What is a Flash Briefing?
An Alexa Flash Briefing is short audio content that can be listened to via your Smart Speaker*. Think of it as a micro-podcast, with content made up of news, informational content, reviews or joke/quote of the day. Flash briefings can be published daily or weekly, with a maximum length of ten minutes.
Smart Speakers and Voice Assistants
Smart Speakers are small devices that operate via voice recognition technology, activated by simple voice commands that the user speaks. They are found in homes and cars.
Smart Speakers enable us to:
- Control household settings such as lights and wireless-enabled appliances
- Search for information or products online
- Purchase products
- Provide information such as weather forecasts, time and date
- Stream music, audiobooks, and audio content
- Use custom Apps [called Skills on Amazon]
They are often termed virtual assistants and voice assistants. Alexa is the name of the voice for Amazon, an interactive Artificial Intelligence [AI] bot that lets people speak with their Amazon Echo, Echo Dot and other Amazon smart home devices. Other brands of smart speakers are the Sonos, the Apple HomePod and Google Home, and they each have their own voice assistant.
A voice command for an Amazon device would be: “Alexa, what is today’s weather forecast?”
The Flash Briefing
These smart speakers allow anyone to publish short audio content on them. While there is a ten-minute limit, the sweet spot for flash briefings is one to two minutes. This is great news as they are quick to create and easy to consume. Every entrepreneur, business owner, author, coach, consultant I have met is comfortable and capable of speaking about their business, products, and services for one to two minutes.
Also called Alexa Flash Briefings and Alexa Skills Briefings, they can be found on Amazon under Alexa Skills, which is the name given to all custom apps or voice content published on their platform for smart speakers.
This means you can publish a micro podcast instantly, to a potential audience of 40 million homes, with usage expected to continue to grow exponentially over the next few years.
For those who start their micro podcast now, the competition is very minimal. To give you a perspective on the market, there are 550,000 podcasts and approximately 8,000 flash briefings. It is currently easy to dominate your category on Amazon under Alexa Skills.
While other smart speakers have the ability to post audio content on them, I am focusing on Amazon as they have the most developed platform and benefits.
A flash briefing listed on Amazon will put you in front of their millions of customers and has the potential to send you free traffic. Your listeners will naturally check out your website and look for you on social media if they like your content. You can direct that traffic by including a call to action at the end of your flash briefing, such as “for more great tips, tools, and resources like this, visit my website at SimplyGoodPress.com”
Here is a snapshot of my website traffic since starting my flash briefing. I have done no other additional marketing, so the increase in traffic is largely due to the flash briefing.
*Other Places you can listen to a flash briefing – On your smartphone via an app. If the flash briefing host has set these up, you can listen in on social media, on their website and via podcast platforms.
I’d love your feedback on my flash briefing – The PR AUTHORity Minute here
Amazon Editor’s picks – Top flash briefings https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dalexa-skills&field-keywords
Ready to get started with your own Flash Briefing?