It’s no secret that the rise of computer apps is transforming both the marketing and customer experience. One of the most intriguing developments in app development is in the area of chatbots that not only can send communications to customers but also respond “intelligently” to conversations.

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Christian Brucculeri, the CEO at mobile messaging company Snaps, a developer of chatbots and other marketing technology products for companies. Brucculeri explained some of the background of how chatbots came to be, as well as their usefulness as a marketing tool.

“Typically chatbots represent a conversational interface between a consumer and a machine,” Brucculeri said. “They’re applications that have linguistic structure. It might allow you to ask a question and try to find an answer. They enable one-to-one communication between brands and consumers at scale, and they leverage technology in order to do that.”

Certainly chatbots have close technological relatives we’re already used to, like Apple’s Siri, Google Home and Amazon Alexa. You might call automated phone systems—the kind people love to hate—as a chatbot’s second cousin. But so far these are far from able to use artificial intelligence to understand language, and respond appropriately.

And while the technology can be used for entertainment purposes—think Snapchat or Facebook Messenger, for example—its greatest impact is potentially coming in marketing, Brucculeri told me.

Creating conversations, not messaging

“We work with brands across several industry verticals, including tourism, hospitality, entertainment, media, CPG, retail, quick-serve restaurants and more,” he said. “For example one apparel brand delivers a 30-day workout experience using basic Facebook Messenger. For some hospitality brands, they’re trying to manage their ongoing relationship with consumers and help them manage their rewards accounts.”

In many ways, this sounds similar to most apps we’re used to. So, what makes chatbots a different kind of app?

“Where chatbots get really interesting is in personalizing media and responses,” Brucculeri suggested. “Here, you can really do one-to-one marketing at scale.” Brucculeri said Snaps has developed such chatbots for sports teams, where a fan might receive notices of games, results and highlight videos. In the stadium, a chatbot might help a fan find restrooms and snack counters, based on physical location.

Brucculeri said Snaps is developing chatbots that function on a variety of existing platforms. Facebook Messenger, which launched a chatbot in 2016, may be most appropriate in accessing consumers, he said, but there’s also Kik, WeChat, Slack and many others, each of which may be experience-specific.

Chatbots also can be connected to customer relationship management platforms, such as Salesforce, to deliver notifications at the right time to the right person, Brucculeri said.

“We do CRM integration and user matching to log in and do account management,” he said. The result might enable companies to find new customers, engage with existing customers in a fun way, getting customers to take some form of action, or managing the relationship in other ways.

Improving the customer experience

Customer service, driven by artificial intelligence, also can be aided powerfully by such matching, Brucculeri said. Instead of hitting a bunch of digits to get routed to the right person, the artificial intelligence capabilities of chatbots—the two-way ability to listen and respond appropriately—can improve this experience immensely.

“A chatbot can do this in ways that are more convenient, simple, fast, and better for the customer and probably less expensive for the customer-service function,” he said.

The future of chatbots is an intriguing one, as technology evolves and as the bots themselves get “smarter” and more humanlike in their analyses and responses.

“We’re long on the idea that conversational interfaces will continue to evolve. Whether consumers are texting with or talking to them, automated systems like bots are almost certainly going to have a role in our future lives” Brucculeri said. “We see conversational media becoming the next wave and being potentially bigger than application media itself. I think in three years, people might be talking to bots more than they’re typing in bots.

“But the main idea remains the same,” he said. “Might I one day launch a chatbot on Alexa, Amazon’s voice control system? How about getting some type of visual element to go along with that, such as HoloLens, Microsoft’s holographic headset? Can these things become really rich experiences, far better than just staring at our phones and typing?

“I think some of the form factors are going to change, but I think the fundamental elements are going to be the same, which is conversational commerce. People increasingly will be talking to their computers, and they’re going to get a lot done by doing it.”

Agile marketing increasingly is being recognized as a powerful key to content effectiveness. Buyer interest and trends can change in the blink of an eye, in particular as social and other media drive the news. Breaking news creates windows of opportunities, but only if marketers are quick and smart enough to take advantage of them.

On topic of agile marketing is what some have called newsjacking, which means responding quickly to news items of the day. More than just quickness for its own sake, the increased focus on what customers are interested in greatly improves content relevance.

And did I forget to say it can produce stupendous ROI results? It can produce stupendous ROI results!

I’m proud to say my latest efforts in this area on behalf of PwC have been recognized by ITSMA with its highest honor, the diamond award in its 2016 Marketing Excellence Awards global competition. Below, I’ll explain some of the elements of the winning program.

The quick or the dead

Keeping up to the minute with who’s buying what, matched with what you’re selling, and how you’re connecting and delivering for your customers is a dynamic and fluid challenge. As Financial Services and U.S. Brexit Marketing Leader at PwC here in New York I have a particular interest in rapid-response content creation, in particular how it can benefit our customers in their day-to-day decision making.

But professional service firms often impose inherent drags on marketing response. Internal reviews and multiple approvals have to be adhered to, and design and layout of messages, and distribution via Web, e-mail and social media, consume big chunks time.

That’s a shame, because firms like PwC are well-positioned to offer keen, insightful analysis of breaking financial news—analysis that’s effective only if it’s quick out the door. Think of it as a client calling a very knowledgeable friend to get “their take” on the news. Marketing best practices demand it, but more importantly so do current and prospective clients who have to make rapid decisions based on sometimes complex new regulations often rendered in government speak.

Knowing how the content game is played

We already distribute thoughtful briefs on new regulations, as well as deeper analysis. What we needed was a quick-response campaign platform tied to newsworthy events that we already knew were on the horizon, and that our customers also anticipated.

Consider the U.K.’s June 2016 referendum to eventually leave the European Union. It seemed that Brexit follow-up was always catching people flat-footed, with how-come and what-if analysis that was too uncertain and too late.

But the calendar revealed key dates that would produce news and content opportunities. We knew, for example, the Bank of England would hold a policy meeting on a certain day. We knew the particular date that the UK’s GDP numbers would be released, that the Economic and Financial Affairs Council was meeting in Brussels, and more. From these and other events, we were able to prepare preliminary analysis based on expected news, and get it out the door in two days or less—unheard of in most professional services firms.

The key is not responding to events, but rather anticipating them with compelling marketing content your customers want and need. I’ll give you a single example that turned out great for us, and impressed the ITSMA judges.

A combination of hard work and opportunity

• Market trigger: We knew that the U.S. Department of Labor planned to release details of a new trading law on April 6, 2016. It was a complex revision of previous regulations that changed how broker-dealers, investment advisers, insurance agents and consultants are compensated when dealing with investment and retirement accounts. A big yawn? Nope … it was and is of keen interest to an immense financial services community.

• Web presence: In advance, we developed a classic microsite, and built it out with content, news, video and keywords.

• SEM: We launched Google search ads two days prior to the DOL announcement, scheduled to run for two full months. We wanted to own this conversation.

• Scrum prep: We threw together a five-member client services team with the sole task of tearing apart the anticipated 1,000-page DOL ruling to fully understand what was in it.

• Thought leadership: Two PwC subject area experts were identified and prepped for press interviews.

• Media opportunities: In advance, and in anticipation of the announcement, we arranged for interviews on the day of the DOL announcement with The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Reuters, Reuters TV, Bloomberg, CNBC and CNBC Closing Bell. (Not bad for a day’s work!)

And the payoff? Our keyword buy results were among the strongest ever recorded for any PwC paid-search campaign, with the highest ever click-through rates and the lowest bounce rates. And we booked business in the first week of the campaign.

If all this seems daunting, don’t worry. Pick your spots, develop content in advance and think like the folks who are going to consume it. Agile marketing works; moreover, in many industries it can be the rule breaker that makes for outsized competitive success. So roll up your sleeves and make it happen!

This has been a great series of conversations with cryptocurrency expert Alex Tapscott, and we’re just about done. Alex is founder and CEO of Northwest Passage Ventures and coauthor—with his dad, business theorist Don Tapscott— of the book “The Trust Protocol: How Blockchain Technology Will Change Money, Business and the World.”

In previous conversations, we delved into the issue of security, trust and the structure and solidity of blockchains, bitcoin’s major technical innovation. Here, we discussed a topic near and dear to my heart … regulation. In short, who’s minding the store, and what does government think about cryptocurrency?

“There’s a misconception that’s held by a lot of people that governments are ambivalent and in some cases hostile to cryptocurrency, but that’s simply not true,” Alex said. “Yes, countries like Russia, Iran or Bangladesh are not onboard with digital monies, but in most mature, developed countries, governments are looking at this as a tool and an opportunity, not as a liability.

“The reason is quite straightforward. Consider central banks, which have three important roles in business and the economy—to manage monetary policy like interest rates and money supply; to act as a lender of last resort in the case of crisis or liquidity crunches, putting credit and capital back in the system; and to act as regulator.

“And when it comes to being a regulator, what do you care about the most?” Alex continued. “You care that consumers are being protected, that companies are not violating the law or committing crimes, and perhaps most importantly you care about risk in the system. You want to ensure that risk is not being concentrated in the wrong places where it could eventually lead to a crisis.”

Alex said that a great advantage to a blockchain, from a regulator’s standpoint, is that they can see transactions happening in real time, and can identify pretty easily whether or not money is flowing in ways that might be suspicious, or to places (Iran, China) where money laundering or other nefarious dealings have been known to take place rather often.

“One of the reasons why the global financial crisis happened was that regulators were unaware of how risk was getting concentrated in the hands of different intermediaries,” Alex explained. “A lot of those transactions were done bilaterally, at different parties, where Goldman and Lehman Brothers (for example) might not know how much each of them owed to each other. And often they were using really antiquated technology where the records would be held in Excel spreadsheets or filing cabinets.”

Alex noted that if these transactions had been cleared and were settled on a public ledger like a blockchain, regulators would have had much better visibility and would have been able to react more quickly when things looked like they were getting out of hand. It’s certainly an interesting position.

Another point Alex made—and that regulators should appreciate—is rapidity of response.

“Consider monetary policy,” Alex said. “When you cut interest rates—whether it’s to increase spending or borrowing, or boost investment in equities or consumer confidence … whatever—you’ve got to wait a few months to randomly sample retailers and check in with banks, these types of things, to see how credit books have grown. And that means that your response to things are slow.

“But if you had a digital dollar that was issued on a blockchain, and you cut rates, you’d be able to see in real time all the metadata about how that money was circulating and flowing through the system,” Alex said. “That would give you much better information on whether or not your policy was effective. Many regulators are saying blockchain technology could help them do their job a lot better, and it’s the reason regulators and government officials in many parts of the world are really keen on this technology.”

I want to thank Alex Tapscott for sharing his views about bitcoin, blockchain and the future of digital currency with me, and of course with all you readers. Please feel free to review previous posts in this blog series, about digital currency security, building trust, blockchain details, and reputational issues. And as always, I’d love to here your thoughts.

Your neighbor borrows money from you. When he pays you back, would you prefer a) cash; b) a check; or c) cryptocurrency? While the third option may give you pause, it may only be because digital money is new and hasn’t established the trust you give to the first two. Consider it a branding problem.

Cryptocurrency expert and author Alex Tapscott agrees. Over the course of several blogs, Alex and I have discussed the different forms of digital money, their blockchain platforms that make transactions possible, scalability and—most importantly—trust. The essential question on many people’s minds is, How do you move from greenbacks, which everyone (mostly) has confidence in, to something as “mystical” as bitcoin?

“Here’s the thing,” Alex said. “In 2015, a lot of banks and companies and governments were waking up to the potential of this technology. They loved the idea of frictionless payments, of secure networks, of lower cost, of better speed. But they didn’t like the idea of opening up their companies to anonymous networks of participants.

“The blockchain innovation is the most-important part of the equation,” Alex continued. “Bitcoin is just the incentive mechanism which helps to secure the network. I have spoken to people in the financial services industry, and also big technology firms, who readily acknowledge that if they’re going to build consortium and private blockchains, they’re going to need to reconcile this issue of how to secure transactions.”

Alex mentioned Mt. Gox and Silk Road, two of the more popular scandals impacting digital currency and hurting its reputation badly, and in recent news the Hong Kong bitcoin exchange Bitfinex said it had some $72 million stolen in a serious hack—an amount that has slumped, due to loss of confidence in the currency.

“If I speak to the uninitiated with the subject, and I say ‘bitcoin,’ a lot of times they say, ‘Isn’t that just criminal money that drug dealers and ransomware perpetrators use to commit crimes?’ ” Alex said. “I won’t downplay the fact that there’s a major communications issue around bitcoin. Some of us have wondered if it’s too late to rebrand this whole space to help cleanse it of its troubled past.”

Alex used the analogy of the Internet as the structure of content, in the same sense that blockchain is the structure of digital currency, and how branding can actually facilitate trust.

“With the Internet back in 1994, people hadn’t really arrived on a term for it. Was it the ARPANET? Was it the information superhighway? Was it the network of networks? Eventually we landed on the term ‘Internet,’ which has got a sort of aura of elegance to it that the words like ‘blockchain’ and ‘bitcoin’ do not yet have.”

Alex and his dad, business theorist Don Tapscott, actually did come up with a new term for these vague concepts in their new bestseller, “The Trust Protocol: How Blockchain Technology Will Change Money, Business and the World,” just published by Penguin’s Portfolio imprint.

The new term is the “trust protocol.”

“I’d say that there has never been a system designed where security is more at the heart of it than with blockchain,” Alex told me. “I think that big, open public blockchains are the most secure way to move and store and manage anything of value than anything we’ve ever created. Just look at history: If the NSA, the CIA, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Target, LinkedIn, Twitter and Home Depot can’t secure financial data or data about identity, then no one can. These are companies and governments with enormous resources.

“The problem is that they’re all centralized and they all control data,” Alex said. “If you could take that and decentralize it across a network, it would make it much harder to hack. It doesn’t mean it’s impossible to hack, but it’s significantly harder to hack a blockchain than it is a conventional database because you don’t just have to hack one source, you have to hack millions of different computers in a very short window of time.”

Next time, Alex and I will look at more issues concerning cryptocurrency, and how they might figure in your future—how bitcoin and blockchain can disrupt entire industries. Stay tuned!

Those of you who have been following my recent posts about digital currencies may remember my recent discussion with Alex Tapscott, founder and CEO of Northwest Passage Ventures. He’s the co-author along with his dad, the business theorist Don Tapscott of the best selling book ‘The Trust Protocol: How Blockchain Technology Will Change Money, Business and the World. ” In my last post, we delved a little into the topic of blockchains, those public ledgers that allow digital currencies like bitcoin and others to be sent to others as a form of payment. Here, Alex discusses the different forms that a blockchain can take.

“There are lots of different ways to make a blockchain, with some being public and some private, and a lot of times people don’t really know what that means,” Alex said. “Basically a public blockchain is simply one that is open and permissionless, where anybody can access it regardless of where they are or who they are.

“And typically public blockchains have a native token, a cryptocurrency like bitcoin or in the case of Ethereum—a blockchain-based computing platform that can execute peer-to-peer contracts—a cryptocurrency called ether. Public blockchains have a lot of positive attributes. Because they’re open, they have many different participants, and the more participants there are, the more transaction validity you get.”

Alex acknowledged fears that cryptocurrencies might be hacked, with bitcoins or other currencies actually stolen, but said public blockchains help mitigate the risk.

“The more different people you have, the more distributed it is, which generally speaking reduces the chance of attack, because you have to attack many computers rather than one computer. Also, because you’ve got lots of different computers, there’s more energy and more computing power going into this blockchain, which makes it more secure for the most part.

“Now, there is a flipside to public blockchains which makes it somewhat limited, at least today. Transactions in a public blockchain have to be broadcast across the whole network. This means that the number of transactions that the blockchain can handle is limited because, remember, it does requires a lot of computing power and a lot of energy. So the question of scalability is one that’s still unresolved in public blockchains.”

By contrast, Alex noted that private blockchains are made up of participants who have permissioned access. And with fewer participants a private blockchain can manage a higher transaction volume, he said.

“And it can manage more types of transactions, too, because the rules are set by the participants, and they can change the rules to meet different types of assets. Everyone trusts each other somewhat, and can trust that they each have the necessary computing resources to manage the blockchain. That means it’s unlikely that someone won’t have the ability to participate fully.

“Also, because private blockchains are permissioned, they are, generally speaking, more palatable to regulators, because you could grant permission to different parties in a transaction. One of those parties could be an auditor like PricewaterhouseCoopers, for example. One of them could also be a regulator who could look in to see the metadata and validate what’s happening.”

In future posts, we’ll delve into a lot more about the future of cryptocurrencies, including setting up private blockchains, regulatory aspects, security and more. Watch for it!

I’ve had a great time chatting with cryptocurrency expert Alex Tapscott about the future of digital money, and how it may (probably) change our lives. In my last post with Alex—founder and CEO of Northwest Passage Ventures and coauthor with his dad Don of the book, “The Trust Protocol: How Blockchain Technology Will Change Money, Business and the World”—we discussed the all-important topic of security: Who actually is minding the store on these new types of monetary transactions involving such things as ether, bitcoin and other new digital currencies?

A major issue—perhaps the single most important issue, actually—is trust. There’s plenty of trust in the U.S. dollar, but what about bitcoin and other digital monies? I asked Alex how one establishes trust in this brave new world of digital currency?

“Traditionally we have an intermediary to establish trust, those agencies that verify the identity of parties, perform the processing, and the clearing and maintaining of reliable records. Now, intermediaries—call them banks, credit card issuers, PayPal, you name it—do a pretty good job at that, but they have certain limitations. They’re centralized, they cost money, they capture data, and doing so can slow things down if they’re using old technology.”

Well then, I thought. what’s the new paradigm for digital currency? Who is governing whether bitcoin and other digital monies are “real” or not? Alex discussed a bit about blockchain—bitcoin’s main technical innovation, a public ledger for bitcoin transactions allowing users to connect to the network, and send and verify transactions.

“With blockchain, you’ve got a new platform where trust is not established by a third party, but rather established through maximum collaboration and clever code,” Alex replied. “In a public blockchain (more on this later), you have an incentive mechanism in that users commit computing resources to validate transactions, and then are rewarded for reaching consensus on what is ‘true’ by receiving bitcoin or an Ethereum ether.”

But, I asked Alex, how do you validate a crypto transaction? After all, it’s not script, like the U.S. greenback or the euro.

“Right now, there are a whole bunch of different solutions that have been proposed. A mining method is called a ‘proof of work.’ So in exchange for doing lots of work, you have the chance of getting rewarded. But there are other different ways of validating a blockchain, like ‘proof of stake,’ which basically just confers validating power on whomever owns a share of the network.

“So, if you have 10 banks in the network, and each of them owns 10%, then no transaction is valid unless all 10, or some plurality or majority, can reach consensus,” he said.

Since we were dealing with the all-important topic of trust here, I had to ask: How much effort does it take to break a blockchain and steal money? Trust is the key to the new world of digital currency, right?

“One of the great advantages of the bitcoin blockchain is that validating transactions takes a lot of work, so guess what? Hacking transactions to try to break the blockchain—to steal money—takes an equal or greater amount of work! That’s what makes it really safe. So in order to hack a transaction on the bitcoin blockchain—to, say, send the same $20 twice or sell the same share 10 times because you’re trying to make 10 times the profit—you wouldn’t just have to rewrite one transaction. You’d have to rewrite every transaction, basically back to the beginning of the blockchain, and do so in a really short window.”

Alex told me he feels that proof-of-work blockchains that use a native token like bitcoin, or Ethereum’s ether, are the ones that are likely to succeed. “I think that private blockchains that don’t have that could work, but I don’t think they’ll ever be as secure.”

Next time, we’ll look a little closer at public versus private blockchains, to get a better feel for why Alex thinks one may prevail over the other, at least in the short term. Stay tuned!

Most marketers I talk with today say they are drowning in data. But in reality data they really want sits in disparate systems throughout the organization. Or if their company has invested big money in a traditional data warehouse, the results have fallen short of expectations. This is because traditional data warehouses were never designed to handle the volume, variety and velocity of today’s data-centric applications. So, while most marketers and most companies “talk” about big data they just go on with “business as usual” taking little or no action.

This is not just my opinion. Recently, my UK colleague, Richard Petley, director of PwC Risk and Assurance, conducted a survey of 1,800 senior business leaders in North America and Europe. And only a small percentage reported effective data management practices. 43 percent of companies surveyed “obtain little tangible benefit from their information,” while 23 percent “derive no benefit whatsoever,” according to the study. That means three quarters of organizations surveyed lack the skills and technology to use their data to gain an edge on competitors.

The problem is not access to data. It’s the management of it. What companies really need is the ability to manage large amounts of data in a safe, agile and adaptable fashion. And that means they need a more modern data warehouse.

The overall purpose of a data warehouse is to integrate corporate data from various internal and external sources. Implementing a data warehouse is traditionally a long, costly and risky process. When the solution is ready, it’s often slow, outdated and hard to update as business changes. A modern data warehouse is different – employing new technologies, products, and approaches. Approaches that allow for both speed and agility.

With a modern data warehouse, you only have to query one source to get the data you need. When you add automation to the mix, you can load, clean, integrate, and format the data in record time.

POSSIBLE is a creative agency that brings results-driven digital solutions to some of the world’s most dynamic brands. Every two weeks, analysts faced the herculean task of reporting campaign results based on 10 different data sources, applying 20 different measures on 70+ products delivered by 100+ media partners. They would spend on average 35 hours just processing data before they could begin analysis.

When I spoke to the POSSIBLE team they reported this free demo introduced them to a data warehouse automation tool from TimeXtender. After a surprisingly fast implementation period, the “data munging” performed by POSSIBLE’s analysts has now been reduced 68%. “This has really turned out to be a big win for us. The fact that we can now get actionable data to analysts so much faster allows us to spend more time providing valuable insights to clients,” says Harmony Crawford, Associate Director of Marketing Sciences.

As my colleague Richard Petley likes to say, “Data is the lifeblood of the digital economy.” It can provide insight, inform decisions and deepen relationships, and drive competitive advantage, but only if it’s managed in an agile and adaptable way.

So the next time you find yourself complaining about the problem with big data, stop talking and start researching the modern data warehouse and data warehouse automation.

This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Storytelling Gone Wild: The Key to Creating Viral Content. This webinar featured James Hilliard (@hillyprods) President & Executive Webcast Producer for Hilly Productions, Bree Baich (@BreeBaich) Transmedia Mastermind “The Storyteller“for SAS Institute and Jamie Turner (@AskJamieTurner) CEO of SIXTY. This webinar was sponsored by Citrix GoToWebinar. We discussed how to make your storytelling more viral by connecting with emotion.

Here are three key takeaways from the webinar:

1. What is viral content? – Anything that is liked by thousands and shared by millions
2. Connect with Emotion – This is the key to being memorable and getting that story to go viral!
3. Know your Audience – everyone loves kittens and puppies but you would never leverage them if your audience was B2B Execs!

To get a copy of the slides or to listen to the replay, please click here. You can also scan the highlights of this webinar on Twitter by reading the Storify below.

This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Social Listening: Harness Marketing Insights from Consumer Conversations. This webinar featured Kevin Hack (@kevinhack) head of Social Intelligence in Global Digital Marketing Advancement at The Hershey Company, Kendra Simpson (@Kfoley) Director of Communications at Kohler Company, Drew Neisser (@DrewNeisser) founder and CEO of Renegade and Will McInnes (@willmcinnes) Integrated Marketing Analyst at Union+Webster. This webinar was sponsored by Brandwatch. We discussed tips and tricks for finding and utilizing Social Listening in your organization!

Here are three key takeaways from the webinar:

1. Customer Centric? – How can you declare that you are customer centric if you don’t do Social Listening!
2. ROI of Social Listening – what’s the ROI of not listening to your customers – most likely it more than the cost of Social Listening
3. Social to predict what’s next – more and more social is being used to find opportunities in product development or innovation

To get a copy of the slides or to listen to the replay, please click here. You can also scan the highlights of this webinar on Twitter by reading the Storify below.

Our next webinar is titled Storytelling Gone Wild: The Key to Creating Viral Content be sure to sign up for it or view the schedule of other upcoming webinars here.