The Bambu by Sprout Social Team Efficiently Curates Content for Enterprise Clients

When you work with enterprise clients, expectations tend to rise. From support and service to the client relationship itself, the experience must be seamless.

Sprout Social, the social media management, analytics and advocacy solutions provider, knows this well. One of their solutions, Bambu, is a platform that simplifies employee advocacy—the act of a company's staff promoting the organization—on social media. To that end, Bambu enables companies to curate approved content and provide suggested social messages so their employees can easily read and share company and industry news.

Advocacy at this level can bring your company stellar recruits, increase brand awareness, and promote your products and services. To help manage growing demand and support clients with targeted content curation, the Bambu services team looked to automate content curation, alerts, and filtering relevant content. For all this, they turned to app automation tool Zapier.

Automatically Curate Content from Multiple Sources

"We use Zapier to quickly and automatically feed content into Bambu," says Stephan Hovnanian, Content Solutions Architect at Bambu by Sprout Social. "We source that content from a diverse pool of websites and social platforms, all tailored for the customer and their industry."

This Zap, our term for automated workflows, connects Feedly to Bambu, Digest by Zapier, and Email by Zapier. Digest by Zapier rounds up content, notifications, etc., and sends it off in one go to summarize the content the services team has curated.

When Bambu's services team adds a relevant article in Feedly, Zapier creates a new story from that article within the Sources tab in Bambu so that it can be reviewed and curated for the client’s team.

Simultaneously, Digest by Zapier adds these articles to a scheduled digest. Finally, when the scheduled time arrives, Email by Zapier sends the digest out to the client’s program administrator as a summary of content available for their review.

With this workflow, Bambu by Sprout Social gave time back to their services team. No more manually triggered emails or building a digest piece by piece. In order to scale their offerings for enterprise clients, the team embraced the old adage: work smarter, not harder.

We broke this content curation workflow into a few different Zaps, the better to customize for your own process. Pick and choose the parts you need or give the whole a thing a try:

Cut Through the Noise with Automatic Filters

Multiple clients means multiple feeds. Multiple feeds means a lot of content. Not all of the content related to a client or their industry is ripe for employee advocacy, though. To avoid having an employee—or several—sort through each piece, the Bambu services team uses Filter by Zapier.

"You can imagine how noisy these feeds get," Stephan says. "Zapier's filtering capabilities help us ensure only specific and relevant types of content are fed into Bambu for employees to share."

Stephan and his colleagues on the Bambu services team cut through the noise with a Zap aimed at finding specific keywords in content. By filtering based on keyword, the services team can automatically deliver relevant content to their clients.

The Zap starts with RSS by Zapier. When a new piece hits an RSS feed, Zapier filters the piece, looking for a specific keyword. If the content contains the keyword, Zapier creates a Story for it within the Sources tab in Bambu.

Track Errors in Slack

Try as you might to avoid them, errors pop up even in the most efficient workflows. Maybe a connection reset. An app might experience an outage. Either way, with Zapier playing a crucial role in the Bambu team's curation workflows, should something go awry, their services team is notified immediately in Slack.

"Zapier's namesake app has proven to be quite useful to track errors with customer Zaps," Stephan says. "We combine it with Slack to help us stay on top of critical errors with customer Zaps."

Any time Zapier returns an error in a Zap, the Sprout Social team receives a message in Slack. This message tells the team which Zap errored and when, so they can determine whether or not customer outreach is necessary to troubleshoot.

Where Bambu creates a simple path to employee advocacy, Zapier cuts through the weeds of complicated workflows. With content curation simplified, the Bambu services team can focus on developing relationships with their clients and ensuring their employee advocacy programs are engaging, strategic and successful.

All images courtesy of Sprout Social.