In this episode, Teri welcomes Melissa Klepacki, a serial entrepreneur and wellness fanatic. She’s also one of the pioneers when it comes to voice first and particularly with flash briefings. She is well into the 200s of her episodes of flash briefings, and they had a very interesting conversation about the impact that voice is and will continue to have on the world.
Getting into the Voice First space
- Got into social media marketing to push marketing out to people instead of having them go to a website to get community news. Was using Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to share information with people.
- She realized the paradigm shift happening with voice and decided to develop a daily flash briefing skill called “Today’s Health Tip”, to push wellness information to people.
Today’s Health Tip
- It’s a 3-minute daily wellness tip.
- Available on Amazon.com
- She talks about all kinds of subjects like low carb living, gut health, brain health, recommended supplements, mindfulness, incorporating more movement, and others.
- She works with a developer. Initially used Storyline to piece together her daily flash briefing, but it was ugly. The developer advised her to use her voice in developing the entire skill.
- People in 190 countries listen to Today’s Health Tip. 28% of the listeners are in Canada.
- The recommendations she gives comes from journal articles, books and anecdotal things that have worked for her.
The Guud Company
- She has a passion for Umlauts which remind her of the smiley face.
- She wants to share good news and make people think about wellness on a daily basis.
- Consults with other companies to develop flash briefing skills. Currently working with Princeton Partners, the largest marketing firm in Princeton, New Jersey. They have developed 2 flash briefing skills for them.
- They just launched a fun, family-friendly holiday skill called “Dear Santa” done in Santa Clause’s voice. The typical consumers are 4 to 9 year olds and the two choices they have is to report their good behavior to Santa so they can be on the nice list or to request a specific gift. When requesting a gift, the child asks for a specific gift and that information is captured so that the email registered to the Alexa device will receive an email from the North Pole to tell the parent that a specific gift has been requested. The parent can then buy that gift for the child for Christmas. Kids will typically not share their gift requests directly with their parents.
- Dear Santa is live right now.
- They plan on building out the regular Alexa skill to include more wellness and mindfulness topics.
Challenges and Rewards with the flash briefing
- Recording it on a daily basis can be a challenge.
- Records a few episodes at a time sometimes like when she’s taking a vacation. Does it the night before and tries to release at 12:01 AM on the day that it’s going to be shared.
- Friends and other people have reached out telling her the flash briefing has changed their lives.
Flash briefing tips
- There is a huge opportunity in the flash briefing skills arena especially for people creating content regularly. There are about 50,000 Alexa skills and only 5,000 of those are daily flash briefings.
- You don’t have to do the flash briefing every day.
- Flash briefings are a huge opportunity for companies to get out in front of competition.
- The discoverability issue: It’s not easy for people to find the different Alexa skills that are available because there are currently no discoverability tools. There needs to be a website or Alexa skill that will recommend the different skills and flash briefings based on each user’s preferences. She occasionally asks people to share her flash briefing and leave reviews. Plenty of Alexa skills have no reviews.
List of resources mentioned in this episode:
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