AiC Episode 91

In this episode, Teri is welcomed on the Alexa Dev Chat Podcast by the host, Dave Isbitski, to talk about flash briefings and what else he is doing in the voice first space.

Enjoy the Conversation!

Teri is a family physician by profession and works at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Three quarters of his practice is sports medicine and the rest is general family practice. Before medical school he had done an education degree which formed the basis for his interest in education technology.

Getting into Voice Technology

  • He had always been interested in technology from a young age.
  • The first time Teri was exposed to voice technology was through Gary Vaynerchuk.
  • Gary Vee was talking about voice technology and flash briefings, and Teri found them as an interesting way to get a message across to a population.
  • He started searching online for information on voice technology, but couldn’t find anything on the technology’s presence in Canada, so he thought he should combine his passion for technology, healthcare, and education, and create a resource for people to learn about the technology.
  • He had done podcasting in the past so it was easy for him to set up the Alexa in Canada blog and podcast. He started them before the announcement of Alexa coming to Canada was made.

Alexa in Canada

  • Teri has a lot of content on the Alexa in Canada blog and podcast website.
  • For those who are new Alexa users, he has a page on the site with hundreds of commands for the users to try out.
  • He has other pages that highlight blog posts, the podcast, and some devices that are compatible with Alexa.
  • He also has tutorials and the flash briefing page that highlights his flash briefings.
  • He gets a lot of organic traffic on the website. When people type in the search terms “Alexa and Canada” his site is the number one that comes up after Amazon’s.
  • He gets a lot of questions from Canadians about what they can do with Alexa.

Flash Briefings 101

  • Teri thinks they are an incredible opportunity for people to get out a message. They are going to become more popular in time.
  • Just like how TV went to Netflix, and there is now personalized on-demand TV, with audio too, people can now get personalized on-demand audio. Amazon has positioned flash briefings to facilitate that.

Alexa Dev Chat with Dave Isbitski and Teri Fisher

How to Start a Flash Briefing

  • Teri suggests visiting CreateaFlashBriefing.com where he goes through the main steps in creating a flash briefing.
  • He also offers his premium course in flash briefing creation for free at FlashBriefingFormula.com. He covers everything about creating a flash briefing, marketing it, and growing it.
  • In terms of the costs of creating a flash briefing, the developer APIs are free. One gets AWS credits that can cover hosting.
  • The preferred length for a flash briefing is two minutes.
  • There could be potential in producing video content for flash briefings.

Flash Briefings for Increased Customer Acquisition and Engagement

  • Teri tested this out by carrying out an experiment.
  • To do something special for his 500th flash briefing, to thank the guests that had been on his podcasts, and promote his flash briefing, he created a gamified flash briefing which included an Alexa skill called “Crack the Code”
  • In his daily flash briefings, he would give some type of puzzle that the listeners had to solve. The listeners would then have to go to the Alexa in Canada website to search for answers to the puzzles.
  • They would then go to the Alexa skill, enable it, open it, and then start talking with it to try and guess what the answer to the riddle was.
  • If they got it correct, the skill would tell them a secret piece of the final code. Every day for two weeks, they would do the same thing.
  • At the end of the two weeks, if a listener had all the 14 pieces, they could speak to the skill, say the answer to the final code, and would be told they’d cracked the code, and then get a text from the skill which would direct them to the Alexa in Canada website where they could enter to win prizes.
  • There were extra entries for sharing the contest on social media.
  • The growth and activations of the flash briefings from that were huge and the feedback Teri got was overwhelming. The number of times the flash briefing was played during those two weeks went up 20% and the number of activations went up 180%. The website traffic went up 100% and the number of times the flash briefing was played on the website went up 200%.
  • His followers on Twitter went up 20% in those two weeks and the number of times that people were clicking on his links went up 430%. His stuff was retweeted 65% more than the prior two weeks.
  • The contest also enabled him to increase his email list.

The Network of Flash Briefings

  • Teri created Briefcast.FM to be the platform where all the best quality flash briefings will be found.

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

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