How a chatbot helps the People’s Choice Awards

People’s Choice Awards is a televised show that allows the public to vote for their favorite celebrities in movies, TV shows, music, and digital. The event is watched by over 10 million viewers and receives over 200 million votes from fans each year. In previous years, all votes were cast through mobiles apps and a responsive website, but for the 2017 show, People’s Choice Awards decided to extend its digital presence by utilizing a bot on the Facebook Messenger platform — with its 1 billion users — as an additional channel for voting.

The Facebook page for People’s Choice Awards has over 1.7 million likes and a built-in audience that can immediately start voting from a single notification.

Here’s a demo of the bot in action.

1. Vote where you are already spending your time

Users are spending 50 minutes a day, on average, on Facebook properties and can instantly start voting as soon as they open the bot from an ad, a friend’s post, or by searching for the bot in Messenger. They’re greeted and instructed how to get started within seconds. There is nothing new for the user to learn, and they are guided through the entire process in a conversation with the bot.

2. Conversational search

A search function was added to help users quickly vote for a celebrity in TV shows, movies, music, or digital in just one tap. It’s as simple as telling the bot “vote for Deadpool” to bring up all the categories the film is nominated and then voting for it in all categories, or just one. Adding this to the web experience would have required UI redesign and iterations, significant front end coding, QA, and a more rigorous approval.

3. Analytics

Unlike web voting, where there is no guarantee that using a tracking cookie will identify a voter or even that a user will vote from the same browsers or device, the bot will utilize the unique user ID from the Messenger platform. Using this ID — which is the same in all browsers and devices — as the key for all analytics data gives People’s Choice Awards an exact count of active users and their engagement metrics. The other advantage is that, as of November 14th, Facebook provides anonymized demographic breakdowns, including age, gender, and country. Facebook also provides another key metric: the number of posts that were shared from the bot. Gathering these metrics is much more challenging on the web or in an app.

4. Follow-up

The bot will send a notification to let fans know the results of their voting and to re-engage them after the televised event, extending the People’s Choice Awards experience beyond voting and the awards show. This follow-up would be impossible if fans voted on the web without an account.

5. Just for fun

The bot also has a fun add-on experience, a trivia game to test the user’s knowledge of popular culture. In addition to being a fun break from voting, it will be available all year long and continue engagement beyond the awards show. Trivia can be continually updated to keep users coming back.

The People’s Choice Awards voting bot is one more example of how bots can be utilized to deliver meaningful brand interactions to consumers on their terms and in their preferred channel. The bot can deliver a completely new experience and re-engage with the existing 1.7 million fans of The People’s Choice Awards. In addition, the demographic data and sharing metrics generated by Facebook provide insights that were never possible from the voting website.