Last fall, Pico.buzz, a tech company from Haifa, Israel, was featured in the SportTechie Startup Profile Series. Since then, Pico.buzz has graduated from both St. Louis’ Capital Innovators accelerator program and the Stadia Ventures sports business accelerator program while experiencing significant growth and completing successful pilots. This article is a follow-up to its Startup Series profile, written by G. Byron Abrigg, Program Coordinator at Stadia Ventures, about Pico.buzz’s recent pilot program with the St. Louis Blues.
Pico.buzz is a fan communication platform that aims to help sports teams and companies drive fan engagement. It has created a platform of tools that allows teams to perform tasks such as geolocate social content posted at a physical location during a game, building one-on-one relationships with fans through personalized communications and providing new sponsorship activation and revenue generating opportunities.
One of its most intriguing features is an AI-powered Facebook Messenger bot tool. This was developed as a result of the difficulties that sports teams experience with modern fan communication. No longer is the preferred communication channel a website or emails; fans now want to be engaged through social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Unfortunately, teams do not have the tools or manpower to effectively handle this fan engagement before, during and after games.
That is why when Matt Gardner, Senior Director of Promotions & Digital Strategy at the St. Louis Blues, was introduced to Pico.buzz, he saw many possibilities: “With the buzz around bot usage heating up, Pico.buzz came to us with a great tool for improving how we communicate with fans inside and outside of our venue.”
The St. Louis Blues receive over 1,900 unfiltered messages from their nearly 1.4 million social media fans on Facebook and Instagram every week. For their staff to manually initiate conversations and maintain relationships with such a volume is impossible, which means that opportunities to engage with these fans — let alone turn them into fanatics — are lost.
Therefore, the AI-powered Facebook Messenger bot tool was of particular interest to Gardner: “It’s becoming really difficult to organically reach Facebook fans, but to use Messenger to directly communicate with them could potentially be a huge way to get messages out to fans and simply provide better customer service.”
The Blues established a pilot with Pico.buzz to test out the platform’s features and see how it changed their fan engagement this spring.
As a part of this pilot, the Blues made a Facebook post encouraging fans to reach out to them on Facebook Messenger. In the 24 hours following the post, over 1,500 fans opened up a personal conversation with the Blues. The various links shared in the message saw a 29% click-through rate (CTR) during that time, a rate well above the industry average. A follow-up message was sent, suggesting fans participate in a “first goal fan poll” to be used at the game; 57% participated. This poll was then displayed on the video board during warmup, showing votes and fan avatars arriving in real time.
Over the 16 games that the Blues employed Pico.buzz’s software, the Blues were able to have 4,909 one-on-one conversations with their fans across Facebook and Instagram. The Blues also saw an increase in fan loyalty, brand amplification and continued Messenger usage after the initial engagement.
Gardner sees this AI-powered Facebook Messenger bot tool as a game changer: “For the sports world in particular, the bot communication method via social media channels is still in its infancy stages. It’s becoming clear with a lot of the activations out in the market right now that bots are going to be a big player in how we better communicate with our customers. We have been pleased with the initial results we have seen with Pico.buzz’s ability to deliver more interactive ways of engaging our fans in-venue, while also allowing us to quickly address issues or questions via social media.”
So, what’s next for the Blues and Pico.buzz?
“We look forward to continuing to brainstorm ways to leverage AI-driven technologies to improve in-venue experiences for our fans, while also pursuing potential opportunities to provide unique sponsorship activations for our partners,” says Gardner. “We want to make Messenger another form of communication with the Blues and Scottrade Center when attending one of our events, and the starting point of these conversations will center around our ability to cultivate that one-on-one communication by engaging them with innovative and exciting content.”
To learn more about Pico.buzz, their investor pitch from the recent Stadia Ventures Spring 2017 Demo Day can be found here.