3 Things: Caregiver Benefits, Social Listening for Communities, Meeting Scribe

Happy Sunday and a very warm welcome to all the new subscribers! I’m thrilled and honored to have you as readers and truly appreciate your thoughts and feedback 🙏. Each edition of 3 Things will contain a dive into 3 rabbit holes I’ve found myself going down recently and associated business opportunities. Subscribe to get each week’s edition straight to your inbox and if you enjoy it, please share (I suck at self-promotion so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:

• Caregiver Payments Employer Benefit

• Social Listening for Communities

• Meeting Scribe

**** Quick note - I’ll be on vacation for the next 2 Sundays so see you all in a few weeks!

1. Caregiver Payments Benefit

There are currently over 53 million unpaid family caregivers in the US who provide over 30B hours of care per year for family members or friends, most of whom are over 50. As the 76 million Baby Boomers (who are currently between 58-78 years old) continue to age, there will be even more need for family caregiving. The average caregiver spends 24 hours each week (and ~37 hours for those who live with the care recipient) providing aid for Activities of Daily Living (ADL) including grooming, transportation, grocery shopping, dressing, toileting, eating and more. Over half also provide aspects of medical or nursing care.

Billions of dollars in federal, private, state, and local subsidies for caregivers exist but less than 10% of them get utilized. There are dozens upon dozens of companies that provide benefits sold through employers related to everything from mental health, financial wellness, and many healthcare point solutions like fertility (ex: Modern Family, Carrot Fertility), direct primary care (ex: One Medical, Carbon Health), or musculoskeletal treatment (ex: Hinge Health, Sword Health). There are now even early stage companies that are selling caregiver benefits to employers for support, but I think the larger opportunity is to aggregate data on what capital exists and how caregivers can access it and provide a corporate benefit that actually gets people paid. Employees would input data on the care they’re currently providing and the company would determine which subsidies they are eligible for, enroll them directly, and process the payments. Going through employers would enable you to hook into payroll systems directly and directly deposit the payments to employee bank accounts.

2. Social Listening for Communities

With the rise of social media, solutions cropped up to help take all of the unstructured data that occurs within user generated content and conversations across the various platforms and turn them into insights. Social listening (AKA social media listening) tools help provide real-time information on what your customers and potential customers are saying about you and your competition, derived from data mining techniques applied across social media platforms. This data is used as a form of market research to guide marketing spend for both paid and organic initiatives and provide insights on campaign performance, industry trends, competitive landscape, and event monitoring. Today, over 80% of companies report leveraging social listening as a tool with the most useful channels being Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn (for B2B).

Conversations that used to take place on social media platforms are now taking place in communities more and more. Whether it’s brand-owned communities, affinity groups, DAOs, or other forms of digital communities, people are connecting with individuals and companies in Discord servers, Slack Channels, Discourse forums, and many new community platforms. Companies like Hivebrite, Mighty Networks, Tribe, Circle, and many more now offer products for companies to host and engage with their community. A startup could connect social media listening data with community listening data to provide much more robust insights and push that data to marketing systems and ad platforms for Marketing teams. As 3rd party cookies are deprecated, it will become more and more important for brands to deeply understand their customers/users and find new data sources to drive acquisition, engagement, and retention.

3. Meeting Scribe

Even before the pandemic, as more knowledge workers started shifting from a pure in-person work environment to a more distributed one, it meant video conferences became more normal and pervasive. Solutions like Otter.ai and Fireflies started popping up to use the massive improvements in speech-to-text technologies to transcribe meetings. We reached a point where the tech could do a good enough job at multi-speaker identification, accent handling, and real-time transcription so pointing it at meetings made sense. It also aimed to solve the information silo problem that became more acute with both distributed work as well as different teams using their own point solution software. With the pandemic and shift to remote work, there are now numerous products that join your meetings and act as a notetaker.

All of the solutions today focus on just capturing the conversations, transcribing the audio and sending the transcripts to a folder or emailing it out to the attendees. This creates a new search problem as you now have a tremendous amount of transcribed audio to sift through when you’re trying to find something specific. In an hour-long call, there might only be 3 minutes of useful content that you’d want to refer back to or that contains action items or next steps. Speech-to-text technology has gotten both extremely good and also commoditized so the next step is to use ML to identify the few pieces that should be saved and determine what to do with them. The ability to automatically generate next best actions (such as send that file to Erin, schedule another meeting with Randy and Margaret, or add a note to an account record in Salesforce) would provide exponentially more value. Just as in medicine, doctors have scribes (and now technology) who document the relevant and pertinent parts of conversations with patients into the EMR, this would do the same for teams within software companies. Scribes often adapt to each individual physician’s style and way of documenting and this software could learn individual and team nuances over time to better serve their needs and remove a lot of busywork.

That’s all for today! If you have thoughts, comments, or want to get in touch, reply here or find me on Twitter at @ezelby and if you enjoyed this, please subscribe and share with a friend or two! I will be on vacation for the next 2 weeks so will see you all in a few!

~ Elaine