring all requests are answered properly.
• Reach customers on apps they’re already using – in this case, Facebook Messenger
• Take advantage of emerging platforms with messaging-based customer service
• Prepare for a new version of SEO to conquer the prime space in AI-generated suggestions
At a time when the U.S. market is finally catching up with the Asian market in discovering messaging apps’ great potential as a commerce platforms, Facebook is looking to take initiative in a nascent ecosystem that brands of all types could benefit greatly from. It is time to start expanding your customer service from phone call-based to include text-based messaging, reaching consumers on the platforms they already use.
As of now, Facebook seems to be deliberately keeping M neutral and completely devoid of “opinions”, i.e. whether something is good or not. Instead, it merely presents all available options as generated by algorithms. While this approach may not seem too welcoming for brand integrations, we are optimistic that Facebook would open up M for sponsored content and branded recommendations in the near future, given Facebook’s trajectory in making Messenger’s platform more brand-friendly so far. And brands need to be ready for what could essentially be a updated version of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that plays around AI algorithms to make sure their content shows up in advantageous positions in M’s recommendations.
Market Impact M will certainly face some tough competitions: Amazon unbundled its virtual assistant Alexa from its smart speaker Echo in June; Microsoft has launched Cortana on new platforms; and Apple is reportedly integrating Siri into its updated Apple TV for voice command. But unlike other virtual assistants, Facebook M holds the advantage of being a hybrid of AI and real-human touches. Boasting over 700 million monthly users and still growing, Facebook Messenger has been actively adding new brand-friendly features to integrate businesses into its platform, clearly aiming to become go-to place for mobile discovery and customer service. Moreover, it bucks the convention of being voice-activated, and instead is text-based. Given the flexibility of conversational UI, however, it seems reasonable to expect Facebook M to adopt speech command down the road as an option, just as its competitors could easily move to texts-based communications to best suit user’s’ needs.
In recent months, we have seen some messaging apps adding a “functional layer” on top of its chatting features to connect customers to businesses. For example, popular Chinese messaging app WeChat has been actively onboarding certified brand accounts to expand the functionality of its messaging platform, to some great success. Similarly, apps like Kik, Vurb, Path, and Tango all updated their platform to add features that seek to connect users to businesses and brands via chat or in-app shops. On the other end of the spectrum, there is Magic, a startup that promises to fulfill any legal request that users send via texts, and employs real humans to handle those requests. Other similar texting-based on-demand service includes Operator, helpa, and the travel-focused Pana. Everywhere we look, the major tech companies are expanding their platforms with business-friendly features that aims to connect consumers with brands in a natural, conversational context.
For More Information Please contact Engagement Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) at the IPG Media Lab if you would like more detail or to schedule a visit to the Lab to discuss strategies and tactics around tapping into the marketing potential of virtual personal assistants and conversational UI..
For previous editions of Fast Forward, please visit www-stage.ipglab.com. Please reply with any constructive criticism or feedback. We want these to be as useful as possible for you and your clients, and your feedback will help us immensely.
What Happened
Several digital publishers including The Huffington Post and The Daily Dot have replaced their usual Twitter profile pictures with “Snapcodes,” an account-specific icon generated by Snapchat that doubles as a scannable QR code for easier following. Snapchat users usually find people to follow through phone numbers in their address books, so this offers a good alternative for brand accounts that aren’t typically tied to a phone number. Previously, users would have to know the username and manually search for the brands’ Snapchat accounts in order to follow them.
What Brands Should Do For brands looking to connect with today’s young audience, utilizing Snapcode on other social media channels to build a following on Snapchat would be a good place to start. More importantly, brands should learn to leverage their social media presence into building a fanbase on new emerging platforms, such as Snapchat and other messaging apps, where today’s consumers are spending more and more time in.
What Happened Partners of Snapchat’s Discover content channel are reporting quite positive results since the popular messaging app revamped its layout two week ago to give Discover content to give Discover content more, ahem, discoverability, as well as, adding a shareable feature to Discover content. Snapchat claims that half of its 100 million daily users visited the Discover section in the past month, while publisher partners like Daily Mail and Hearst also reported huge spikes in views and engagement. Discover, which launched with 11 media publishers in January, hasn’t yet lived up to the expectations of some partners around traffic and ad revenue. It was under fire earlier this year for overcharging for its ads, and the company quickly dropped its ad price to a much more reasonable two cents per view.
What Brands Should Do With the revamped Discover section seemingly delivering the good results that Snapchat had hoped for, it could be a good time for brands and advertisers, especially those seeking to reach the younger audiences, to consider looking into Snapchat’s content channel and its ad units.
Facebook is reportedly planning to add to its Messenger platform a new digital assistant service dubbed “Moneypenny,” which will allow users to ask real people for help researching and ordering products and services, among other tasks. Previously, Facebook had already started letting Messenger users communicate directly with businesses, and this new feature feels like a natural, yet significant, development in building out its messaging platform.
Since this is Facebook, there is no doubt that they will leverage some of the user data it has for better targeting and recommendation. The question here, however, is just how much access the Moneypenny staff will have to the vast amount of data that Facebook has gathered on the users across its various services and platforms. While it’d make for a quicker, more personalized service to let the “Moneypennies” tap into the user data and learn about their customers’ preferences and interests, ensuring user privacy and data security remains a big issue to Facebook.
Back in May, Snapchat CEO hinted at retiring “pressing down to view”, a staple feature for the popular messaging app besides overlaying texts and disappearing photos. Now with the updated app rolling out this week for iOS and Android, Snapchat user no longer need to hold a finger down to view snaps and Stories. Instead, a simple tap will now start video playback.
Moreover, the new update also brings a new “Add Nearby” feature that will let users to add fellow Snapchatters in near proximity as friends. While not entirely original, as other messaging apps such as WeChat have had similar features for a while, this is still a very savvy move for Snapchat to grow its user base. With more and more brands starting to make good use of the location-sensitive features on Snapchat, it makes perfect sense for Snapchat to do the same.
Toyota is getting on Snapchat, marking the first time ever an automotive brand has utilized the popular messaging app’s geo-targeting ad format. As a latest evolution of its “Let’s Go Places” campaign, the carmaker is targeting Snapchat users in the great Los Angeles area, who will soon start seeing promoted video ads with city-specific content inside Snapchat’s localized Live Story feed, a new feature debuted earlier this year.
Of course, Toyota is not first brand to tap into Snapchat’s localized ad offers. Last week, McDonald’s started offering location-activated Geo-filters for users visiting the 14,000 McDonald’s stores across the States. As Snapchat and other messaging apps start leveraging their mobile-first nature and resulting location-awareness into sophisticated ad formats, we expect to see more brands to get on board.
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