What is an Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing

A Flash Briefing is a very simple Amazon Alexa skill that plays a brief 1–2 minute update for your followers or subscribers. The content can be anything, a tip of the day such as management tip or health tip, it can be an inspirational quote, joke of the day, word of the day, company update etc. It is content, and the content is up to you. You might have noticed by the descriptions, many of the Flash Briefings are updated daily, and Amazon recommends to maintain high customer engagement, you should publish new content at a minimum, daily. However, you have the option to set your content updates to be weekly, daily or hourly, which is useful for doing news updates.

Flash briefings updates, are subscribed to by Amazon Alexa users, aka your customers, and are queued up, like stories in a personalized news cast, and streamed to them when they invoke the skill by saying “Alexa, what’s my Flash Briefing?” Studies have shown, that Flash Briefing usage spikes tremendously, early in the morning and later in the afternoon. This corresponds to when people are typically getting ready for work or returning from work, making the Flash Briefing a part of their daily routine. Keep this in mind when developing your content for a Flash Briefing. Personally, I’m not a fan of loud, in your face personalities or updates, especially first thing in the morning. I prefer more calm updates so my Flash Briefing subscription list reflects this personality trait. Know your customer and how they would like to receive information updates from your organization and tailor your content to that persona.

The Flash Briefing content can be in the format of a voice recording, or an RSS text feed that is read by Alexa. However, we highly recommend recording your content and delivering it as audio content. Develop short concise updates that can be delivered in 1–2 minute sound bites, and is updated on a daily basis. Make sure the volume of your audio clip matches the volume of Alexa’s speech, and ensure the volume of your feeds is consistent, and does not have peaks, where your volume gets too high, and valleys where it is too low. For your Flash Briefing, get straight into your update, avoid long introductions, your skill with be published with a brief intro from Alexa, so there is no need to reintroduce yourself in the content. Also make sure there is no dead air at the beginning of your audio file and avoid putting advertising or promotions in your content. Your listeners are subscribing to an update, they are NOT subscribing to a commercial. Finally, resist the temptation to use existing content designed for another source such as a podcast or a blog post. Blog posts and podcasts are typically a longer form of content and are too long for a Flash Briefing. If you have a long blog post or podcast, consider extracting small portions (1–2 minutes) and repackaging it as a Flash Briefing. You can always direct your listeners to your full blog post or podcast at the end of the briefing.

That is where we can help. If you are a do it yourself person, who just wants instructions on how to create a Flash Briefing, we have online training courses available. Or, if you want full support and need someone to get this done for you, we can help as well. Either way, please fill out the “Contact Us” form at the link below and someone will be in contact to discuss the option that best fits your needs.

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