Inventing Social Media Payments & Commerce
Building Bots in 2011
Consumers hate being interrupted, especially with marketing they didn’t ask for. I knew technology would eventually enable consumers to avoid that. I knew in the future brands would be judged by how much utility they provide.
So, I decided to build something that would attempt to make marketing more of a utility. A way for consumers to engage with brands on their own terms. The idea was that consumers could message brands to get something they wanted. Brands would simply tell consumers “We’re here. When you want something just tell us!”.
In 2011 the predecessor to Chirpify was born.
In-stream payments
It started as a way for people to sell goods and send money to each other, simply by tweeting at them.
Our bot would pick up commands like “buy”, “donate”, and “pay”, and respond back based on different criteria: Didn’t have an account? The bot would let you know where to sign up. Had no money in your account? The bot told you to add funds. Didn’t have shipping stored? The bot asked for your address. Everything check out? The bot sent money from one bank account to another.
Thousands of people were tweeting money to each other, and were happily interacting daily with our bot. The bot didn’t have a shakespearean vocabulary, but it accomplished some complex tasks.
Suddenly, famous people starting using the bot and we got written up all over the place.
And then brands joined the bot party (ain’t no party like a bot party, cuz a bot party has no people and the dialogue is syntactically sparse). We started enabling marketing conversion, not just commerce. And we expanded the bot’s presence to Instagram and Facebook.
Today enterprise brands are using Chirpify bots to enable more intricate conversational conversions, such as engaging and earning in loyalty programs, checking balances, downloading content, and registering for events.
These bots have more complex rules based logic, such as geo-fencing participation to the city, event, or store level. Frequency rules governing how often consumers can engage. Moderation and blacklisting to prevent bad human actors. They respond in a user’s native language. And more and more these bots are operating inside DM’s and private messages.
It’s still very early days for bots, but despite the recent hyperbole, they’re not new. We’ve been teaching our bots for years now, and they’re just starting to grow up. The future for us is enabling even more utility.
If you’d like a utility bot of your own let us know.
