A chatbot to unleash the power of data
Content-driven organizations from news portals to today’s most successful consumer brands have seen the rise of data as one of their potentially most powerful resources. But while working with some of Europe’s biggest publishing houses and brands, we’ve learned that they are still on the look-out for the best ways to make use of it. That’s why we developed POST, a user-friendly tool that monitors stories and delivers practical tips to boost performance, so content organizations can embrace data culture.
The idea of POST first came up during an internal hackathon where our team decided to tackle a common challenge that we observed while working with editorial teams across Europe.
According to our observations and research data and analytics teams share numbers and data trends but rarely translate their insights into concrete suggestions for improvements. This creates a discrepancy as editors hardly ever know what to do with this input. So in short, POST addresses the gap in the workflow between data analysts and editors. A positive impact on the editorial workflow in the area of data integration was our main goal, driving product strategy and development.
We started the first round of the project with an extended research phase where we’ve partnered with some of the most respected editorial teams in Europe. In that phase we’ve built the first prototype and tested it with our users to get a feel for the way they interact with the product. A validated prototype, iterated based upon user insights, enabled us to get a follow-up funding with which we had a chance to turn our ideas into a product.
After using the prototype I have to say that this integration between Analytics and Slack is a very useful tool. I like the idea that a bot tells me when something noteworthy is happening with my articleSebastian Horn Deputy Editor-In-Chief, ZEIT ONLINE
The result, POST, offers an integration between data sources and communication channels. The first version of the product connects Google Analytics and Slack, since those were identified as the most common tools among our partners.
In the product development process we’ve partnered up with Pandata, who developed the underlying data solution for our product while our team was working on the overall UX and product development. From the user perspective POST combines an easy-to-use dashboard to create and monitor alerts and a slack bot that delivers actionable recommendations in a conversational style and approachable way to the editors. Alerts are based on a predefined set of triggers based on the organization’s individual KPIs.
From my daily work running the audience team at Sueddeutsche.de I could really see innovations like this tool helping to change the mindset in the newsroom to win new audiences!Antje Ebner Head of Audience Development, Süddeutsche Zeitung
