News

Audio Museum of Art launches on Amazon Alexa platform

April 3, 2019 By Doug Schumacher

Excited to announce Arrovox has launched the Audio Museum of Art. This should be a fun ongoing project.

It’s a voice app that works on the Amazon Alexa platform. With plans to launch on Google Assistant soon.

So what’s an Audio Museum of Art? As I describe it, it’s a “hands-free, eyes-free museum toured with your voice.”

The idea is to explore different types of content formats, as there should be a lot of upcoming opportunities for brands on the voice web.

The museum’s first exhibit is titled “Vintage Radio Commercials”. The docent, Bot Draper. will guide you through some of the more interesting commercials from advertising’s so-called golden era.

Want to visit? Just say:

“Alexa, Open Audio Museum of Art”

The Audio Museum of Art website is: https://audiomuseumofart.org/

Launched podcast covering marketing for voice and audio products

July 1, 2018 By Doug Schumacher

This week I launched a podcast covering the voice space, which I’ve previously been covering tangentially through my short form sketch comedy podcast Homie & Lexy.

There are somewhere in the area of 60,000 (and counting) voice apps on the market. And about 500,000 podcasts. Each one of them fighting for a limited share of the public’s time and attention.

VoiceMarketing explores strategies and tactics in branding and marketing to help voice apps, podcasts and other audio experiences generate awareness, favorability and use. Each episode of VoiceMarketing addresses a voice-related topic and highlights the critical issues and challenges, accompanied by tips and suggestions.

VoiceMarketing is a production of Arrovox, and a member of the VoiceFirst.FM network of podcasts.

Where to subscribe

New podcast “Homie & Lexy” launched

March 27, 2018 By Doug Schumacher

Most anyone who’s talked to me in the past couple of years knows my interest in AI. The more I looked into AI and it’s potential impact on marketing, the more fascinated I became with the voiceweb. Accessing content currently on the web, via a voice interface.

While voice offers challenges that text and graphic information doesn’t, it’s also the most natural interface developed so far. If you’ve played around with either of the two major devices — Amazon’s Echo or Google’s Home — you’ve no doubt seen the potential. And the likely challenges.

Given how reliant these systems are on AI, how much AI stands to progress in the very near future, and how early we are in the voicebot game, I think it’s pretty clear that we’ve only scratched the surface of the voiceweb.

So for me, the personal challenge was, How to immerse myself in this new channel of established growth and greater longer-term potential?

After considering a number of content types to develop, I came to the idea of a simple, short-form comedy podcast about two voicebots.

Homie & Lexy.

As the website says:

Homie & Lexy is a podcast about two voicebots residing in the same house. When their owners step out, the voicebots discuss the perplexing human world around them.

The show integrates themes arising from the growing presence of artificial intelligence in our lives. Each episode is about 2 minutes.

Meet the stars of the show.

Homie

Lexy

The podcast’s short format is, by design, well-suited for the voiceweb, as I’m currently in development on voice apps for both Amazon and Google’s platforms. Once finished, the podcasts can be easily played on either platform. (Yes, podcasts can be played on Echo’s and Home’s currently, but having an app streamlines the process and makes it more reliable that episodes will be played upon invocation.)

The short comedy format is also a kind of return to one of my favorite advertising mediums, radio. Something I did a lot of in my early days of advertising. My radio-writing background, combined with my years of digital marketing experience and lifelong early adoption of technology, makes Homie & Lexy feel like the completion of a circle. The weekly episode process involves comedy writing, digital audio production, and then distribution and promotion.

The voices are generated using Amazon’s Polly text-to-speech technology, using Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) to push, pull and wrangle the right prosody out of the voices.

If you listen to podcasts, or if this sounds interesting, please listen and subscribe at any of the providers below. Thanks.

What Subjects engage on Facebook? Find out with Zuum’s new Subject Analysis reports

July 16, 2012 By Doug Schumacher

We just launched a couple of great new reports on Zuum. These should give unparalleled views on what subjects perform best on Facebook. Our Subject Explorer and Subject Analyzer are two reports that work together to give you the most accurate view ever of what content makes the biggest impact on Facebook.

Zuum users will find these reports on the left side navigation when they’re logged into the Zuum tool.

Subject Explorer or: What topics should I be posting about?

Subject Explorer goes well beyond just showing you which keywords drive the best engagement. It gives you multiple parameters for filtering those subjects, based on critical engagement criteria. So the subjects it presents are subjects that work the way you want them to work.

Minimum Average Engagement Rate: Slider let’s you view only words above a certain engagement level. For example, you may want to only view subjects generating 20% above the average engagement.

Minimum Number of Posts Containing the Term: A subject that works in one post is very different from one that works again and again. The more times a high engaging subject is used, the more consistently it’s performing, and the more likely it will be to drive engagement for future posts. You may want to view at least 2-3 months of data to ensure there’s a broad range of subjects to analyze.

Minimum Number of Pages the Term is Used On: Brand and product terms usually are among the most engaging terms. By selecting more than one page, you’ll quickly eliminate most terms specific to a certain page, and get a better sense of what subjects are working across the entire industry.
You can rollover any term to get a quick view of its engagement rate, posting volume, and pages used by.

Subject Analyzer or: How are the most engaging subjects being used by marketers?

A detailed breakout of how a given subject is being used across all the pages you’ve selected. When you click on any term in the Subject Explorer, you’ll go straight to this view.

Across the top is data on the posting volume, average engagement rate for posts with that term, what types of engagements is pulled, and the media type that term was used with.

Top Related Terms: Shows the most common terms used in all posts on this subject.
Posting Calendar: Which brands posted about that subject on which days.
Top Brand Post: The most engaging page post on that subject.
Top Fan Post: The most engaging fan post on that subject.
More Brand Posts: Click to view a listing of all brand posts on that subject, ranked by engagement.
More Fan Posts: Click to view a listing of all fan posts on that subject, ranked by engagement.

Launch of Zuum: Facebook Page Engagement Analysis

July 8, 2011 By Doug Schumacher

We’ve just launched our new tool for analyzing Facebook data, Zuum (ZuumSocial.com).

My biz partner, Alex Gonzalez, and I are very excited about the insights that can be gathered using Zuum. Things like what terms are most powerful for driving engagement, which days are fans most active, which media type drives the best engagement.

All things that anyone wanting to optimize their Facebook Page should find very helpful.

If you haven’t, please register for free access to our public reports. Any thoughts you have to share on the tool would be welcome.

Here’s a sample image of the media type chart, one of thirteen charts in Zuum.