 Hello, guys. Good afternoon. By taking a little walk down memory lane, the technology edition, let's go back 10 years ago, right? The year's 2007, what came out, the iPhone. The iPhone first launched. All the things and apps we take for granted today, like Uber or Instagram or seamless, didn't exist. The craziest stat to me, though, from 10 years ago is that one out of four Americans was still using dial-up internet. Dial-up. Remember the sound? Does that now feel like a lifetime ago? And yet, despite all of these great advances in technology that we're making, we're still doing things like this, pushing, interrupting. And I get it, right? Attention is so difficult to get and to hold on to. We feel compelled as marketers to do the things that we don't like as consumers. And then what happens? The consumers strike back. We install ad blockers. We happily pay more money for services like Hulu or Spotify that are ad-free versions, right? We all do this. What we need to be doing is saying goodbye to interruptions and hello to conversations. Advances in AI and technology have made it incredibly easy to more effectively engage with our audiences. So we need to make the switch. And I'm going to show you how today to make the switch from interruption-based marketing to intelligent conversational relationships. Using chatbots. So let's get started by covering our evolving technology. We'll look at how we need to be evolving engagement and how we need to evolve our strategy. So let's get started by looking at technology. Before we look at what's coming or what's already sort of here, let's take a look at what changes are happening to existing technology. A lot of the things that we have taken for granted as being absolutely 100% necessary are becoming less and less necessary. Let's talk about screens, for example. Did you ever imagine we'd have a marketing without screens? Yet with voice-controlled marketing, we can interact with technology without the need for a screen. I could order pizza from Amazon Alexa, for example, without needing a screen. Or if we think about apps. Gartner did this research that in the next two years, by 2019, 20% of brands are going to abandon their mobile apps. And if you think about why, the siloed apps that we have on our phone are the interruptions. You have to start what you're doing in one app to go into this other app and figure out how to use this new app and all the different systems. It's not cohesive. In websites, as well, are increasingly being bypassed. Look, they're not dying. They're just being bypassed in several cases. So I could go to the Skyscanner chat box to book my next trip. And I don't need to go to the website at all. So there are new players in this game that are coming in to change things for us. And this is what we need to be paying attention to so we can stay relevant in the years to come. The new players are digital personal assistants, chat bots, and skills. Let's level set about each of them. Personal assistant is something like a Cortana or a Google Assistant. Her job is to get to know you better and be a part of your entire digital life through different touch points, with your permission, of course, and get to know your preferences, your likes, your dislikes, so she can serve you and make your life easier. On the other hand, we've got bots and skills. These are the agents on behalf of the company. So their job is to know the company really well. And you can interact with bots or skills either directly via a platform like Facebook Messenger or Skype Messaging or via your digital personal assistant. Their job again is to help you and work with your personal assistant to make your life easier. Let me give you an example. Let's say I have a trip to Boston coming up next week and Cortana is tracking it for me because she saw the email from my travel company. Let's say Expedia. So Cortana knows because of Expedia's email to me that I'm going to Boston next week. Like a lot of people, I book my flight really early, but I always forget to book a hotel to the very last minute. So now I'm in need of my hotel room. So I can go to Cortana and be like, hey, Cortana, ask Expedia to book me a hotel in Boston. So Cortana has the information so she can say that, oh, your trip to Boston for July 23rd, OK, last time you stayed at the Contoso Hotel, do you want me to book you the same one? See, because she knows what I've done before. I'm like, yeah, that's great, Contoso was fine, let's book that. Great choice. Do you want me to use your credit card ending in 1, 2, 3, 4? Like, yeah, that's perfect. That's exactly the one I want you to use. OK, you're all set. I've emailed you the confirmation. How easy was that? This took less than 60 seconds to do something that would have taken me at least 10 times longer than that if I did it the traditional way. So it's no surprising at all that business insider predicts that by 2020, 80% of businesses want to have chatbots. So the natural question to ask at this point is, hey, what will this do for SEO? Is it going to destroy it? Because that's the trend, right? Everything is going to kill SEO. And no. It's not going to kill it at all or destroy it at all. There's just a shift coming. And I don't think any other industry outside of us is so used to handling and dealing with big shifts. So in this time, we can even see it coming. So our jobs are going to expand. They're going to go beyond the website. They're going to be including the bots and the skills and the personal assistants in our quest to engage with our audiences. So let's look at how engagement is going to be evolving. One of the reasons that I really, really like conversational marketing is that it changes our conversation with the audience from a one to many to a one to one. And it also allows the audience to determine the cadence of the conversation in your marketing efforts. You can also get super personalized and learn from the interactions with your audiences. So let's see how we can use it. The big misconception is that, OK, great, chatbots are only something like a large company or large brands can afford to do. And that's not true at all. Bots work for every brand, big or small. In fact, smaller companies can benefit even more from chatbots because they can help bring about efficiencies. So you may not need to hire another person that you may have struggling to afford to do. And they also work for every single state of the funnel. Let's have a look. Bots are great for broadcast and awareness. They're great for engagement as well as conversions, remarketing and retention, and of course, customer service that we're used to. Let's look at an example. Let's say I shop frequently at ABC Bookstore. ABC Bookstore knows that I'm a big fan of Rand Fishkin and I have bought his books before. So if Rand has a new book coming out, ABC Bookstore's bot will send me a message being like, hey, Perna, Rand's new book is releasing soon. Do you want me to send you a sneak peek of the first chapter? Of course, it knows me well, it knows I love Rand, so my response is going to be, yes, please, oh my god, oh my god. And what this bot also knows about me, based on my purchase interactions with them before, is that I'm a sucker for a sale and I suffer from retail formal. So if you tell me things are on sale now or things are running out quickly, I'll buy it. So what I will do next is be like, OK, great, I'm emailing this to you now. But you can also save 15% of a pre-order of his book if you use the code, ILoveGeraldine. Just hurry up, though, because the code expires in 24 hours. Of course, my response is going to be, thank you. You can probably bet that I went and bought the book now. The reason that it works is because it up the level of relevancy. It was all about me and my likes and dislikes. It changed the conversation from a buy now to a what do you need right now. And that's what's going to make marketing something people are going to want to consume when it comes across as really helpful. And this applies to all the different channels. So let's take a look now at how we can use chatbots across your different channels to help them and how we can use your different channels to build up your bot channel. We'll start by search, of course, because that's near and dear to all of our hearts here. Traditionally, if you look at your search result, I mean, yes, you put in a query and a lot of backend or logarithmic and advanced engineering goes into it to give you the right results. But there's no real further interaction that happens with the SERPs. It's time to shake things up a bit. It's time to make the SERPs conversational. And I don't mean voice search for once. I'm going to ask you guys to do something since I know most of you have your computers. If you don't have a computer, would you mind just sharing with the person next to you? This doesn't work on the phone. It has to work only on the desktop for now, because it's something brand new. And it has to be Bing, because no one else is doing this. So it's exclusive to us. So if you go to Bing.com, do a search for Monsoon Seattle. I'll give you a second, okay? If you have got your results so far, do you notice this one line under the main listing? Questions? Ask Monsoon Roster on bot for help? Now, while engaging and having conversations with your search engine is a little bit in the future, you can interact with businesses in the SERPs through the business bot that Bing has. So now, and you can try, you can ask it questions, you can ask it things like, hey, what payment information do you accept? Do you have vegetarian options? Or even natural language like, can I bring my dog? It's smart enough to understand that can I bring my dog means is it pet friendly and are pets allowed? Sadly, pets are not allowed at Monsoon Seattle. So if you're gonna go there, please don't take your dog. How cool is that? Local SEOs, I'm sure this is very exciting to you, because now you can engage with the brand. This saves me as a consumer time from going to the website and like scrolling around to find the answers to these questions, which may not even exist on the website. And from a business standpoint, I don't keep getting the same repetitive calls that waste the time of my human staff to answer the same questions again and again that can be easily answered by a bot. So this is so new that it only exists for restaurants in Seattle at the moment. Our goal is to expand this beyond Seattle in the coming months, so stay tuned. You can either just follow me on Twitter or check the Bing blog for this. But that's fascinating. Okay, those were chatty business listings. How about making the entire SERP conversational? Well, here's a real cool sneak peek of something that's still in really early stages of development. Advancing advances in artificial intelligence, in particular something called machine reading comprehension, which is pretty much what it says on the box, which is the machine reads something and understands it. Can help to botify the entire web. So let's say, for example, I was looking for something on Wikipedia. So the history of Singapore, for example. Bing's Infobot can be like, hey, do you want to ask questions about this page, this information on Wikipedia? Again, this is not Wikipedia's chatbot. This is Bing's Infobot that's creating a chatbot on the fly from websites that show up in the SERPs. That's gonna change our fair amount, right? I would imagine. Now this is still really early stage. We're still piloting this with companies like Wikipedia, WebMD, or Recipes, for example. But stay tuned. I want to give you guys a glimpse into the future so you can be prepared. Let's go to the next step, which is you wanna be right there when people are looking for you. That's what all of us want to do, right? And I'm gonna give you some tips. But the most important thing in our future conversational world is brand awareness. And I'll show you exactly why. Say I was talking to the personal assistant of my choice. Again, this works on Google, this works on Cortana, this works on any of them. So let's say if I was asking Cortana that, hey Cortana, how much are flights to Paris this weekend? Cortana will give me, or Google assistant, a list of results in the SERP, pretty much like we're used to getting, right? It'll be, here's some different companies, here's some different price options. Not surprising. What if I was already very familiar with the Skyscanner bot, and I knew that by interacting with it before, it was very easy to use. What I could do then would be like, hey Cortana, ask Skyscanner how much are flights to Paris this weekend? Do you wanna see the difference in interaction? So connect me directly to Skyscanner. That means all my interactions are going to be with Skyscanner. Where's the competition? Not visible at all. There's no chance of me being distracted now because I know about Skyscanner, I knew about their chatbot, I'm gonna just use it and book my trip, bye bye competition. So brand awareness is gonna be super incredibly important for us to be working on with all of our clients. You want people to discover that A, you've got a really good bot, and that it works really well, and it makes life easier. So how are some ways that you can do that? Let's turn to search, of course. Now, bots have the same problem right now that apps had, which is discoverability, right? There's tons of different apps, it's hard to find out or know that they exist. And this is something that we see happening with bots as well, but because we see what happened with apps, all the different platforms, whether it's Facebook or Microsoft or Google, are taking steps to build discoverability tools. But for now, some of the ways that we can get discovered is via search. I can go to google.com and I can do a search for bots. I can also go to bing.com and bing does something slightly different with the bot experience. We bring up different boxes right up top, so it's like a little answer box up top that lists the different bots. They're also sorted by the type of platform. So if you notice next to finance bots, it says telegram or Slack. So I can just filter based on the platform that I prefer to use. And if you notice the blue link under the name of the bot, it's already enabled. So if I click on that, I can just quickly set up that bot in the platform of my choice. It's awesome. Sorry. It's gonna make your discoverability really easy. The next one is with email. Can you guys guess what the average email open rate is? Just shout it out. What's that? 18%, 80%. 80. It's a bit lower than 80. Anyone else? Yeah, 18 is a bit closer. According to MailChimp's research, it's 15 to 25% open rates. Can you guys guess what the click-through rate within the email is? I heard of that. About it's 2.7% ish on average. Again, according to MailChimp, you guys, there's some pretty low numbers. Let me ask you this question now. Hands up, if when you get a text message, you usually look at it, you check it within 10 minutes. Yeah, a lot of us. Okay, keep your hands up for a second if you respond within 10 minutes. So many of us do. It's a really fast medium, far more than say ads or emails, which can get lost because we're inundated with messaging. So let's think about ways that we can try to use our emails to build awareness for our bots so that we can try to build that platform up more and get that engagement. So I could just within a call to action in my email be like, hey, message us for 20% off. So this is a good way to again incentivize people to go ahead and interact with your bot. Once you help build up the bot channel, it's also a good way to even personalize more and then you don't have to be as reliant on email though as Justine was saying, it's not pretty valuable. What you can also do is with your social media. Now we're also used to going to social media to go ahead and share updates about our brands or ourselves or of course run ads. What if we, instead of running ads or messaging that went back to our landing page, what if we sent it back to our chat bot instead? It is a native platform. If you're on Facebook, you're pretty much used to also dealing with Facebook Messenger for example. So you're not really going to a completely different website. You're still staying within the realm of Facebook. Also, the ads can feel more helpful than salesy. So if it says, like, hey, we're having a special sale, 10% off, your normal call to action would have been like shop now or buy now. Whereas here we can say things like, why don't you chat with a stylist? Let us help you. Again, we're going from the buy now to how can I help you now? So think about doing those ads, not just your social media ads, your regular display ads, your taxed ads, any of them can be really greatly enhanced by trying to drive some traffic to build up your bot channel. And you can see it thrive and prosper. Now hopefully at this point you're like, okay, this is super exciting. How do I get started? The first thing you need to do is think of this quote by Brinne Brown. Perfectionism is the thing that's really preventing us from taking flights. A lot of people are scared or afraid to go and test out this channel because they're like, oh my gosh, my bot has to be as advanced and chatty and interactive like in the movie Her. But that's not the case. Take the pressure off. It does not need to be perfect. And certainly it does not need to be anything like the movie Her at all. Which again, it's still science fiction. That technology doesn't really quite exist to that level right now. What you can even think about is what Facebook's research showed that sounding robotic can actually increase your efficiency because people have lower expectations for what a robot can engage with you in terms of conversation. So take the pressure off, get started, it doesn't need to be perfect. The thing is, even though chatbots are still quite a brand new or a more nascent channel, the fact that even today's basic conversations work is proof that as this gets more and more advanced, marketers will adopt this technology in increasing numbers. A big proof of that. I was chatting with some of our banking clients and they are very excited in creating chatbots. And as you know, banking as an industry has so many regulations that they tend to be slower to adopt new things. But they've seen the value in saving themselves time from repeated questions such as, hey, how much balance is in my bank today? Or things that are easy, but take three or four minutes of their customer services time because of security questions that need to be asked. So they've seen the value in saving their customer's time and also saving their money in terms of call center reps. So I'm gonna share with you a bot design plan that you can use no matter what platform you go with to create your bots. It's a simple four step plan. Step one is you need to identify the goal. Why does my chatbot need to exist? To do this, you wanna start by talking to customer service that, hey, what are questions that our customers are asking us very often? What are things that they want to be able to do more quickly, more efficiently? Try to get to the root of that so you can find the one singular problem that you wanna solve. Now sadly, shockingly, I guess, chatbots can't solve world peace, but they can still solve smaller problems and that's what we need to get them to do. Then you need to identify the problem of the platform that your audience is on. For some people that may be slack, for some people it may be Skype. So you wanna discover where your client's audience is you spending most of that time. The next slide is my favorite step, which is where you brainstorm without any limits. Ask yourself this question. If anything was possible, what would I do? And if the answer is I would bring in Brad Pitt to sit next to me in the office while I created my chatbot, put it down on the list, it's fine. Don't disqualify any ideas. Once you have this list down, you can then go and think about what would our customers love? So that will shorten the list a little bit. Then we go to the step where we bring it back down to reality and we're going to say that, okay, what's the simplest way to start? Maybe I have this big grand idea, but what's the first step that I can take towards it that I can start testing out today? Then you wanna think about making it either a bot or a skill. So for example, how important is the vocal aspect which would make it a skill? Or does it need to be both? And what should my KPIs be? So that would all be determined by the goal of your bots and how you set it up. Step four is when you spark it into life. So you're going to wanna think about the platform. You're gonna wanna think about the structure as well as the conversation, the tone and the voice that you're gonna use within your chat bot. And then you're gonna launch it and monitor it. Now bringing something like this to life can take anywhere from 10 minutes to several months. It's one of those, it depends, answers on how complex you want it to be. Tools, there are several. Facebook has their Facebook Messenger for devs. Google has api.ai, and if you want to find some of the different tools and resources along with some code samples that you can use, you can go to this website, aka.ms, front slash mask on. I promise you it is a treasure trove of everything that you're looking for to guide you to getting set up. I also created one more thing for you. It is your design worksheet. And I'm sorry, as you can see, I'm a terrible designer so it's not pretty, but I promise you it's really functional. This is a one sheet project management guide that will allow you to go through and think about what am I trying to achieve? What are the questions people ask? So you can keep everything in one place and then create the actual powerful hypothesis for your chat bot. So you can easily download it at that URL up there. And I promise you, no matter what you choose, it is easier than most people think. So if I had to recap, you want to try to build an AI-powered bot or scale. You want to promote it across different platforms and you want to engage and measure across multiple touch points. And like any tech that is brand new, problems are going to exist. For example, on a very large one-off aberration scale, you all read the news about Microsoft's state chat bot that went actually quite horrible. And what we learned from it, we learned that you need to put up those guardrails around the conversations that you have. So other people are already learning things the hard way for you to make it easier. So come back in and learn. Remember, caution is necessary, avoidance is not. One day in the very near future, your chat bot can be your best-performing employee, your best sales guy, your best customer service rep, your best marketer. The proof is in the pudding. Last year, I was reading this interview with the 1-800 Flowers CEO, just two months after they launched their chat bot. He said that 70% of their orders from their new Facebook bot were from brand new customers and tended to go towards a younger demographic. 70%. That's a brand new audience that they're able to reach. Last year as well, Sephora shared that once a user engaged with their kick Sephora bots, they then went on to average 10 messages per day. That's an incredible interaction. But my favorite example of all is Taco Bot from Taco Bell. That bot, which takes orders for food on Slack, has taken in over $10 million worth of food orders just via the Slack bot. That's a lot of tacos, $10 million. So my question to you guys is, are you gonna be the next conversational success story? Thank you so much.