Sports Card Strategy Show

If you're a small business owner, entrepreneur or mid-level company marketer, it's obviously important how you spend your time. And if you're spending your time on a Twitter strategy, you need to know how well it's working for you. Not in terms of justifying it, but rather to see which content is working better than other kinds. Also, we had a question from a client recently about how to download Twitter Analytics into a spreadsheet to use it / pull it into other dashboards / reports. This Data Driven Daily Tip Covers Both.

Attention Small Business Owners and Mid-Level Company Marketers, Facebook Changed the way you can access your audience data and page insights. You now have to access it via Facebook Business Manager / Facebook Ads Manager. And much like Google Analytics Demographics and Interest Reports, you have to go manually turn on the tracking of this data, and you can't retroactively get data, meaning - the sooner you take action by following the steps in this video and turn it on, the sooner you can get your data. Thanks so much to YouTube Subscriber Andres Granados for asking a question in a comment on this old video. As you can see once you set up your Facebook Analytics though, not all of the same information is there yet, such as "when are your fans online."

I've built several Google Actions and Alexa Skills recently, and while Alexa seems to be pretty straightforward in terms of finding and adding Skills to your devices via the Alexa app / Skill store, the Google Home situation with Google Assistant isn't as straightforward. To be honest, there still appears to be some "friction" in this experience that is eventually supposed to be "frictionless." I will tell you, like most Google "situations," the answer is actually pretty simple, it's just not easy to find it. So nevertheless, once you know which app to use to add your Action via, there will be no problems. That's just it my friends, don't look in the Google Home app to find your actions, look in the Google Assistant app! It's that easy. This audio explains what I mean.

Alexa Skills and Google Actions are voice applications built on top of Alexa and Google Home / Google Assistant.  The next generation will expect businesses to have Alexa Skills. Watch this video or keep reading to find out why.  You can build these apps for just about anything. For example, in this video, I demo what would happen if I forgot my entire Nashville Voice Conference introduction, but I built a voice app to help me.  I'm really excited because we are at the very beginning of something that is going to shake the way businesses are run.  If you remember, back inn 1999, not that many businesses had websites. Well, by 2003, it was pretty much unheard of for businesses NOT to have websites.  That is what we are going through now in 2019 with Alexa Skills and Google Actions related to businesses.  Whatever our role or responsibility, whether a Small Business Owner, Entrepreneur, Marketer, Product Owner, Developer or Operations person, we can all benefit from voice tech.  While voice tech is still early and new, the data shows it is actually going to be expected that businesses have Alexa Skills in the next 12-36 months.  A perfect example is Dan Winterberg, a 10 year old from Georgia who attended the Nashville Voice Conference with his father Bill, because Dan builds Alexa Skills for his class projects in elementary school.  So when Dan enters the workforce in 10 years or so, you can bet he'll EXPECT that the company he works for will have 10-15 Alexa Skills, including at least one that allows him to access the voice-based version of the company intranet.  This is happening now, and if you want information on building these kinds of voice-based apps for your business, please email me at paul@datadriven.design.  I've worked with a ton of small businesses, a ton of small business owners and marketers, and I've experienced the behavior that comes from being overwhelmed with trying to keep up with the ever-changing aspects of digital marketing, design, branding, websites and digital strategy.  I know this seems like "just one more thing we all have to do," and I'm very empathetic to that.  But I really want everyone to think this is the beginning of using voice apps to make your lives easier.  Don't just think of it as one more thing you have to do. Let's work together to integrate it into what you're already doing to make your work life more efficient and effective.

Seems like a weird concept, right? But honestly, the data says that we’re only about 1-2 years away from people expecting to be able to listen to content from websites on Alexa while driving. This means, Alexa Skills Are The New Websites. Today, Data Driven Design is building Voice Based versions of content on websites, using Voice User Interface Design to create an engaging conversation with the audience. Your business needs to think about doing this. The way people do business has changed. When I presented this session at Nashville Voice Conference, there was literally the mother of a newborn baby in the session as an attendee, and the baby was with her, folks! This is the perfect example of the fact that the way people will need to consume information will continue to change rapidly. The days of getting a screen out and scrolling will be annoying compared to simply being able to say “Alexa, open XYZ Website,” or “Hey Google, Tell me about XYZ website.”

The title slide is wrong on this video folks, it is Data Driven Daily Tip #324, and we're talking Facebook Offline Events with Casey Carroll of Action Ad Agency. In addition to the alliteration in our company name, Casey and I have a lot in common. As you can see from the Steve Largent jersey hanging in the background, he is also an NFL fan (Seattle Seahawks to be exact), and he knows Facebook Ads like no other. In fact, he specializes only in Facebook Ads. In this podcast, we talk about Facebook Offline Events, the Facebook Attribution Tool, what the minimum monthly budget should be for any business looking to run Facebook Ads, and much, much more. Thanks to Casey for being a part of the Data Driven Daily Tip Show. So let's get right into it... What Exactly Are Facebook Offline Events? Let's say you have a physical location where you do business. Like a retail store, convenience store, coffee/drink franchise, or car dealership, for example, and you may or may not have a way of collecting customer information, like a loyalty program, or a point of sale system (all businesses have this by the way). Facebook Offline Events actually allow you to retroactively upload lists of customers that have purchased from you, and get real data around which Facebook Ads you've run that they have seen. Let me explain this again. You can run Facebook Ads, and then track exactly which creative, imagery, headlines, body copy, calls to action, etc. drove the most actual sales at your offline store. You do this by having us or your digital agency, set up Facebook Offline Events. Or, you can do it yourself with a little help from this article. In this podcast, Casey and I also talk about the Facebook Attribution Tool. What Is The Facebook Attribution Tool? Attribution is something I've written quite a lot about related to Google Adwords, but now Facebook has made their Attribution Tool available to marketers.  Essentially the Facebook Attribution Tool is a way of understanding which of your ads are driving action, but it allows you to assign conversion credit to marketing touchpoints along the consumer journey, on and off Facebook, to understand what's really driving your business outcomes. It also allows you to track conversion paths that happen across multiple devices and easily view performance by channel – paid or organic – and publisher to see what's driving your conversions.

What is a Google Action? A Google Action is a way to make Google Assistant smarter. It's something you can search and add to your Google Assistant App, Google Home, Google Home Mini, Google Hub and more. As a user, you can just ask Google for information, similar to the way you can ask Amazon's Alexa via Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Show and any other Alexa Enabled Devices. A Google Action is a voice-based application, just like an Alexa Skill. As a developer / digital agency, we can create these voice based apps to help businesses build a presence on Alexa and "dominate" search on Google Home. The data is showing that more and more users are getting their information from voice assistants and smart speakers, meaning we're leading the charge and getting businesses there. In this Data Driven Daily Tip, I demonstrate how to take a voice-based app that has already been published as an Alexa Skill, and submit / publish it to the Google Actions Console using Voiceflow, so it can be added on Google Assistant, Google Home and Google Hub users.

What is Alexa For Business? It's not a phrase I'm using to try to encourage businesses to use Alexa, it's an actual service offering from Amazon. Similarly to the way that IT departments have managed company-issued computers and mobile devices, organizations can now distribute and manage company-issued Alexa-enabled devices as well as create Private Alexa Skills. This episode walks you through how to set up Alexa For Business for your organization.  Things you need: 1. An AWS (Amazon Web Services) account 2. That's it. 3. If you want to deploy, manage Private Alexa Skills, you'll also need an Alexa Developer Account. Things you can do with Alexa For Business include: 1. Manage Meeting Rooms 2. Have Alexa enabled devices on your desk 3. Ask private skills to read you information from the company intranet, conduct voice-enabled new employee trainings or sales trainings, or even just ask when a meeting room is available or "what building does Sally work in?" Alexa for Business is all about making your organization more efficient and effective. For more on voice-enabling applications and creating more productive employees, click here. For more on using Alexa in meeting rooms, click here. For more on Alexa for Business Blueprints, click here. For more on Creating and Publishing Private Skills, click here. And please know that Data Driven Design certainly provides all of these services for our clients. For a free consultation, click here.

I decided to run Google Adsense ads on Data Driven Design. First of all because we're publishing so much content on our site (1-2 new pieces per day), so technically we're a publisher in addition to being a digital agency. Secondly, because as a leading web design and development company, we need to stay up to date with all of the new changes to Google Adsense so that we can implement it properly for our clients. Recently, while logging into my Adsense account, I realized that there was a critical message at the top. It read - Earnings at risk - One or more of your sites does not have an ads.txt file. Fix this now to avoid severe impact to your revenue. What? No email warning, and my "revenue" might be impacted, that's not good! This video walks you through what steps I decided to take to attempt to resolve this matter. All publishers should listed and read this documentation... Declare authorized sellers with ads.txt  Ensure your ads.txt files can be crawled

Voice User Interface Design is so new. It's so hard to think through every scenario of what a user might want to say to Alexa or Google Home, which is why this particular use case I think is a good one to share with you all. I recently built an Alexa Skill using Voiceflow, which allows you to map out your entire conversation with Alexa. So for example, my Alexa Skill is to let attendees of the Nashville Voice Conference know about their roles and responsibilities at the conference. At one point, after you identify who you are, if you're a featured facilitator, it asks you about if you'd like to know about Parking, Timing or your specific event preparation. One of the featured facilitators used the Skill and told me it didn't work, because he had tried all variations he could think of using "my specific event preparation".... Turns out, I hadn't accounted for the word "specific" in my synonyms in Voiceflow. So, it was an easy fix. I anticipate much of Voice User Interface Design (VUI) being like this.