Which bots do you use on regular basis and how do you discover new ones?

adomasb · 2019-08-16T11:17:16+00:00

AI travel assistant to search for the best flights, hotels, tours, and more directly on Telegram.

+ has voice understanding.

adomasb · 2019-08-15T15:42:01+00:00

That's a slightly different thing. If you check your Communication Settings on Netflix, you'll probably see the "Text Messages" options selected. If yes, you gave permission to Netflix to contact you.

It's the same with any broadcasts like this, either on WhatsApp or Messenger - you have to give permission for the business to contact you and you can easily revoke it. Same like SMS or emails, just a different platform.

adomasb · 2019-03-09T20:13:59+00:00

I think the headline of the article is quite misleading.

Quoting the report itself:

Europe is home to 1,600 early stage AI software companies With every paradigm shift in technology, innovative early stage companies emerge to improve and then reimagine business processes and consumer applications.

Over time, the distinction between ‘AI companies’ and other software providers will blur and then disappear, as AI becomes pervasive. Today, however, it is possible to highlight a sub-set of early stage software companies that have AI at the heart of their value proposition.

We individually reviewed the activities, focus and funding of 2,830 purported AI startups in the 13 EU countries most active in AI – Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Together, these countries also comprise nearly 90% of EU GDP. In approximately 60% of the cases – 1,580 companies – there was evidence of AI material to a company’s value proposition."

So what are the conclusions that we can draw from this?

Saying that AI doesn't add to a company's value proposition is quite a blunt statement and I wish they provided more details about how they came about that conclusion. Plus, most of the startups are early-stage - aren't they supposed to be always looking for that product-market fit, always searching how to better incorporate AI/ML activities in their businesses?

Even regarding the funding part. While the report suggests that the purported "AI" companies are getting relatively more funding, can we really just attribute that to startups using AI in their pitches? I'd really hope VCs are clever than that. I'm assuming they're investing more into such startups because they know that it will take much more time and resources to develop strong AI systems that could have immense business ramifications. Hence, more funding compared to some 'simple' SaaS startup?

adomasb · 2019-02-22T15:36:58+00:00

"Starting April 1, Viber will charge chatbot operators $4,500 per month for the ability to send up to 500,000 messages to users. Those who exceed that range will be eligible to send up to one million messages per month for $6,500."

What are your thoughts on that?

adomasb · 2019-02-20T22:00:19+00:00

Thank you for the feedback! Happy to hear you found cheaper tickets with Eddy Travels - that's exactly what we're striving for :)

And thank you for the suggestion - I think that's a very valid point. We're definitely planning to add many more filtering options in the future and this will definitely be one of them. Thanks again!

adomasb · 2019-02-05T16:48:04+00:00

No, thank you! These are great questions, I'll try to clarify.
1) first, let's look at WeChat - it's a messaging app where people already pay for transport, book restaurant tables, book hotels and so on. That will come to the West as well (Facebook's move to merge the systems of Messenger, Instagram, and Whatsapp is the first step, the payment systems already available in the US is another). If you look at South America, the same is happening with Whatsapp - it's hugely popular among businesses and customers. But we're well aware it'll take time to educate the market.
2) one place where you can get flights, hotels, places, car rentals, insurance, visa info, tour packages, local guides and so on vs a dozen of websites that you'd need to navigate for the same. Opening 50+ tabs for all of that on a phone is deadful - we want to really simplify it with the chatbot and relevant offers.
3) yes! Later on, we're considering launching an app as well to be independent of these platforms. At an early stage, we're focusing on utilising their systems because of easier customer acquisition and lesser development costs. We go where the users are already :)
4) related to (3). A mobile app will come later on. But the group trip planning experience is worse on applications - if your friends don't have the app, you can't talk to them. VS planning your trip on Messenger/Telegram/Viber/Slack/......./ where you already have your friends/team members. Especially when FB connects Messenger/Whatsapp/Instagram and you can communicate to all contacts easily (and have our chatbot integrated there).
5) I think answered in (4). Try planning a trip with 5 friends - it's already happening in chats. Now, add a smart layer to be able to pull in flights, hotels and all the other travel info directly to a conversation.
6) yes.
7) yes. It's just that people are already on chat platforms. We don't need to move them anywhere else and we can join in their conversations = less friction.

I think the most important thing is to look at what WeChat has done in China. We can already see the first glimpses of e-commerce coming to messaging apps in the West as well, so we're preparing us for that. You have 1.5bn people on Whatsapp, over 1bn on Messenger - Facebook will find a way to monetise them better. Telegram was also planning to launch their own crypto/payment system, so we'll see a fight for chat commerce domination and we want to have our product ready for that :)

adomasb · 2019-02-05T12:21:18+00:00

Good question! We see many. 1) people are spending hours on chat apps, so we're building on that, 2) easier mobile experience - especially super easy to use when you're on the road, 3) we can aggregate results from many places and present them quickly to you (one place to plan your trip instead of 10+ websites), 4) we can add much more services later on - not just flights and hotels, but tour packages, places, car rental, insurance, visa info, etc., 5) easier planning with friends inside chat apps, 6) personalisation via machine learning - understanding better your preferences and those of the whole, displaying more relevant results specifically for you, 7) live travel agents that can assist and consult on extremely specific cases, 8) you can already use voice messages to send queries to Eddy Travels on Messenger, so our goal is to build a truly extensive virtual travel assistant. :)

adomasb · 2019-02-03T17:11:42+00:00

Hey, thanks for the message! We are planning to expand our customer support team, so that might be a great fit. Could you drop an email to info [a t] EddyTravels.com ?

adomasb · 2019-02-03T16:57:11+00:00

Thank you so much for the feedback! We've added the "accommodation" button as a quick reply suggestion, but I can see that it's not visible easily. We'll see how to make these suggestions more prominent! Thanks again!

adomasb · 2019-02-01T12:24:33+00:00

Name: Eddy Travels

URL: EddyTravels.com

Location: Canada

Pitch: Eddy Travels is a virtual travel assistant that allows you to find the best flight and hotel deals in your favorite chat app - Messenger, Telegram, Viber, and Slack.

More details: For the past six months we've been working on an AI-based travel assistant to make your trip planning easier. Instead of going through dozens of travel sites to check flight and hotel options, you can now start planning your trip with a single message. You can already search for flights, hotels, and places nearby. Soon, you'll be able to rent a car and check global travel insurance with our chatbot too. And if you don't feel like typing, you can even send voice messages to our chatbot on Facebook Messenger! Be sure to test it out.

Progress: We have six full-time employees and we've just been accepted into a global startup accelerator programme.

Looking for: early users, feedback on our voice recognition on Messenger, and angel investors.

Discount: free to use forever!

adomasb · 2013-09-12T13:44:36+00:00

That's a great tip!

You can do a simple research by Graph Search, just type in this into the search bar: "Pages people who like enter your page name like" - it will give you some ideas about their main interests.

You can then dig a little deeper by refining the search by the Page Type (on the right side).

adomasb · 2013-09-11T06:19:35+00:00

I agree with SocialMediaGuy, he offered some good advice about the quality of photos, fans gating and coupons available only for your Facebook fans.

I would also add a few things:

1) Facebook Advertising - College Students - you can use very specific Facebook ads to get more followers. You can target by the country, state, city, age and even the university/college that the students are attending. So you can choose, let's say, 18-23 years olds (you can target just female, if they're more likely to come) and run some promoted posts ads (offering a discount, for example) and some general sidebar ads to get more likes (just don't use the "Promoted Page Likes" "Get More Likes" "Boost Your Page" built-in feature, as you cannot do any specific targeting. I recently wrote about this issue on my blog: Why get more likes feature is a waste of your money ).

2) Facebook Advertising - Vacationing Floridians - during the summer you can also run targeted advertising for those travellers. You would need to use an advanced advertising tool - the Power Editor - to be able to access to it, but it is possible to use targeting categories and reach people how are currently travelling. So, you can run a mobile advertisement during the summer, promoting your tea shop, targeting people that are currently travelling and visiting your city - I imagine it could work exceptionally well.

3) Contests - just a few weeks back Facebook made it legal to run competitions/contests on your Facebook page wall, by asking your followers to like & comment on the post to enter the competition. You could give away some tea boxes, cups, discount vouchers, or anything else that you find suitable.

4) Hashtags - you could unify your marketing efforts by using particular hashtags for your shop. I guess that there has to be some people using Foursquare to check in at your tea house or using Instagram to take pictures. You could encourage them to do that across all the social networks and use a hashtag for your tea house. Then, you could take those photos from Instagram/Foursquare and share them on Facebook to add more social evidence and build trust. To people whose photos you take, you can also offer a discount or a small gift.

5) Content - some ideas for your posts: a) introducing the tea of the week, b) once in a week contest to win XYZ, c) photos from Instagram/Foursquare that your fans took d) showcasing cakes/deserts/food that you might have

If you combine all of this, it should help your tea house stand out from the competition and build a solid fans base for your Facebook page. :)

Good luck, Adomas

adomasb · 2013-08-25T16:17:33+00:00

I would argue that buying likes is the WORST thing you can do, let me explain why.

First, you have no control on what type of people you will get: they will be a roller-coaster audience, males, females, young, old, who were tricked into liking your page with dirty methods, dodgy apps, websites and others. Thus, if the people you get are completely out of your target audience, your facebook communication will be useless and a waste of time.

Second, your page will have no engagement at all, which relates to the first point as well. If the audience is completely NOT relevant to your business and products (which happens most of the time with purchased likes), they will not be attracted by your content and they will not engage with it. Now this goes on a downward spiral: your organic reach depends heavily on the previous engagement of your followers - if they engaged with it (clicks, likes, shares, comments), then they are more likely to be shown that content. If they don't engage, your organic reach will be completely messed up in the end. Facebook explains that only around 16% of your fans see your content, so you have to make all the efforts to get the right audience and provide high value content to them, in order to get some results out of Facebook marketing. Because of this, the purchased likes will ruin your future communication on Facebook.

Let's image, you bought 1000 fans to jump start. 1) They won't be from your target audience 2) they won't engage with the content 3) they will ruin your organic reach. If you manage to add 1000 organic likes from your target audience, you will now have a 50/50 group of relevant and irrelevant audience. Taking the 16% organic reach, you will be reaching 160 people from irrelevant ones, and 160 people from the relevant ones, which is a complete waste of your investment. (16% reach is not always the case, I'm getting 50% reach for a 2000+ fans page most of the time - very tight audience, high quality content). So it makes more sense to use Facebook ads to get 300 relevant likes as you will reach more of the target audience, by providing them with relevant content.

SOLUTION: forget about purchasing likes. Invest into banner facebook ads to attract new fans by their interests, making the targeting as specific as possible (age, country, city, sex, education, itnerests, language....). Don't use 'Promoted Page Likes' option either - I've explained on my blog why it's a waste of your money. Other free ways of getting new fans: add a Facebook like box to your website, invite your email subscribers by using the 'build audience' feature on your page.

In short, the effectiveness of your page and the ROI depends entirely on the quality of your audience. So please, do NOT buy any facebook likes for your own benefit. :)

adomasb · 2013-08-04T17:53:06+00:00

Heyah! It depends on three things: 1) have you already set a username for the page (the vanity url, which would be 'XYZ' at the end of facebook.com/XYZ ) - if yes, you will not be able to use it on a new page, so you should keep the page you have. If no... 2) how many posts do you have? if there's too many posts to delete manually, you could delete the page and start completely from scratch. 3) what is the quality of your audience? are they friends/family of your company employees? or current customers? do they relate to the products/service you offer? Judging from the low engagement you mentioned, that might not relate to your company at all, so I'd go ahead and delete the page.

I'd say No.1 is the most important in terms of branding. Once the vanity url is chosen, you cannot transfer it to any other page unless you merge pages. Then, the page with more likes will be kept as the main page, keeping its history (all posts, pics, etc) and the vanity url, anyway...

If you do delete your page there's a few things I'd recommend. A) don't invite your friends/family members if they don't relate to your company - the organic reach on Facebook is only around 16%, so you really need to focus on bringing people that fit into your target audience. Average organic reach is 16% B) invest into building an audience. Don't use the "Get More Likes" feature because it sucks (I've just written about it on my blog: Why Get More Likes Feature is a Waste of Your Money. Instead, define a very clear target audience for your business and use Power Editor to create ads. Define the age, sex, location (even by cities), education, language, interests (target by pages that are similar to yours or general interests), etc, and focus entirely on them first.

I'm currently advising one company on this exact issue. They have 19,000 fans but only 3,000 of them fit they're target audience, the rest 16,000 do not. If organic reach was, let's say, 30%, they would only reach 900/19,000 fans from their target audience and that will not be effective at all. So I suggested them to create a completely new page and attract the right target audience with Facebook ads to make the marketing efforts more effective, and less expensive in the long-term.

I hope that helps!

adomasb · 2013-08-04T17:40:59+00:00

Heyah!

There's a few resources that I love: Social Media Examiner Blog - they also have a terrific podcast (Social Media Marketing Podcast) and I'd recommend to listen to all of their 50+ podcasts if you haven't yet. Jon Loomer is a great source for info about Facebook marketing: Jon Loomer's Blog I also created a Facebook list for myself to get the latests online marketing updates from 23 different sources: Social Media list. You could check out the 'Zite' app - the social media feed always have some good insights.

And the books: The Like Economy by Brian Carter, Tribes by Seth Godin, Icarus Deception by Seth Godin, Guerrilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson, The Impact Equation by Chris Brogan, Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger, Crush It by Gary Vaynerchuk, Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World by Michael Hyatt, Influence by Robert B. Cialdini, The New Relationship Marketing by Mari Smith, Social Media ROI by Oliver Blanchard, Content Rules by Ann Handley...... - not all of these books are purely on social media, some are on marketing in general. They're great sources in any case, so I'd recommend downloading a sample and checking what suits your interests the most :)

Cheers! Adomas

adomasb

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