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:

1. Get the email address of your flow (you can find it in Team Inbox settings)
2. Go to google.com/alerts
3. 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
4. Fill in the form: It’s best to start with “All results” and then change it if you’re getting too many results.
   
5. Click Submit
6. 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.

1. 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”).
2. 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.
3. 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.

During the summer we’ve done quite a few improvements to Flowdock, including user highlights, one-click email and Twitter replying and a successful change to a new message database. Today we deployed a big update for Influx, our application for bringing external content to the flow. Here are some of our latest features:

Redesigned Influx sources dialog

Since we launched our public beta, the experience of managing Influx sources hasn’t been as good as it should. Because the sources dialog worked as it should (technically, at least) and we had more urgent things to fix, we left it pretty much untouched. However, as the rest of the user experience became more polished and clean, the old dialog with its many tabs, fields and buttons started to stick out like a sore thumb.

After several iterations of sketching and planning we came up with a design that was dramatically simpler than the old one. Inspired by the multi-function address bars in today’s browsers, we implemented a single text field that works with all source types. Type a Twitter user name, RSS feed address or any keyword you’d like to follow and you’ll get a preview dropdown of all the sources you can add to your flow.

When anybody in the flow adds or removes an Influx source, everyone gets notified of the change so they know what content is coming to their flow without constantly checking the sources view.

Get notified about messages for you

Starting from today you’ll get notified by email about all the chat messages sent to you. Notifications about discussion in your flows pop up in your inbox after a day if you haven’t visited the flow. This is a great way to inform your teammates about important stuff even if they can’t access Flowdock right away.

Pending invitations

Last but not least, we’ve added a list of invited people after the flow members list on the Dashboard. In addition to seeing who has already got an invite, you can also resend the email or cancel the invite completely.

Remember to give feedback!

At Flowdock, we’re always listening to our customers to concentrate our development to the weakest points in our software. We need your feedback to make Flowdock better, so tell us what you think about these new features. To give feedback, you can use the feedback form in the Dashboard, add new ideas to our UserVoice page or email us at team@flowdock.com.

Follow us in Twitter and Facebook to keep track of our latest updates and features!

Integrating your day-to-day conversations to Flowdock just got easier. Now you can send a reply or forward a message using your mail client as soon as the message appears in your flow. So don’t forget to use your flow email address as a mail recipient when you want to keep your whole team up-to-date on your mail threads.

Also included in today’s update is the ability to retweet and reply to all Twitter messages in your flow. So whenever there’s important discussion in Twitter (it could be product feedback or brand publicity) you can instantly react to them just by pressing a button in Flowdock.

Last but not least, be sure to check out our fresh new website! Go read our tour pages showcasing our best features and check out who are the people behind Flowdock.

We try to be as responsive and communicative as possible towards our users because they are our future customers (fingers crossed), and they provide incredibly valuable customer feedback.

We try to give our customers enough ways to give us feedback, so they don’t have to sweat it. They can use a feedback form inside Flowdock flows, use our Uservoice page or send us email directly to team@flowdock.com. Some users choose to use Twitter for feedback and they catch our attention by mentioning @flowdock. All this means we need to track different mediums. Luckily enough, Flowdock gives us everything we need, in real time.

Emails and Twitter

In this example from the Tour, you can see how we handle feedback from emails and tweets.

• Responsiveness comes easily when the whole team can respond to the feedback
• All feedback form emails have the tag #feedback in their subject, so they get correctly tagged
• We have forwarded all the emails to team@flowdock.com to our development flow as well, so it’s easy to answer to them and track them in Influx
• Live, face-to-face feedback we just type into the chat and tag it with the same #feedback tag

With these practices, all the feedback is easily accessible when we need it.

Uservoice

Uservoice is a great way of sourcing and managing ideas and suggestions from the user community. The team gets notified about all changes in Uservoice as well. It’s great to talk over new feature requests inside our flow right away when they’re suggested. Then we tag them further and they become part of our backlog. That is agile.

7 days to Flowdock public beta on March 10th!

EDIT: Check out the new revised version of this blog post here: http://blog.flowdock.com/2012/01/11/track-your-brand-with-flowdock/

Flowdock has been designed to be the best group messenger in the world, but it can be so much more. We’ve previously covered using tags to abolish the barrier of reporting bugs, and now I’ll show how you can make your team act as a single unit in tracking, creating, molding, protecting and generally managing your brand.

Flowdock allows your team to react to everything with zero delay. You can pipe anything into Flowdock’s Influx as RSS feeds, tweets or emails. Here’s a couple of things we’ve found immensely useful in tracking our brands. You should try them out.

Add Twitter tracking for your brand

This is basic functionality of Influx in Flowdock.

1. Go to Influx and select sources from the top right

2. Choose the Twitter tab and add your brands as Twitter searches

3. React with zero delay

Add Google Alerts for your brand

1. Go to Google Alerts and add alerts (RSS) with your brand names as search terms

Choose “Feed” in the “Deliver to” selection.

2. Copy the alert’s feed address from Google Alerts

3. Add the feed to Influx through the sources dialog

4. See what the internet says about your brand, and discuss it in Flowdock

Flowdock is completely real-time, and so will your team be once you start using it.

8 days left till public beta on March 10th!