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Phil Byrne 0:00

Welcome to Digital Sparks the podcast where you can improve your web marketing, enhance your online productivity, and spark your entrepreneurial spirit. All from the tips, tales and techniques. Our guests come here to share

My name is Phil Byrne, and today I’m joined by Jim Rowe, otherwise known as Jim Robots, a chatbot entrepreneur and founder of the Facebook group, Botrepreneuers. Hey Jim, welcome to the podcast.

Jim Rowe 0:36

Thanks for having me.

Phil Byrne 0:37

It’s good to have you here. Excited to talk today about a very new part of internet marketing this whole world of bots. But for those of us who don’t know who you are, and what you do, tell us all about yourself, Jim.

Jim Rowe 0:49

So my name is Jim Rowe. People often refer to me as Jim Robot now because I’ve been building bots for the last couple of years. Previous to that I’d spent eight years working in social media, and still love social media, but saw the diminishing results and chat bots seem to come along at just the right time. So I’ve been really focused on them solely focused on them for the last five, six months.

Phil Byrne 1:16

It’s interesting that you mentioned there that you used to be in social media and made this move into bots, because in many ways are quite connected, aren’t they?

Jim Rowe 1:26

They are. So most people would have engaged with a bot by one of the messaging apps. And that’s social media as we would normally call it. But there’s been a big step change over the past, say 12 months where people are spending more time in messaging apps than they are in social networking apps. So there’s a definite change. I think, calling it social media is a bit disingenuous now, and it’s more just the next iteration of the internet.

Phil Byrne 1:57

I think you’re right there, Jim, I think the internet can have gone through various stages. And I don’t know about yourself, but I sort of started out pre 2000. So in the pre Google days, we’ve almost gone through these eras. And I think you’re so right in saying we’re now in this kind of AI powered era. That’s coming into almost everything. So not just bots. But we’re using lots of AI power tools now in pay per click. And that idea of having this intelligence to help you is a is the next step in internet marketing.

Jim Rowe 2:30

Yeah, 100%. And I think a lot of people don’t see the AI element from even in little things like LinkedIn now, where it kind of if you’re chatting in the messaging app, within LinkedIn, it kind of pre guesses what you want to say back. And you can just select it down to apps popping up on your phone, when you’re in certain locations, certain places. AI is everywhere now. And it’s only going to grow over the next five to 10 years.

Phil Byrne 2:58

Totally true. And you would you say that AI is the main factor that chatbots have brought to marketing?

Jim Rowe 3:08

No, I wouldn’t actually I think AI is the next step, really. So when you talk about chatbots, you’re talking about a huge range of technologies. And chatbots is a term I’m not particularly a fan of but It’s the one that everybody understands. So what we’re talking about, the very basic end is very decision tree based conversations that are digitally driven, and then at the other extreme, you’ve got Alexa and Siri, and the more intelligent AI driven Machine Learning Technologies. Now, they will all start to merge over the next three to five years. And especially when we talk about voice, you know, it’s very limited at the moment, but I think within 10 years, it will be built into every device you buy.

Phil Byrne 3:59

Yeah, I would agree with you, Jim. And I don’t know if you saw this that fantastic new Google AI assistant online just a few weeks ago, which made a very human sounding phone call to a hairdresser for its client as such and perfectly booked in a time that suited both the salon and the guy who own the assistant overall, which again, was another indication of where things will go.

Jim Rowe 4:26

Oh, undoubtedly. And I think we can’t really even fathom where that technology is going to end up. But it’s going to be an interesting journey. That’s for sure.

Phil Byrne 4:38

So Jim, we’re talking there a bit about where things are heading tell us about the very first bot the you built.

Jim Rowe 4:45

So weirdly enough, I built my first bot in a live environment with a startup I was working with. And when we were putting the sales and marketing plan together, one of the challenges we had was fighting the Facebook algorithm which is a challenge for a lot of digital marketers. Chatbots had just arrived, I’d had a little play with some of the technologies. And we decided to kind of really give it a go. And it became the mainstay, really of our engagement with our customer base, and a way of reaching out to a new customer base. And I kind of cut my teeth on that. And I learned the hard way. And then 50 bucks on from that I’ve learned an awful lot.

Phil Byrne 5:29

I can imagine you have 50 bots. That’s a good rounding? So one thing I often think of with bots is, they’ve emerged at a time when email marketing is sort of beginning to lose some of its power. And the big reason for that is that lots of the emails we send out, get filtered. I use Gmail, for example, most of the newsletters I receive, will filter into a promotions tab, which is a way from my primary inbox. Now with a bot, because they tend to power through messaging services on Facebook, or maybe even LinkedIn, we’re more likely to see the message.

Jim Rowe 6:14

Yeah, so I was watching a webinar yesterday, and then a guy Anna from a company called Boss Squad. He said, we’re kind of neurologically programmed to join in a conversation and an email is not a conversation. So we get an email, we spend split seconds really analysing it, and then we decide very quickly, very arbitrarily, to read it or not. And that is one of the reasons that we’ve kind of moved on from email marketing, that and the fact that we don’t email our friends anymore, we message. So with messenger, for example, Facebook Messenger, you naturally want to because the conversation has been initiated, your natural response is to get involved in the conversation. And then it’s up to the bot builders to make sure that that conversation is of the right quality that you’ll want to continue the conversation. It’s no different than learning new skills in the email marketing world, people are having to learn additional skills in the world of conversational commerce.

Phil Byrne 7:20

And that word you’ve mentioned there, the conversation is very much the the art of bot marketing that you pointed out there. So tell us a bit about how you’ve developed learned from and changed your process. Through those 50 Plus bots, what have you learned about bot conversation?

Jim Rowe 7:40

Interestingly, the first thing I learned is that no bots survives first contact with customers. You can think it through as much as you like, but it’s not until it’s actually in front of customers that it starts to fail. But you learn very quickly how to tweak them and understand your customer base more. One of the first things that Bot builders do and I did the same is try to replicate the information that’s already held on a website. We know that people predominantly don’t read much on a website. We’re visual creatures, we like to watch video, and we like to look at diagrams. But when it comes to reading, especially on a small screen of a phone, we kind of move on really, really quickly. So what I learned is, rather than just replicating the information on the website is you’ve got to present it in a more conversational way. And I had this conversation with a client This morning we’re doing some work with I said to him, imagine that you’re not putting web together for a webpage. You’re putting text together for a script. If you’re a playwright and you’re writing a script, it’s more copywriter script based, I would say

Phil Byrne 8:52

interesting stuff. So have you found you’ve developed your own copywriting skills? Or have you ended up working with creative copywriters to help you with that.

Jim Rowe 9:05

So I would say in these first 50 or so bots, it’s all been down to me. And I’ve had to analyses the customers tone, voice, and sentiment and kind of try and get their voice to come through in the conversation. And I’ve worked with some really strong characters that’s made it really easy. I am looking at some projects over the next two to three months with some bigger entities and that’s going to be a little bit more difficult. So that’s either going to be using their own copywriters or looking at bringing a copywriter on board to assist on those project.

Phil Byrne 9:38

Sure. That makes sense. So Jim, have you found that all the things you’ve learned from conversation marketing bot has changed in any way you relate and converse with people in real life? Let’s say you’re at a networking event. Do you do that differently now? Or is it separate completely?

Jim Rowe 9:57

Yeah. There’s something am constantly analyzing, Conversation. I find myself listening to people talk a lot more. Especially if I think they’re the kind of business that would need a bot. So listen to their business leaders talk, how they hold a conversation, that passion, it’s really tricky to drive passion through a chatbot. And the ways we’ve done that in the past is to introduce video and audio. Because there’s no one more passionate about business than the owner. And to do that in text is really, really difficult.

Phil Byrne 10:33

Sure, isn’t it? I can imagine. So what tips would you give to a company listening to your speaking now and thinking, you know what, I’m going to give this bot marketing a try? How would you suggest they begin?

Jim Rowe 10:46

So there aren’t any good books? Yeah, I’ve spoken to quite a few people that are out there now. And actually writing books. So they said, it’s a burgeoning market. The groups are amazing, though, there’s a lot of really good Facebook groups, many of which were, I kind of learned the initial skills, many of them based around the different thought building platforms. So you do have to search around a bit and find the good ones. There’s a lot of people pitching for work in the groups, and you’ve got to kind of wade through that and find the really good contacts that people will reach out that will help you. And that’s also one of the reasons that we started the Boterpreneurs Facebook group, so that we could have a place where Bot builders could come together and work without it being platform specific.

Phil Byrne 11:40

Which many groups are, aren’t they? That’s what I’ve noticed with the ones that have appeared on Facebook and Jim, I will have to go and check out your group. And but lots of them tend to be Facebook but marketing focused.

Jim Rowe 11:52

Yes, they are and what we’re trying to do with Botrepreneurs is make it so its voice AI machine learning conversational commerce, but it’s not platform specific. So somebody can come in and say they’re building bots for slack or Skype, or messenger or kick, or web based, whatever format and we’ve got the actual but, many of the bot platform people are in there as well. So yes, they’ll try and pitch their product. But we tried to make it kind of agnostic. And it’s a way of bringing people together. And already we’re seeing groups of people kind of forming. So there’s a big Dutch contingent, for instance, you wouldn’t believe how into bot building the Dutch are, obviously a big American contingent. The UK ones pretty small, actually. But it’s growing. And then there’s lots of on the outside. So India, Latvia, Estonia, French. So we’ve got a really good group coming together, really interested people

Phil Byrne 12:56

And are all those different communities writing in their own languages.

Jim Rowe 13:02

Yes, many of them are. For a lot of them English does seem to be the preferred and I have come across more and more bots that are bilingual or trilingual. So very early on in the bot process, it will ask you a question, or some of the web based ones know which country you’re coming from. It’ll automatically be in the language that you like. I saw one recently by a company called Curio Bot. And that was really, really beautiful.

Phil Byrne 13:30

Great stuff. So Curio Bot, another one to check out there. Jim, we’ve spoken about being multi-platform there. But I wondered if you or what you discovered, with all the recent changes from Facebook, how’s that affected all the bots that you have running on that platform?

Jim Rowe 13:47

I’d be honest, that there’s very little effect. Yeah, we had the shutdown, where they closed down all the apps, so we couldn’t really do any development for about a month. So we couldn’t launch any new bots. Personally, for me, that came at a good time, because I had some decent work on, I was taking some of my customer bots to the next level. So actually, I wasn’t that badly affected. But I know there were some people that it hit really, really hard. And to be honest, anything that makes the platform more trustworthy. And more robust is great for as Bot builders

Phil Byrne 14:25

Totally agree. Absolutely right. And so really, you found that once that initial shutdown of the apps was over, it was kind of businesses normal.

Jim Rowe 14:34

Yep, straight in there. It was a little bit sluggish at the beginning I think, because everybody was trying to get back on to bot building. And it was it was struggling under the pressure, but things have really settled down now. Facebook their focus was on protecting their brand as you would imagine. But now their focused back on, really developing Messenger as a product and I I think people are vastly under estimating Facebook’s messenger offering and what’s coming, you can sell now within a bot, you can do location based services within the bots. I think we’re at the very early stage with Facebook Messenger bots, very much like when the iPhone launch and there was only I think it was about 1000 apps available. And they’re all rubbish. And we’re kind of at the same stage with our bots at the moment. They’re quite, you know, 99% of them are a bit of technical fun, but they’re not that great. But we’re seeing some really special development going on and Facebook are wholeheartedly trying to support the developers in making it happen.

Phil Byrne 15:40

Absolutely right. And I can echo what you just said there on the paid side to about six months ago, we suddenly had the possibility of putting ads into Facebook Messenger. And when they are carefully targeted, they’re incredibly powerful. It’s certainly not somewhere that you’d want to show an ad to someone who’s brand new to a brand. But once someone is quite connected, perhaps after they’ve engaged with a bot, it can be a really good place to focus your remarketing.

Jim Rowe 16:08

Yeah, and a lot of people you know, a totally unaware of the power of the Facebook advertising where you can then advertise to people that have messaged you or you’ve messaged. Absolutely. There is a list. And is it so powerful?

Phil Byrne 16:23

Absolutely right Jim. So we spoke earlier on about where chatbot marketing and AI in general was going to go. So what are you going to learn next Jim, you’ve been through many ages of the internet now. So what would you want to learn in chatbot development, and then outside of it.

Jim Rowe 16:44

So my pre-history was around technology and project management, I’m a prints to project manager. And I think those skills and a really good technical understanding of the current technology kind of leads me to want to explore more enterprise type of chatbot work. NLP driven, so natural language processing driven chatbots. So it’s getting more involved in that technology about really making chatbots that are intelligent, rather than these dumb decision tree based ones that most of us are using now. So for me personally, that’s the way I want to go. I’m trying to raise my profile within the chapel world. For instance, I’m up in London three times in October, speaking to various groups, about chatbot technology. So it’s a buzzing market to be in, but nobody can really predict what’s going to happen.

Phil Byrne 17:45

Sure. Exciting, because of that, I guess. Do you think we’ll get to a point where chatbots have flooded the market and their potential and power begins to drop?

Jim Rowe 18:02

Yeah, undoubtedly. If I was to make a really cheap prediction, I would say the bot era is going to last three to five years. And they will get more and more fully featured a bit like apps did. But what we’ve got coming up very quickly behind chatbots is voice. And I think that it’s got a limited time, it’s like anything, there’ll become really powerful chatbots. And I think there’ll be very good at one thing, I have this prediction already that you’ll have a hotel concierge chatbot there’s really good at his job. And then if somebody wants to, for instance, find somewhere close to the hotel to go and eat, it will pass over to another chatbot who’s really good at that bit. And then when you finished your meal and you want to taxi back to the hotel, it’ll hand over to a bot that’s really good at the taxi bit. So my gut feelings they’ll work in silos and the amount of money that’s been pumped into boys tech at the moment is just mind blowing. So I can see that coming up behind very quickly. But there’s always a time when you don’t want to use voice when you’re normally out in public always feels a bit weird speaking to Siri and I don’t think we’re going to get over that anytime soon. So chatbots will hang on I think for a while but voice will then really come into it so

Phil Byrne 19:28

Interesting stuff. So for all of us now who are focused on chatbots Have you got any great examples? You suggest we go on try?

Jim Rowe 19:38

Yeah, I recently reviewed booking.com Chatbot. Now that is a great example of what I call kind of a level two level three chatbot so it has got some decision tree elements to it as in you know pick from this list, but it’s also got some quite nice NLP driven context in there. So booking.com, straight through their Facebook page, send message and trigger and it’s just beautifully designed. It feels quick. It feels natural. There’s enough. When you’re booking a hotel, you don’t want all their personality and all the small talk, you just want to get the job done. And it just does that beautifully, allows you to filter the results. Yeah, I think they’ve done wonders with it. I’ve been trying to find out who was involved in the build. Apart from that, the form I’ve been using for the last two weeks is called The Score, which is giving me all my World Cup results. And, again, that’s a level one bar, but really, really useful. Whoever’s build that has done a fab job of pulling together. And I just find that I don’t go looking for the answers about the World Cup and the articles, they all come to my Chatbot. So two very different chat bots, both on Facebook, but both work beautifully

Phil Byrne 21:07

Great stuff, so two there to try out, am certainly going to give the booking.com chat bot a go that sounds really intriguing. And as for the World Cup, all about Saturday now isn’t it Jim. That’s where everyone focus is I guess

Jim Rowe 21:20

It is. Yeah, I’m not doing any work that day am going to focus on that. But yeah, I think if you tried to score, it’s just a really cleverly put together but interestingly, there was a company down in Bournemouth, who were building chat bots in Facebook Messenger for football clubs. And they done one for I think it was Bournemouth FC. And I felt that was a brilliantly done and brilliantly delivered. But I’ve not seen any other football clubs really take it on, Manchester City have got one but it’s a bit basic.

Phil Byrne 21:57

Two more to try there, I’m sure over the next year or two we’ll see them increase, especially for something like a football club with such a massive community. That it seems like an obvious tool for them to employ.

Jim Rowe 22:10

Yeah, it’s madness that more are really jumping on it, I think any kind of sports, any kind of venue. Somewhere like the O2 or any kind of the NEC in London, these type of places need to be on chatbots. I think any business that works in tourism, I think tourism is fantastic. I turn up to York, I just want to go into the Chatbot and ask it, where can I go and get fish and chips? That’s going to take me less than 15 minutes to get to. Yeah, I just want it to be simple and easy. One of the things that frustrates me whenever I stay in a hotel in a city, is I don’t like eating in the hotel, but also don’t like walking around aimlessly trying to find somewhere. I just want something to help me find somewhere that I would like.

Phil Byrne 22:56

Yeah, I think that’s a great point, Jim and cities like York, which are such a tourist kind of magnets. It makes total sense for them to give everyone a better experience of being there, doesn’t it?

Jim Rowe 23:08

Yeah, And the other thing that people forget is once you’re in the bot, then they can send you offers and opportunity to tell you about more events invite you back. And I think marketers are just starting to wake up to the opportunities. And in October I will be talking to the AI and PR Working Group in London and one of the things that they’re looking at is where the opportunities are for PR companies

Phil Byrne 23:33

It is definitely a great connection there isn’t there. PR and bots together. Phenomenal. So Jim, I’m sure lots of people listening now and quite excited about giving their own bot a go. What tools can you recommend to help us?

Jim Rowe 23:48

I think without a doubt the two most basic tools out there also very graphical driven, so you don’t need to know how to code are many chat, which a lot of people start with and chat. You’re both equally good, they’ve got supporters on each side. And it’s a bit like the Volkswagen, BMW arguments. But they are the same of the same but they’re a great place to start. There’s really great active communities who will help each other out. And they’re ideal for getting people up and running really, really quickly. But actually, they are two great products to start with. But really, as I said in the beginning of the podcast, it’s really the focus should be on the conversation. How you start effectively how you hold the conversation for the right length of time, so that you get enough information as the bot builder but also the customer gets enough information to make a decision and how you drive the conversation to the end point, to the action you want the customer to complete that is far more important than the technology,

Phil Byrne 25:02

Which is probably the case with every forward digital marketing, wouldn’t you say?

Jim Rowe 25:07

Undoubtedly, what I see is everybody’s focused on the tech. And it’s wonderful and it’s shiny, and it’s new, but actually the focus should be on what you can drive the customer to do and how you can add extra value. So for instance, I’ve just spent the last week building our chatbot, for onboarding customers, and the whole plan of it is to wow them, is to welcome them to the team in a nice way, with our culture and our tone and our voice. And then to really show them what is possible through their bot. And I’ll be honest with you, it’s an upsell. It’s obviously selling more features more advantages for them as a business owner.

Phil Byrne 25:55

Absolutely right. And you’ve mentioned a couple of tools there Jim, and you’ve also mentioned your own Chatbot. I’m sure people also want to come and check you out. So tell us where we can find you online.

Jim Rowe 26:05

So if you want to talk to me, the easiest way is through LinkedIn and just search for Jim Rowe, or Jim Robot, or just search for chatbots. I normally come up really high in that, because I’m so active. You can search me on Twitter at Jim Robot. I’m not a massive Twitter fan anymore. Although that’s where I used to hang out all my time on social media. I just think it’s become a bit noisy. And you can look for the blooming social media Facebook page.

Phil Byrne 26:31

Great stuff. Jim has been so much fun having you here today. I’ve written down a few things myself. So I’ve learned some things from you. Any final message you’d like to give everybody?

Jim Rowe 26:41

Yes, take this seriously. There’s a lot of people in businesses who are blindly pumping money and time into traditional social media marketing. That’d be Twitter ads, LinkedIn ads, Facebook ads, content marketing on those platforms, when actually there is some huge opportunities with chatbots. And they need to be looking at these now.

Phil Byrne 27:05

Right. So thank you so much for your time today, Jim. Am sure, everybody’s now thinking of all the different robots that can build. I wish you a great rest of the day.

Jim Rowe 27:14

Thanks, Phil. Appreciate that and take care.

Phil Byrne 27:21

My name is Phil Byrne. Thank you for listening. I hope you got something good to take away from our great guest today. This podcast is brought to you by Positive Sparks a multi-channel pay per click and web analytics agency. If you would like some more free help in promoting what you do, head on over and test our skills and your business https://positivesparks.com

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