Podcast: Messaging For Business with Eytan Oren and Stuart Wall
When most of us think of messaging, we think of talking to friends and family using apps like Snapchat, WhatsApp, or Line. But a growing number of companies are developing innovative ways to use these and other messaging apps for business. In this episode, Jon Prial talks to two entrepreneurs doing just that. Eytan Oren is the CEO of Block Party, a consultancy focused on messaging for business, and Stuart Wall is the CEO of Signpost, a cloud-based marketing software company that helps companies build and manage customer relationships. Get a glimpse into what the future of messaging is all about. You’ll hear about:
- What messaging for business means (0:26)
- How messaging and social networks are different and how they overlap (3:07)
- How brands are using push notifications (4:10)
- What messaging apps are doing to avoid being perceived as spam (5:24)
- Who should be thinking about messaging to reach their customers (9:29)
- What companies should be doing to embrace this trend (12:34)
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Transcript
Jon Prial: Messaging for business. It’s not about two 16-year-olds texting each other or people or groups of people of any age having these purely person-to-person interaction.
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Hershel Harris: It’s not exactly just not that, because there may be platforms in which business, messaging for business is conducted, but what it’s not is conversational social messaging between two 16-yea-olds or two people of any age. It’s really about doing the same thing, but between businesses, between businesses and employees, between businesses and their customers.
It’s about conversations that happen in the format of messaging for the purpose of conducting business.
Jon: That’s Hershel Harris, CTO of George and Partners. We were able to corral him and a few other outstanding guests to share with you their thoughts on messaging for business. This is Jon Prial. Welcome to the Impact Podcast.
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Hershel: What matters is that it’s a natural conversation that has the characteristics of being long running, that context is understood, that transactional business payments can be managed within it. Some of that will be done on simple platforms like simple messaging, SMS. Some of it will be done within Facebook or Facebook Messenger, which they’re working hard to build out, or on WeChat if you’re in China.
Some of it might be done, because it’s been integrated nicely within an application. Those are all good ways in which messaging for business will be done, but the characteristics of messaging remain the same in each of those three contexts.
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Jon: As we continue our podcast on messaging for business, we’re here with Eytan Oren. He’s the CEO of Block Party. Block Party is a consultancy and one of the very few we found that’s very focused on this topic of messaging for business. Welcome, Eytan. We’re glad you’re here.
Eytan Oren: Thanks for having me.
Jon: Tell us a little more about Block Party and what you do.
Eytan: Block Party is a consultancy that specializes in messaging apps and we help media owners, celebrities, brands. Pretty much, anything that you can do on a major messaging app, we’re going to help you do cool things on there, whether it’s buying media in messaging apps and getting better bank for your buck than you might on Facebook or Twitter.
Audience development, we’re setting up official channels and hopefully getting millions of followers on some of these apps, creative campaigns like designing official emojis and coming up with ways for your audience to interact with each other in fun ways one-to-one.
Jon: It’s too bad you don’t have fun and enjoy your job, then that’s really kind of sad.
Eytan: It’s a very fun space. It is.
Jon: You mentioned social networks. Talk a little bit about messaging and their contrast to social networks or their overlap with social networks. Tell me a little bit about that.
Eytan: I would say that the lines are increasingly blurring in both directions. For the most part, in an overarching way, I would say that social networks tend to facilitate broadcast messaging, one-to-many, and messaging apps gravitate more towards one-to-one or small group conversations with the people you care about most.
That fundamental difference tends to inform how we like to think about how marketers might be able to reach people. It actually makes it way more challenging to enter the conversation when you’re talking about a medium in which people are really having private conversations, as opposed to social networks, where it’s sort of natural for a brand to broadcast to people in the same way people are to their friends.
Jon: You had mentioned in the session earlier today that the brands are really leveraging push notification and recognizing what’s happening already.
Eytan: Yeah. Push notifications are a huge notifications to messaging apps. Some of them, not all of them are offering them to brands right now. A few of them like LINE, which is the huge messaging app in Japan and Kik, which is a major one in North America, they’re essentially allowing brands to get followers and then reach them with push notifications that come in just like your friend sent you a message.
You’re going to get a message from Dunkin’ Donuts as if they’re your friend. It might pop up on your phone screen, so the open rates are really off the charts compared to social networks. You might get upwards of 60 percent or higher open rates for your notifications.
A 100 percent of people will actually get those messages. Where you might have a six percent organic reach on Facebook, we’re talking about a 100 percent of people that get the messages and then maybe 60 percent or higher that will actually open them.
Jon: Something special has happened here in terms of the relationship between the brand and the end consumer if they’re actually opening it and looking at it. This is not a spam world in this case.
Eytan: That’s a very interesting topic. It runs the risk of becoming that. Different messaging apps approach that in different ways. For example, LINE, I’ve noticed, I will get a message, push notification, every morning from BuzzFeed and from The Wall Street Journal on LINE, which arguably might be too many and might cause a lot of people to opt out, but perhaps not since they keep sending them to me.
Other apps like Kik really put a cap on it at one message per week for brands. My personal opinion is that a push notification is a much more powerful, more obtrusive tool than a news feed post. I would err on the side of caution in terms of overdoing it. There are other mediums that you can use in addition to the notifications to interact with people.
Jon: You mentioned BuzzFeed, Wall Street Journal, and our focus in Georgian is not worrying about messaging in the consumer space but more in it for businesses, there are two businesses. Talk to me a little bit more about what you see happening in this world of businesses and the challenges that they’re faced with and some examples, perhaps.
Eytan: A lot of the innovation in this space is starting in the Asian market, I would say, on apps like WeChat and LINE and migrating to North America and Europe.
It’s almost like apps like WeChat and LINE are proving grounds. You can really see Facebook Messenger and Kik very openly seeing what’s working over there and then adopting some of the more successful products to their own needs.
When you look at a messaging app like LINE in the US, you can actually flip it to Japan Mode and see what people see over there. You go from a handful of small brands to everybody. You see every major corporation has their account there. They have functionality for couponing. They’ve rolled out really interesting e‑commerce.
If you look at LINE and WeChat, it’s equivalent of having Facebook Messenger but with seamless baked into it, and Uber baked into it, and all these other things, which I think companies like Slack are starting to take a very similar approach.
What we’re really moving towards is this reinvention of the web portal on this late ’90s style, like AOL and Yahoo, where some of these messaging apps are really trying to position themselves as the portal for your mobile web experience and the place where you can plug in to all the other things you can do and have payment integration within that.
Jon: For the term app constellations, no more dozens of apps, these platforms are going to begin be a little more in control?
Eytan: That’s possible. I’ve read a lot of interesting articles about, some people hypothesized that bots within messaging apps are going to replace apps, I don’t necessarily assume that’s going to happen, but it does make sense. That’s a trend to keep an eye on, for sure.
I think we’ve been talking AI in this conference a lot, and that’s something that we think about increasingly for messaging apps. I think those two trends are going to go less in a big way and a lot of the major messaging apps are really investing in AI at this point.
I think you will have different bots that essentially are like apps. That is starting to happen, for sure.
Jon: Who ends up winning? We’ve got a lot of different companies. There are companies that are around, establishing growth, but they’re not giant yet, they’re beyond the world of just start‑ups and venture capital. Does everybody play? Who should be engaged in thinking about this in terms of how they touch their customers?
Eytan: If you’re asking me which of the chat apps is going to win.
Jon: I want to do that as well, and that’s good, but I’m actually also thinking about, do all these companies that don’t have chats, are they going to lose? There’s a little bit of both. Let’s talk about the companies and then we’ll talk about the platforms or the places they target as the delivery vehicle.
Eytan: I think a lot of companies have seen this trend coming. One of the slides that I always open with is one that shows that there are more people on messaging apps than there are on social networks.
Companies like Facebook have done an incredible job of reinventing themselves into messaging for companies, either by buying their way to that, by purchasing WhatsApp, by breaking Facebook Messenger into a standalone app, but then they’re even taking products like Instagram and making them way more messaging forward. Now, they’re really encouraging people to share photos one-to-one.
I think you’re going to see that chatification of a lot of platforms. LinkedIn has also sort of moved away from what felt like an email format, to what feels more like a chat interface. I would not be surprised if all sorts of companies start pulling in a chat layer to what they do.
Jon: I love chatification. That’s a new one for me.
Eytan: [laughs] I don’t know if I coined that. It’s possible.
Jon: It’s possible. At least for today, you get credit. Gamification was hard enough for me.
Eytan: Someone said it before me.
Jon: Since you’re on the Facebook, I was just thinking a bit about, they tried to own everything with Facebook Home way back on the Internet platform. That went nowhere. Was it just not the right time?
Eytan: Possibly. Like all of these companies, they try things and some of them stick and some of them don’t. Facebook has tried to conquer the messaging game in ways that have failed too. They rolled out an app called Slingshot, which very few people have heard of, which essentially was trying to be their version of Snapchat. It came and went without much fanfare. Overall, at this point, they’ve really positioned themselves.
Facebook, another chart that we like to show is that they have more monthly active users on their messaging app properties now than they do on Facebook, the social network. Combined, they have 1.6 billion users on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and 1.55 billion on Facebook, the social network.
Jon: What should our companies be looking to do? When they sit back and they’re meeting with their product design teams and they think about the next offer that they’re going to develop, what is it that they should be looking towards?
Eytan: You’re talking about software companies specifically?
Jon: Yeah.
Eytan: I think that brands, in general, media owners, everybody sees that messaging apps are a huge thing that came out of nowhere that they need to figure out, but there is so much to do to figure this out for both businesses, brands, and the messaging apps themselves, which in a lot of cases are a couple of guys. They’re early in the mid-20s that after a couple of years have several hundred million users and have just started to think about how to be helpful to businesses.
There is so much opportunity, in my opinion, for third-party companies to enter this space. I think for great ones to enter this space would be a tremendous benefit to the messaging apps themselves too. There are tremendous opportunities to partner with them.
Having worked with most of the messaging apps for two, three years now, most of them are very open. When they find the right collaborator, they’re very open to ideas and working together to find something that pushes things forward.
There’s also so much room for better analytics and publishing tools and cracking artificial intelligence for messaging apps from the business perspective, there is an endless list of opportunities that I think could be quite interesting, quite helpful to brands, quite lucrative if you really nail the right experience and help people scale. Because the audiences are so massive on these platforms, but they have ways to go to really be mature on the level of Facebook and Twitter I’ve read.
Some people said that they’re seven years behind. I encourage everybody to go out there and help cut that down from seven to four or three years, if you can.
Jon: The opportunities are there, they should put on the thinking caps, start planning a little bit, push the envelope, start to really think about what they could do to do something a little different, differentiate themselves.
We’d like to think that analytics and artificial intelligence with this new technology will help them push that envelope, it’s going to be quite a ride we’re taking. That’s great. Thank you so much for your time.
Eytan: Thanks for having me.
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Jon: We were also able to grab Stuart Wall. CEO of Signpost, another Georgian portfolio company to bring the perspective of a CEO on how the emergence of messaging for business might affect his company and his offering.
Welcome, Stuart.
Stuart Wall: Thanks for having me.
Jon: Why don’t you tell us about Signpost, what do you do?
Stuart: Signpost is an automated CRM for main street businesses. We help any kind of brick-and-mortar business get a better understanding of who their customers are, who their perspective customers are, and then communicate with those people through email and SMS.
Jon: Your current way of establishing all the breadth of connections you’ve got with your downstream customers?
Stuart: Yeah. We track every email, phone call, and credit card transaction between a customer, a downstream consumer, and one of our customers.
For example, if you’re a Pilates studio, you then become a client of Signpost for that Pilates studio. Signpost would track every phone call, email, and credit card transaction between the studio and one of the customers, and then we would market to those people to do things like get reviews on Yelp or re-engage your customer that hasn’t been in a while.
Jon: I think of this new emerging space of messaging for business, what do you see as next for Signpost? What’s on the back of your mind here, or the front of your mind even?
Stuart: The way I think of it is we’re really channel agnostic. We want to help the businesses communicate in the best way possible with their customers in a way that it’s going to be effective. Email and SMS are ubiquitous. It works for every business, it works for every consumer. There’s lots of interesting things happening with messaging. You’re starting to see usage levels that now start to make sense for us to really pay attention.
One benefit of messengers is the open rates of being able to send a push notification and the engagement you can drive. It’s stronger than SMS. It has less regulation than SMS, so there’s more interesting things you can do as a business. It’s a lot more engaging than email. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for us.
Jon: We heard from Eytan earlier that 78 percent of brands recognition now is coming through a digital channel. I guess, if you’ve got the data, you’ve got the demographics. If Snapchat’s the answer for pizza, Snapchat is the answer for pizza.
Stuart: Exactly. That’s a benefit of what we do, is that as any individual business, it’s hard for them to manage all of these different platforms. They may not know that Snapchat is the best thing for pizza. We have the potential of representing, theoretically, thousands of pizza shops to know what the answer is for them and then we just go through Snapchat on their behalf.
Jon: That is the value of cross platform data and cloud solution. As you think about the future of your business, is it fair to say at some point, you will be adding, perhaps, different types of campaigns, great opportunities for you to upsell to your customers in terms of how messaging is going to have a business impact to you?
Stuart: Yeah. I think about messaging on two fronts. One is, again, thinking of it as one of our clients, the Pilates studies and the downstream customers. I think initially for us, it might be an upsell where it’s an option add‑on. I think eventually, it has to become a core part of the products as you see more and more moving from SMS and email into messaging.
The other I think is interesting for us is using messaging for our customers, so in this case, the owner of the Pilates studio, even sending them notifications on what’s happening with the CRM software, any kind of results that we’ve driven through messaging.
Communicating with them from a customer service perspective if they have issues or questions through messaging, I also find very interesting, either on the sales side, upfront we’re adding people to platform or in the back end for the clients that we have.
Jon: Congratulations for being one of the newer members of the Georgian Portfolio. We’re thrilled to have you a part of the team.
Stuart: Likewise.
Jon: We look forward to work with you in the future. Thank you for your input, and have a great rest of the day.
Stuart: Great. Thanks, Jon.
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Jon: This concludes our podcast on messaging for business. We hope you agree that the implications are huge and that it’s important enough to kick off some strategic thinking on your part. As always, thanks again, for being part of our audience. This is Jon Prial for the Impact Podcast.
