Every week, updates are released, products are announced, or an event happens that could potentially affect your marketing strategy. Some things spell disaster while others scream opportunity. So each week, I’m going to provide you with some updates from the news that could affect your marketing strategy, for either better or worse. So checkout this week’s weekly marketing roundup.
Facebook Messenger Bots have finally arrived
Facebook continues to make heavy strides to grow their Messenger app. At Facebook’s F8 developer conference in San Francisco, Facebook unveiled that it would now support bots in Messenger.
What do these bots do?
Essentially, bots within Facebook Messenger allow users to interact with brands to do these like order flowers, food, print photos, get notifications about your bank account, there is even a bot for asking health questions. It seems as if it is meant to give you a more direct line to purchasing items or interacting with various services.
One bot called Poncho can give you daily weather updates. You can then personalize these updates based on your personal preferences and location. Other bots such as CNN can give you personalized news updates based on your requests.
Whether or not these bots actually amount to anything will be another matter entirely. While it seems like it may be a good idea, the uses are still fairly limited and the bots still lack 100% accuracy.
Why is this important?
The release of Facebook bots is once again showing insight into Facebook’s agenda to make Messenger a major media powerhouse. In my opinion, Facebook wants Messenger to become the WeChat of North America. Brands that are jumping onboard early will have an advantage and will be prominently featured in within Messenger’s new features.
Bots are also important because they are offering brands another opportunity to connect with their customers. Allowing people to order flowers or food just by simply having a conversation with a bot may be the future of online commerce. The initial group of partners includes 33 companies, including CNN, Burger King, Bank of America, Staples and Fandango. With many more companies joining in the near future. If you have the resources this may be something your brand wants to put resources into. If not, it’s definitely something to keep an eye on.
Source: Mashable
Medium wants to be publishers home base
Medium is building out a platform that would allow Medium to become a homebase for publishers. Publishers would still use a medium domain but could customize their pages as well as take in revenue from ads.
“On Medium, publishers have full control over their content and spend exactly zero time, money, or effort on tech and hosting, instead focusing their resources on producing great content and reaching new audiences,” Medium said in a blog post announcing the news.
Publishers can either generate revenue from sponsored links at the bottom of the post of through asking readers to pay a subscription to view their content. This is an interesting take on the future of online content and its generated.
Why is this important?
This could make freelance writing a thing of the past. Rather than trying to shop out articles to different sources, publishers can just make their home on Medium. With the way Medium pushes content to their homepage, publishers are more likely to see success on Medium than they would be on their own blog. This is also important for brands looking to get into content marketing. Instead of trying to carve out a viewership of your own, you can place your content on Medium and take advantage of their network of users.
Source: MarketingLand
