This is a user generated content for MyStory, a YourStory initiative to enable its community to contribute and have their voices heard. The views and writings here reflect that of the author and not of YourStory.
Emoticons speak louder than words
This is a user generated content for MyStory, a YourStory initiative to enable its community to contribute and have their voices heard. The views and writings here reflect that of the author and not of YourStory.
Why do emoticons speak louder than words?
The idea of communication, on digital platforms to be specific, is to be able to imitate reality as closely as possible and bring it at par with real time conversation. Contrariwise, we haven’t even reached the holograms we see in movies - a small device projecting you in 3D colorful holographic - and that is sad. While waiting for technology to catch up, we have always expressed our emotions making the best use of whatever we had in hand. When platforms got more creative - interactions became more colorful and engaging. A smile can communicate a multitude of emotions depending on the context. At Bobble, we aim to bring the comfort of context and personal touch to your digital interactions.
Emoticons help in solving user engagement irrespective of platform!
If we delve deeper into growth stories; successful ones and more importantly the unsuccessful ones, a clear logical insight is testing and perfecting your own user engagement model, increasing engagement levels in the platform. Personalizing emoticons bring an authentic signature and more importantly your essence, to the conversation. Integrating these emotions into any and all communication will be the cornerstone of engagement, using tools to aid true expression, which are frictionless and seamless. With artificial narrow intelligence accelerating and doing wonders in the age of “bigdata”, speech & facial recognition and vision technologies, the possibilities leading to an almost you, talking out of the other person's phone are endless and imminent.
Emoticons are no longer restricted to smileys and the standard set. We use all kinds of colourful language and hand movements and neck/head/hair flicks. To be able to bring this panache into your digital conversations along with picking your own setting, expression, language to evoke a special memory or an inside joke is a compelling proposition, especially for the younger generation. Bobble keyboard allows you use a selfie to create your “head” and then get creative with expressions, settings, GIFs and go berserk! 91% of our users are less than 29 years of age and spend an average of 2 - 5 Hours per Week on the app, interacting with the tool. These engagement statistics are among the highest in the industry, and with more data and better technology, this will only get better.
With giants like Pepsi and Starbucks engaging people with Pepsi cans/bottles and coffee emojis, brands are already paying attention to the nuances of engagement. Why will I send a generic image of a white coffee cup when I can send an image of me smiling in a ridiculously goofy way, holding a starbucks spiced pumpkin latte (because that’s what I drink at this time of the year and my friends know it, with snowflakes in the background to communicate the mood? If the process of doing this is made simple and frictionless, like a click or two away, the netizens of today will definitely use it.
Brands have just started using this tool - to make their product/service a part of the expression of their customers. The idea is to have their users be word of mouth ambassadors, who would use the icon to proclaim loyalty and delight. Additionally, this is not the end of all the good things for companies - the insights from data, endless testing possibilities for new product/service releases, metrics that will reflect moods and trends related to public sentiment etc. are only the “low hanging fruit” as far as the possibilities are concerned. Data of this quality - marrying the mood of your users into their engagement metrics, will help smart decision making to evolve, not just with the needs but also the evolving moods of their users. To predict potential home runs - and hit them.
Brands have started witnessing amazing organic growth trajectory in this direction; they are learning and growing by synthesizing feedback that they gather from their offering- which speaks volumes of the criticality of understanding the mood of the users. Patterns from collective user sentiment are powerful and dynamic - depending on many extraneous variables. Insights from collective expression, across platforms and experiences, will play a huge role for brands to be on the right path in collecting more data and understand finer nuances of digital conversations and expressions. In a generation when data is gold and everyone is gathering it, those who gather heaps of quality data, with rich insights about human interaction and offer quality facilitation of all forms of creative self-expression, will be best placed to cull out the sharpest insights. They will have better insights on branding, user preferences throughout the engagement journey, user mindset and emotional state, impact of external triggers like time and place, almost anything! The idea is to connect with your user by giving them a tool so that they can bring their offline personalities online - in all their charisma and flare.
