Advertising & Analytics for the rest of us: Slack, Flock & Collaborative Communication
By: Alex Estabrook
Tags: Collaboration, Analytics, Communication, Advertising, Engagement Marketing

Alex Estabrook

Statsbot: Slack integration breakdown of incoming traffic sources (Google Analytics API)

As the traditional print and commercial advertising business has been under constant strain since the dawn of the web, understanding your audience and retargeting the correct demographics has become the staple of e-commerce and digital publishing. This concept now transcends the ad agencies, creative design studios, and marketing departments of all companies.

In reality, at this point, everyone is an influencer to certain groups of people. This equals engagement, and everyone can be empowered to use their networks to gently influence a few people. Whether you have 100 instagram followers, run social campaigns and analytics for a startup that gets little traffic, or work for a Fortune 500 company, every team should understand what, how, and who they’re selling to, and hopefully, be proactive in doing so.

One of the largest challenges in many organizations is disconnected e-mail and chat services. When you’re using different methods of communication to reach different people within your organization, with no easy way to organize the conversations, departments and teams don’t communicate. This is where people lose focus on the larger community/engagement goals, and have to focus on whatever is tossed on their plate as it appears.

The conversion funnel, and channels of engagement are important to everyone in your company. This isn’t just the Google Adwords and SEO specialists, or the creative, sales and marketing departments. In many organizations, there is still a huge bottle neck in communication about how to track down the most viable target audience for the product or service. To do this, you need to understand how people are reaching your website.

Perhaps the best current solution i’ve encountered is Slack and its App Library.

Flock also seems to be an excellent solution, but I haven’t explored enough of their app integrations to know how flexible and powerful it actually is. Flock is certainly a more cost effective option, but having not tested it with a team or company, I cannot actually testify to its automation, communication, or integration integrity. Currently their main selling point is the price tag-its a lot cheaper.

In my example above, I was using Statsbot, a Slack app that integrates the Google Analytics API. There are plenty of similar applications for Slack and Flock. I was breaking down the traffic sources for the dining portion of my alma mater’s newspaper to figure out how to draw more interest to the dining guide. This was extremely useful in terms of boosting awareness and increasing CTR, thereby increasing CPC value or volume.

I probably don’t need to explain Slack, as most everyone has heard of it, or used it, but just in case, it is essentially a communication platform that allows DMs, private channels, general chat, and your own notebook. It provides automation for aggregation of data, and has apps and bots that integrate the API’s for various web services. Again, Flock seems to be the best alternative, is more cost effective, and i’m sure in the coming few years, they’ll be equally as powerful.

The nice part about using a collaborative communication tool, where everyone can access information regarding target audience, is that sales, marketing, creative, and management can all see the data, and make decisions that drive engagement. This in turn gives everyone the insight they need to be an influencer, no matter how small the audience.

In summation, (in my own opinion) e-mail and instant messaging slow organizations down, and leave people scrambling to complete or find what they should be working on, rather than helping people work together to complete tasks, engage their coworkers and organize and search for files and data more efficiently.

Thanks for taking the time to read-I hope this helps anyone out there looking to optimize data collection, collaboration and communication. To a lot of people, all of this may seem painfully obvious, but for some reason, many organizations still seem to like e-mail and messenger.

Best to all,

Alex Estabrook