I’ve spent part of the summer catching up with a few folks that I’ve talked with for this series in years past.  And although it’s been less than a year and a half since I last spoke with Opus Research founder Dan Miller, in the fast-moving area of conversational interfaces like chatbots and voice assistants, it feels more like a lifetime.

Dan, whose company is gearing up for their Conversational Commerce Conference next month, coined the phrase “conversational commerce” in 2011.  So I wanted to catch up with him to ask where we are today with conversational commerce on the heels of the reportedly low voice shopping numbers for Alexa on the eve of the conference.  I also got his take on what impact the Cortana-Alexa integration might have on adoption of voice assistants in business.

Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.  To see the full conversation, check out the video below or click on the embedded SoundCloud player.

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Small Business Trends:  As you come into this year’s event, where is voice in the landscape of things? How far behind is it? Is it catching on with folks? Or is it really still mostly all about chat bots, at this point?

Dan Miller:  That’s complex. I’ve written about the parallel universe in that, you don’t want to measure which modality is in front of, or behind the other. Because if you take an individual-centric approach, a customer-centric approach, that all companies say they’re aspiring towards, you’re really talking about putting tools under the control of the individuals. And I bring this up in the context of, is voice better than text? Are people going to use bots as opposed to talk to their personal assistant? It’s so obvious that it’s not either, or. It’s a matter of convenience, and at least this is what we’ll be talking through in a number of sessions; how to offer consistently correct answers to your customers or prospects at scale. And that means across all modalities.

There’s just the observation that today, a brand should invest in the resources that today, they’re powered by your CRM system, by your knowledge management, by existing back office stuff to help inform live agents. That should be consistent with what would be presented by a voice-enabled IVR [Interactive voice response]. It’s the same information that would show up on a website, often as a chat bot.

Web chat is the fertile gateway into offering conversational bots. In other words, you’ll see a lot of “bot platform” specialists come in and say, hey, give me your transcripts. Give me your chat transcripts for my platform to ingest. I’ll identify the major areas that people are calling about, the categories. And within that, we’ll know how they talk about those things. So I can build a conversational bot. At that point, do I care whether it’s rendered in text or rendered in voice? Yes, because you want to respond in the appropriate modality. But wouldn’t having those answers apply, whether it’s over a voice channel, live person to live person, over a voice channel through a speech-enabled IVR?

Well, I’ll tell you what the new wrinkle is. What about these smart speakers that you talk to, that have moved the voice channel to be everywhere that’s in the house, is it in the 40 million, 60 million? Whatever many million houses now have their intelligent endpoints that you can talk to. That means you can’t ignore voice. You can’t say, oh, voice is behind or ahead of. You can say, hey, when somebody talks to my skill on Alexa, or to me through Google Assistant, I want them to get a consistent, and a response that I’m proud of, that is engaging, and all that sort of stuff.

Small Business Trends:  So, since you are doing a conference called Conversational Commerce, one of the hot things that cropped up last week was this report from the folks at The Information, on voice shopping via Alexa. Quite honestly, the numbers are pretty low. I think it was two percent of those that have these devices, who have actually done some kind of voice shopping. And then only 10 percent of those folks did it a second time.

So there was a lot of cackling. There’s a lot of, “This stuff is, this is just nothing. Nothing to see here folks.” I would love to get your take on it. Is it already lights out for voice shopping because of what we saw last week?

Dan Miller:  Absolutely not. I haven’t written up my comment on this. Here’s what’s in my head though; you have to think of Jeff Bezos’ master plan here for Amazon. And you can’t just think of voice in a vacuum or isolated, or how it relates to the other modalities. There’s a strategy that will connect online, offline activity, you know, “Order here, pick up at Whole Foods.” So the first step is getting those sensors out there. And Alexa’s just one of many sensors that Amazon has managed to have close to your person. Voice is one of the many modalities for ordering.

But first thing’s first, get people using them in ways that are organic to their lives. If the thing’s a speaker, people think of them as a speaker. They get their news, they treat it as a radio in many respects. They’ll get the weather. There’s longstanding areas that people are happy to get the most recent news on. And even though that assessment of how people were using it, looked like so few of these culminated in a transaction, they still defined a relationship that people were forming with Alexa. They’re talking to Alexa like a person. And you don’t buy something from every person you walk up to. But you’re conversing, and that’s step one.

And then I think everything’s going according to plan. I think you’re going to see more information about local activities, because that showed up in the usage. In as much as those activities culminate in a purchase. I think you’ll find that they’re engaged in much more commercial activity, even though it’s not shopping, that culminates with buying and ordering.

I’m in the percentage that doesn’t mind saying, “Hey Alexa, we’re out of paper towels.” And she figures it out. Oh, last time you ordered these, and next day delivery, like last time. I mean, the mechanism is there to make it really easy.

Small Business Trends:  There’s an educational component that I don’t think has been fully addressed. And I also think the use case that you just outlined about, reordering paper products or things that are easy for us to do because we know exactly what we want. That’s a perfect use case currently. But the vast majority of use cases start with somebody searching for something, or looking for a recommendation. And right now, I don’t think the process flow is there yet.

Dan Miller:  Actually, that’s very perceptive. I used to talk a lot to “dialogue designers,” and I had this idea of when I thought about the protocol for invoking, for waking up Alexa, and then telling it to open a skill, and then carrying on a conversation with a brand, is not a dialogue that’s very pretty. It’s at least a “trialogue”. We’re not going to have success developing a conversation providing command line stuff to your smart speaker. It’s kind of wrong-headed.

Now is the game over? The fact that people aren’t shopping through this, is it game over for voice commerce? We’re at a point in the hype curve, because the expectation was, people are going to be shopping with this. So at this point, there will be disillusionment. It’s early days, that’s what we keep telling ourselves. There’s a lot of missing pieces, both in the dialogue design. And another topic that we chat about, consistency across what I call walled gardens.

I remember at our first Intelligent Assistant conference, four years ago, we had the people that developed Siri, the people that were working on Cortana, I don’t think that Alexa had made the scene. But at the end there’s that reporter from the local TV station, asked the guy from Microsoft, “Does Cortana talk to Siri?” He said, “Yes, I’m sure they do.”And, I mean, we’ll work out the details…

There’s an expectation that my personal, virtual agent, which I don’t have quite yet… I want it. My personal assistant, this entity that’s on my shoulder, that hears what I say, and goes and figures out how to do it for me. That’s going to be the thing I carry on my conversation with. Which means that, yes, Cortana should talk to Alexa and that sort of thing. And we sort out those gaps. Or we could start by sorting out, but you identify the gaps and you start filling them.

It would start with not making me have to have that first order decision, which will become more subconscious. But what device do I want to use? The one I have. What agent will I talk to? The one that is associated with. What do I want to do? Well, that’s contextual. That’s of the moment.

Small Business Trends:  All right, so two quick questions. I’m assuming you view this [Cortana-Alexa integration] as a win-win for both Microsoft and Amazon. Is there any, either one that actually, you feel, is the big winner in this? And then the other piece would be, what does this do to enterprise adoption of voice? Does this move the needle, or is it just this is a nice, but it’s still waiting and see?

Dan Miller:  Well, first of all, everything’s got to be a win-win-win. This shouldn’t be about the two suppliers, it should be about who’s consuming this stuff. And I use that advisedly because I’m not a big fan of the term, “consumer.” Because it just makes you feel like you’re just there, devouring things, which isn’t what happens. So, in a way, it should be a bigger win for Microsoft, just that I would think that Alexa in many ways, has exceeded the expectations of its developers and maintainers. And that Cortana was sort of languishing in my opinion.

Small Business Trends:  I totally agree with you.

Dan Miller:  So if this can bring activity from any point of ingress, that takes advantage of the formidable stuff that Microsoft has in its coveted resources, in its tools, in its developers’ support programs, this is like super win.

And then, whether it incorporates voice or not, both companies have invested significantly in some of the best brains in the business, to build voice-based conversations. Well, I mean, it’s too ironic, voice is a natural way to interact with resources within a company. It’ll be everywhere, and it’ll work better, and sound more lifelike. All this stuff will happen. Its impact on, like I said, in the parallel universe, it’s not like there’s a pie where voice succeeds at the expense of chat. But you will find more and more instances where it feels much more natural to just talk to things. You know, it’s the Star Trek vision. It’s like, “Computer.”

Small Business Trends:  I’m guessing the pie can expand as voice gets used more, and chat continues to be used a lot. So it’s not like, it’s a zero-sum game here. It sounds like things can grow and grow and grow as both these technologies get more introduced and used by consumers, or customers.

Dan Miller:  Maybe as a closing thought, because what you just said inspired in my … We’ve been getting briefings from a lot of companies that are treating and recognizing that voice conversations, be it, in calls like ours, in company conference calls, that the recordings, or it could be transcripts, but the voice-based conversations themselves are a tremendous asset.

In this saga of big data in analytics, it’s an element of unstructured big data that some new tools for doing analysis to do something as simple as, when we hang up, and you sick one of these agents, assistants on, just to evaluate what we talked about, it can almost, within a matter of minutes, deliver a summary. Identify what the topics were, what the main points were, identify in the voice files, where they were brought up and who said them. Yeah, I think we’re moving into a golden age of voice. Voice is an asset. Voice is the basis for better customer care, better employee productivity, all that stuff.

This is part of the One-on-One Interview series with thought leaders. The transcript has been edited for publication. If it’s an audio or video interview, click on the embedded player above, or subscribe via iTunes or via Stitcher.

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A survey of digital marketers by The Manifest has revealed 2/3 or 66% of them advertise online. But when they do, they use different channels to reach their audience and influence them.

When you take into account 89% of Americans use the internet, just as many businesses — or more — should also be advertising there. Online advertising demonstrates greater reach at a lower cost than traditional channels.

For small businesses, it means a higher return on their ad dollars while reaching a much larger and targeted audience. The digital ecosystem also provides data with different metrics small businesses can use to improve their marketing campaigns and deliver better results.

Reporting on the survey on The Manifest’s official blog, Kristen Herhold writes “Online advertising helps businesses reach consumers using more innovative and cost-effective methods than traditional advertising… Businesses can more easily target potential customers with online advertising.”

The Manifest surveyed 501 digital marketers from US businesses included 73% B2C and 27% B2B companies. Respondents to the survey included managers (36%), associates (15%), C-level executives (13%), senior managers (12%), and directors (12%).

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Online Advertising Stats

There are many reasons a business uses advertising and each of these reasons have to be taken into account to launch a successful campaign. While the ultimate goal is to increase revenue, today’s digital ecosystem requires a higher level of engagement to connect with potential customers.

According to the survey, 24% of businesses said their top goal was to increase sales and revenue. This was followed by another 18% who said they wanted to improve brand recognition.

 

Another 16% of businesses participating in the survey said they wanted to drive website traffic, 13% wanted to acquire new leads and 11%  said they hoped to convert customers.

As to their preferred online advertising channel, businesses invested across different platforms. The top three channels are social media at 86%, display and banner ads at 80%, and paid search at 66%.

According to Herhold, businesses are able to reach the maximum number of consumers if they invest in the top three channels together.

In the report, Flynn Zaiger, CEO of Online Optimism, a digital marketing agency in New Orleans, said, “Social media and paid search allow you to reach users on the main platforms they use: Facebook, Instagram, Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Display advertising lets you extend that reach and awareness across most other major web platforms. With all three, you can reach nearly all your likely customer population.”

Online Advertising is Essential

As Herhold put it, “Businesses that don’t invest in online advertising miss out on successfully reaching the majority of Americans who are online.”

With smartphone penetration rates fast approaching 100%, more people will be online more often. When that happens, online advertising will become even more important for businesses he survey predicts.

Photo via Shutterstock

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Running your own small business is rewarding, but it comes with many challenges. A new survey commissioned by Progressive Insurance looks at the role gender and age play in this segment, revealing some distinct differences.

The survey revealed men are more financially secure about running a small business, by a 14% margin of 84% to 70%. Meanwhile  32% women responding to the survey say they wish they had learned more about financial management sooner compared to 23% of men.

With 30.2 million small businesses operating in the US in 2018, understanding the different dynamics of gender and age will help current and future entrepreneurs manage their businesses more effectively.

Progressive commissioned the survey to understand the challenges and complexities of being a small business owner. One thousand business owners took part in the survey.

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Male vs Female Entrepreneurs Statistics

Continuing with the differences between the genders, 48% of female small business owners will seek business advice from friends and family while only 35% of their male counterparts will do the same.

When hiring workers, 21% of female small business owners look for intangibles such as great fit, passion and enthusiasm. However this was important to only 16% of the male small business owners surveyed.

Another difference is how male and female small business owners attempt to protect their companies. Seventy-two percent of males will insure their business when they first establish it, while only 64% of the women do the same.

Of those who wait until they make a profit to insure their business, women lead in this category with 13% compared to males at 7%.

So what do men and women small business owners have most in common? The problem of cash flow is common to both genders, with 65% stating it is a top financial concern.

The Importance of Identifying the Differences

Identifying the differences between gender, race, age and other demographics in the small business sector allows private organizations, public entities and policymakers to recognize problems and find solutions for them.

Small businesses can create products and services for the underserved group while policymakers and public entities can provide incentives such as tax breaks, regulation and more to encourage their growth.

You can look at the infographic below for the rest of the data from the survey.

Photo via Shutterstock

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If you are a young entrepreneur looking to make your way in the business world, where you establish your company can go a long way in determining your long-term success. And if you’re in search of the best location, a new study from LendingTree has listed the top 10 cities in the US with the youngest business founders to give you some ideas — most of which might not even be on your radar.

In the study, LendingTree compared the age of business founders in the 50 largest US cities. The information was gathered from the LendingTree Small Business Marketplace and results were compiled based on the ages of founders in the 50 largest U.S. cities at the tie their businesses were founded.

In a post on the official LendngTree site, content writer Elyssa Kirkham says nearly a third of Americans have thought about starting their own business — according to a LendingTree survey.

But Kirkham adds, “Before launching a business, however, it’s worthwhile to consider your location and how friendly it would be to a new and growing company. The better the location you choose, the faster you can work toward founding and building your business.”

The information for the study came from anonymized data of borrowers seeking business loans on the LendingTree platform over the last five years.

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The Top Cities with the Youngest Entrepreneurs

The top three cities with the youngest entrepreneurs are Salt Lake City, Buffalo, N.Y. and New Orleans. On average the founders in these cities were younger than 38 years old when they started their businesses. Oklahoma City is fourth on the list with Charlotte, N.C., Minneapolis, St. Louis, Portland, Ore., Milwaukee, and Austin, Texas rounding out the top 10 list — but all with entrepreneurs just sightly older.

In all the top cities, the millennial (born between 1981 and 1996) and Gen X (born between 1965 and 1980) generations were responsible for founding the most businesses. In most cases, they accounted for more than 70 to 80+ percent of the entrepreneurs establishing new companies.

Meanwhile, the Gen Z group (born after 1996) had the greatest influence in Charlotte where they were responsible for 5% of small businesses. Baby boomers on the other hand (born between 1946 and 1964) had the biggest impact in Portland at 18%, with the Silent generation (born between 1928 and 1945) founding the largest percentage of businesses — about 1.9% — in Austin.

The Best Business Location

When seeking a place to start a small business, LendingTree recommends  seeking out a growing local economy, business-friendly tax policies, low cost of living, strong startup network and one where business funding is available.

Kirkham writes, “Being picky about finding the best place to start your business can really pay off later.”

Here are the top 50 Cities

Photo via Shutterstock

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If you’ve ever heard me speak at a conference or read my marketing articles, you know I’m all about the unicorns.

I’m usually talking about unicorns in terms of paid search strategy – my theory is that with just a minimal amount of additional effort, you can blow your competition away in just about any field.

Everyone’s always striving to keep up, to be average – but you don’t want to be average. You want to be a unicorn.

In every field, there are success outliers – those who absolutely slay the competition, not by a percentage point or two, but exponentially. Airbnb, for example, has achieved unicorn status in the travel booking space.  And think about taxi companies – how much do you think even the biggest yellow cab company in your city was worth five or 10 years ago? Uber, the inarguable unicorn in the personal transportation space, is worth billions.

How do they do it?

This infographic developed by NowSourcing.com explores the colors used by these incredibly successful brands, and how the psychology behind those choices drives consumer emotion.

Behind Brand Colors

A lot of people know why restaurants use red in their branding, for example – the color red evokes strong emotions, and also stimulates the appetite. It’s a color used by many top brands – 16% of unicorn brands, including Lyft, Pinterest and Airbnb, use red or pink hues.

But did you know that in addition to being cheerful and warm, the color yellow is the most likely to cause eye fatigue? Yellow is also known to trigger anxiety in babies and actually makes them cry. That’s not a concern for Snapchat, which has seen great success with its yellow branding.

Surprisingly, the most popular color may be no color at all. Researchers found that 38% of unicorn brands – including WeWork, Uber, and Vice – use black, grey, or white.

See the other fascinating psychological secrets they dug up in their analysis of the top colors used by the most successful brands on the planet:

Republished by permission. Original here.

Photo via Shutterstock

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In its bid to ensure the people on Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) are who they say they are, the social media giant has added yet another verification tool. From now on, people who manage a Page with a large US audience will have to complete an authorization process if they want to continue posting in their account.

With this authorization process in place, Facebook is looking to protect compromised accounts as well as limiting the reach of fake accounts. By asking the managers of the Page in question to secure their account with two-factor authentication and confirm their primary country location, the issues Facebook has been facing can be restricted.

Facebook hasn’t revealed what exactly “large” means in term of numbers, but it shouldn’t affect the vast majority of small businesses. However, the company did implement a new level of transparency for ads and Pages in June of this year. And this affects any organization running ads on Facebook.

Under those changes, users can view active ads a Page is running across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and its partner network. This includes name changes, dates when the Page was created and more even if the ads aren’t being shown to you.

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The New Authorization for Facebook Pages Process

As the US mid-term elections fast approach, bad actors are beginning to ratchet up their “bad behavior”, this according to a July 31, 2018 announcement by Facebook. In that press release, the company said it removed 32 Pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram.

In the news announcing this new feature, Facebook explained its intention with the policy. The company said, “Our goal is to prevent organizations and individuals from creating accounts that mislead people about who they are or what they’re doing. These updates are part of our continued efforts to increase authenticity and transparency of Pages on our platform.”

When a Page manager needs authorization, they will get a notice in their News Feed to initiate the verification process. The process is supposed to take a few minutes to complete, and if it is not carried out properly, they can’t post anything on their Page.

Moving forward Facebooks said it will be providing users with more information in the Info and Ads section of Pages. It will include a section called People Who Manage This Page to show the primary country location of where the page is being managed and if the Page has been merged with another Page under Page History.

Hopefully, this level of transparency will make it possible for Facebook users to really see who they are engaging with. For businesses of any size, the new feature ensures the ads and content you publish on Facebook Pages come from you and you alone.

Image: Facebook

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