Episode 18 – Building Beta Testers on Instagram, Ads for Bus Passes, Uber Updates, and Holiday AI

This week, you heard from our hosts Matt, Min, Anna, and Alli about a great variety of subjects ranging from building an audience of beta testers through Instagram to the festive responses from common AI assistants! Let us know what you thought of this week’s episode in the comments below.

Building Beta Testers on Instagram [2:30]
Ads for Bus Passes [7:25]
Uber Updates [13:20]
Holiday Artificial Intelligence [19:50]

Building Beta Testers on Instagram

Throughout the history of social media, individuals have used its power to achieve great results when it comes to building a community. Our host Min takes a look at one such example where an Instagram user was able to build a large group of beta testers without even having a product!

“In this specific case, e-mail lists were impossible and Facebook was a little too personal so they decided to contact creatives solely on Instagram and it worked out really well.” -Min
“Instagram is a powerful tool that you can use to recruit people and build a community!” -Min
“If you’re someone in skin care, health, or fitness; something people can see, Instagram is so powerful because people want to share those things.” -Matt
“Instagram has had some exponential growth in recent months and becoming a much more prominent social media platform.” -Matt

Ads for Bus Passes

With such a crowded advertising atmosphere it’s often difficult to find ways to reach your audience and be heard. Anna recently discovered one company in Germany that’s breaking through the noise by offering free bus passes to anyone that watches a series of advertisements. Our hosts share their thought on the tactic to help you decide if it really is effective.

“It’s difficult to ensure that your target audience is engaging with an ad when it’s being displayed to them.” -Anna
“If I was standing and waiting for a bus with time to kill, I would definitely do this.” -Min
“Providing free bus passes for watching advertisements is a really great example of providing an incentive to collect information and displaying ads.” -Anna

Uber Updates

In past month’s Uber has faced some scrutiny over a couple of its features, primarily its tracking. Recently, Uber has released an update that expanded on those features and more and brought itself, once again, under the public eye of scrutiny. Our host Matt takes a look and leads the group through a discussion on security, technology, and modern transportation!

“Uber will be introducing two big changes; firstly, a snapchat integration and secondly, a drive to a friend’s location feature.” -Matt
“It’s really convenient for Uber to be able to send you directly to your friend’s location.” -Anna
“As a business, you could use the new Uber update to allow customers to easily request a ride to your location directly from the app with fewer steps to the action.” -Matt
“Like we always talk about; the less clicks you make some take, the more barriers you remove from making a sale, the more likely your customer is to do it.” -Matt

Holiday AI Interactions

As the holidays start winding down it’s always fun to look at the small interactions that are placed into different platforms during the season. Our guest host, Alli, takes a look at how Google and Apple both tried to share the holiday spirit in creative ways through Google Voice and Siri.

“Apple has been having some big success with their ad featuring Santa asking Siri for directions to kids houses.” -Alli
“I really like Google voice, this is one holiday example of how they’re combining user data to user application which is really cool.” -Matt

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