Talkfire is a social advertising platform for everyday users, consumers, and businesses. It allows companies to post campaigns for their products and services on the app through the web portal. These campaigns, which consist of limited-time contests with rules and rewards, can be found by users on the mobile app. Users sign up for the app and choose which categories match their passions, and campaigns for those passions created by businesses will show up in the app’s explore page. The users then participate in the campaigns by completing the campaigns’ contest rules.
Users participate either by mentioning out loud certain keywords in conversation while recording the audio on our app, or by posting images and positive text captions with hashtags. For the audio recordings, keyword mentions are limited to a certain allotment of mentions per day. Talkfire’s audio recording cannot differentiate between speakers, and therefore does not pose a privacy risk. For the picture posts, users upload photos of the product and a written caption, as well as any hashtags they want, in addition to hashtags decided by the company. When users mention keywords or make posts, they fill up the meter of the contest rules, and work their way towards a reward. The reward can be anything decided by the company, be it a discount code or cash, and is redeemed through an email link.
Businesses can create campaign contests on the talkfire.com web portal. On the portal, they create a profile, and then use the portal’s campaign creation tools to place a picture, description, rules of the contest, hashtags, duration of campaign, and other details. Then they publish the campaign and it appears on the mobile app.
A final functionality of Talkfire is employee training. With this functionality, businesses who want to boost their sales employees’ effectiveness can work with their top employees to create a campaign just like with the advertising functionality, with the contest rules and keywords being determined with the top employee’s input. Less experienced employees can then participate in the campaign by using Talkfire’s audio recording capability while interacting with customers. In effect, these employees are being directed to speak like the top sellers at the company to sell to customers. This speech is recorded and stored temporarily by Amazon Web Services, and a script can be downloaded that can be analyzed for sentiment analysis by AWS, for further refinement of employee contest performance and future contest generation.