The dream of man as a species has always been to work as little as possible. We have spent millions of years perfecting our technologies to spend more time in a horizontal position or taking in solar radiation.
That dream is getting closer. It is not as the pioneers of cinema or science fiction thought with tons of shiny and threatening junk with red pixel eyes, but via social networks and landing pages.
The automata in the form of ChatBots invade us without contemplation making humans more human and therefore more lazy and expendable.
If we do a brief review, it is no longer like in the past where the manufacturing of these 2.0 answering machines was only within the reach of a team of programmers and months of lines of code. Now any unwary armed with a tablet or smartphone can launch his hordes of obedient digital butlers.
Among the services in which they are already working we have:
- Facebook.
- Twitter.
- There are plugins for WordPress.
- Telegram.
- WhatsApp coming soon.
But before thinking about using a bot for good, doing Inbound marketing, let's see what a bot is:
It is a program that imitates human behavior and responds to comments on social networks or instant messaging services. They can be created to facilitate the management of these services and be able to answer predefined questions or even carry out surveys, forms, etc.
But before you think that machines are not for you, reflect on the circumstances in which we already assume these services or modality as normal (and even appreciate it):
- ATMs.
- Vending machines.
- Text predictors (this may not be a good example).
It is only a matter of time before social conventions fall and our prosumers willingly accept being served by a digital assistant.
The application of bots multiplies every day and depends to a certain extent on your imagination and type of business, but any SME or activity can use it, for example on the platform offered by Telegram, to:
- Offer simple, low-level information to the customer (schedules, locations, stock availability, etc.).
- Filter and support “human” technical services.
- Conduct surveys and improve know-how about the buyer persona.
- Accelerate or detect states of the Buyer Journey.
- Dimension the transmedia narrative and storytelling of our marketing.
- Give engagement to our channel.
- Etc.
It goes without saying that It is a good idea to use them in Buyer People with geek profiles whose hobbies include this type of “curiosities” or any type of client with social shyness or simply early adopters.
Some of the examples that are working best, due to quality, level of “humanization”, innovation, meaning and integration with the rest of the company's services are:
- El País Twitter (@el_pais): With a DM to this account we can have a personalized news service.
- Qolitibot: This completely transmedia communication experiment has its central axis in a blog, but above all in its podcast, which is perfectly complemented by the Telegram Bot (@politibot) that generates interactive content daily.
- Sequel Stories: Based on Facebook messenger it is an update of the paradigm of choose your own adventure which in book format was so successful in the 80s and 90s in Spain.
Can you imagine its applications in educational environments? Combined with correct management of knowledge control, we could have a powerful instrument to enhance e-learning. At least in low-level or non-pedagogical queries, but Google is already scheming in this regard (pardon the pun).
