When you hear the word “bot,” what goes through your head?
For me, it’s a toss-up: Election sabotage, death threats on Twitter, or the Cybermen.
Not an awesome list of associations.
But late last week, I happened to catch a session with Andrew Warner at Social Media Marketing World on how to use chatbots to connect with audiences … and I learned a lot of things that seriously challenged my assumptions.
Andrew’s an expert on how to use “chatbots” — automated tools that can communicate on platforms like Facebook Messenger — to deliver messages.
Here are a few of the surprises I took away from that session — they might surprise you, too.
Surprising Benefit #1: It’s entirely permission-based
Maybe the creators of messaging platforms learned a few things from email, because the chat environment is amazingly resistant to spam.
Chat users must explicitly agree to receive messages — which makes the chat environment look a lot less painful than the Hellmouth that is my email inbox at the moment.
Even the father of permission marketing himself, Seth Godin, is using a chatbot on his Facebook page to send interesting, relevant, and valuable stuff to people who are interested in what he’s doing on that platform.
Does that surprise you? It surprised me — because I hadn’t realized how much the chat environment supports the fundamental principles of permission marketing: to entice rather than interrupt, and ask for permission rather than spam and slam.
Surprising Benefit #2: You can deliver autoresponders with it
So, the email autoresponder is one of my favorite content marketing tools.
It lets us deliver relevant, super-useful, interesting sequences directly to folks who are interested in a topic.
Plus, I can put the work in to create the strongest content I can one time, then deliver it to an infinite number of subscribers for as long as it’s relevant. Given my intense content creation schedule, I absolutely adore this aspect.
The biggest downside: every year, auto responder messages get a little harder for subscribers to see.
I didn’t realize that a chatbot could deliver sequences like this, but they can — pretty much just like email does. The only real difference is the platform the message comes through on. But that can be a significant difference.
Surprising Benefit #3: No Hellmouth
I’ve come to terms with the fact that never again will I have fewer than 10,000 20,000 30,000 unread emails.
My email inbox sucks. Maybe yours does as well. It’s jammed with messages from people who have no respect for my time, who have done no homework, and who are trying to grab my attention without having earned it.
Now, when I was listening to Andrew’s presentation, I was thinking:
“Sure, this is fine for now, but what happens when chat is as horrible as email inboxes are?”
Because after all, bad marketers are Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.
And then Andrew said:
“I bet you’re wondering what happens when chat is as horrible as email inboxes are.”
So much for my illusions of originality.
But because of Surprise #1 — the much tighter permission context of chat — it’s a lot harder for crummy marketers to get in there.
Once you say no more contact from someone, that’s it; they can’t contact you again. Even better, people can’t send you unsolicited messages like they can by guessing (or buying) your email address.
We’re going back to what permission marketing is supposed to be about — earning the right to talk to people, instead of interrupting them and attempting to snatch their attention.
That means we have to get creative. We have to marshall our skill and craft as writers. We have to get serious about serving audiences instead of trying to strip-mine them.
Just my kind of thing.