Flowdock is an excellent tool for following your brand on the web with your team. Here’s a quick guide to cover the major steps to get your team in touch with your brand.
1. React To Tweets as a Team
First and foremost, you should track whenever someone mentions your brand on Twitter. We use it for example to detect if someone is asking something about us, even when they’re not directly reaching out to us.
This way we can reply quickly, or have an internal chat about the topic.
Secondly, you can follow the Twitter account of your own brand, just to keep up-to-date about when someone from your team has Tweeted something.
To set these up, head on to Team Inbox settings, type in your brand, and click to follow the keyword, type it again, and click to follow the user. You can even filter out any replies and retweets if you like.
2. Subscribe to Google Alerts
Another great way to stay updated about what people are writing about your brand on the web, is using Google Alerts with Flowdock.
To set Google Alerts up with your Flowdock flow, follow these instructions:
- Get the email address of your flow (you can find it in Team Inbox settings)
- Go to google.com/alerts
- IMPORTANT STEP: If you’ve logged in to google, log out! Google lets you choose a custom e-mail address for the alerts only if you’re not logged in
- Fill in the form: It’s best to start with “All results” and then change it if you’re getting too many results.
- Click Submit
- A confirmation e-mail should pop up in Team Inbox. Verify the email address by clicking the link in the message.
You’re all set and receiving Google Alert notifications. Now you won’t miss what the public is saying about your product or service.
3. Feedback Should Flow To Your Flow
Feedback is super important for any endeavor. Flowdock is a great place to funnel into all feedback. There are 3 great ways to channel feedback to Flowdock.
- Automatically forward your feedback emails
If you have a feedback email address (like feedback@yourcompany.com), make sure that all e-mail sent to it, gets also sent to your Flowdock flow. How this can be done depends on your email service provider. If you’re using Google Apps, check out these instructions (section “To add new members”). - Feedback forms
We use a simple feedback form right within the app from which the feedback is sent to our Flowdock flow. To make this happen, it’s often easiest to use any e-mail capable feedback form to send the feedback to your flow. You can pre-tag the feedback either by using a #hashtag in the subject line or by modifying the e-mail address of the flow in the following way: let’s say your Flowdock subdomain is “company”, the name of your flow is “main” and you want feedback to get tagged with the #feedback tag, you can use the e-mail address main+feedback@company.flowdock.com. If you want to code something yourself, or e-mail isn’t a choice, check out the API. - Feedback services (UserVoice, Get Satisfaction etc)
If you’re using a feedback service of some sort, it’s usually easiest to add a user to that service using the email address of the Flowdock flow as the e-mail address of the account. Then just configure the notification settings of the service to suit your needs. We use this approach to work with our own Uservoice page.
