Workflows

Most of what Spyglasses does is a sequence. Baselining a brand means starting a report, fixing the competitor set, adding prompts, and putting them on a daily schedule, in that order, because each step feeds the next. Handling a crisis means writing down the claims as key messages before you can watch them move. Until now that sequence lived in onboarding calls.

Workflows put that sequence on screen. A workflow is a list of steps in order. Each one names a page you already have and says what "done" looks like. Opening a workflow gives you the steps down the left and, on the right, what to do, why it matters, and a button through to the page where you do it.

What You'll Learn

• What happens to a property the moment you add it
• How steps get checked off, and why you rarely have to tick anything yourself
• The difference between a shared checklist and one you point at a specific thing
• How a workflow follows you onto the pages where the work happens
• When to skip a step and when to mark one done yourself
• Where the long-form guide for each workflow lives

The Library

The library lists the workflows that fit this property. A person never sees the site-audit workflows. A product never sees the ones that need a website of its own. The audience filters across the top narrow further, and each card carries the dashboards the workflow uses, its step count, and how far along you are.

The catalog grows in batches. If a workflow you expect is missing, it has not shipped yet rather than been hidden from you.

Setting Up a New Property

Adding a property puts it on the setup workflow for you. There is nothing to press. The next time anyone opens that property, the panel is already in the corner on step one.

Five steps, in the order they build on each other:

1. Start an AI Visibility Report. Where the brand stands today, and against whom.
2. Add the prompts your buyers would ask. Fifteen or more, across all three buying stages.
3. Add the competitors that matter. Share of voice is measured against that list.
4. Set up a project. This is what puts the prompts on a daily schedule.
5. Connect a goal to the project. Point it at a page group you are improving, or at a coverage group of the placements you are earning.

That last step is the one that ties the work to the number. A project without a goal measures visibility in general; a project with a page-group or coverage-group goal measures the visibility of the thing you are actually working on.

Three places show where a property has got to. The panel follows you onto the pages where the work happens. The navigation carries the same progress under Workflows, folded to one line. And your organization's property list marks anything unfinished with a Not tracking yet chip that opens the workflow.

It finishes when the property is measured daily with a goal attached. The chip goes away, and the dashboards take over from there.

Done for now puts the panel away on that property and keeps it away. The navigation block and the workflow's own page still have it when you want it back.

Steps Check Themselves Off

This is what makes a workflow different from a checklist.

Each step names something Spyglasses can already see: one completed report, four or more competitors, a project with prompts on it, at least one positive key message. If you added the competitors last week, that step is already green when you arrive. You are never asked to confirm work that is already done.

Steps are read independently. Doing step four before step two checks off step four. The current step is simply the first one that is neither done nor skipped, so it always points at the next thing worth doing rather than at a place you got stuck.

A step can also complete while you are looking at the page. Open the report page in another tab, start a report, come back, and the step is green. The page refreshes itself when you return to the window, and there is a Refresh button beside the progress bar for the impatient case.

Some steps have nothing to check: reading a report, briefing the team, deciding which pages to consolidate. Those are marked as such, and they complete when you say so.

Following a Workflow

Opening a step's page from the workflow does not leave the workflow behind. A small panel docks in the corner of the page and travels with you. It names the step you came to do, repeats what finishes it, shows the same evidence the workflow shows, and hands over the next page once the step is done.

The panel looks again after every change you make on the page, and again whenever you come back to the tab. A step that finishes while you are working ticks over in front of you. On a page that is not part of the workflow, the panel shows the step you are up to and offers to open its page.

Next opens the next step's page. Skip and Mark done do the same thing here as they do on the workflow itself. The chevron folds the panel down to a small tab in the corner, and the cross puts it away until you open a step again.

A quieter version sits in the navigation under Workflows: the workflow's name, how far you have got, and the whole list of steps when you open it.

Which workflow is following you is remembered in this browser and nowhere else. Your colleagues do not see it, clearing your browser data forgets it, and none of it changes anything that is measured.

Shared Checklists and Ones You Aim at Something

Workflows come in two shapes, and the card tells you which.

A shared workflow is the property's own checklist. Baseline and daily tracking is the clearest example. There is one right answer for a property, everyone on the team is working toward it, and anyone can carry on where a colleague left off. Starting it when it is already going opens what your colleague started rather than making a second copy.

The other kind you point at something specific. Winning a grounding search is the example. Three people can be improving three different pages in the same week, and neither should be able to tick off the other's steps. Starting one asks what it is for: an incident tag for crisis communications, a month for reporting, a page and query for the optimizer. The card lists what is already going, with its subject, who started it, and how far each has got.

Sometimes the thing you are pointing at does not exist yet. The optimizer workflow is the example, because you score the page as you go. In that case the first step offers a short list to choose from. If you open the Citation Optimizer from the step's own button, what you create there links itself and you are never asked.

Skip and Mark Done

Two things sit on top, and both need you to have started the workflow first.

Skip takes a step out of the sequence and out of the count. Skipping the optional key-messages step does not leave you stuck at six of seven. It leaves you at six of six. Unskip puts it back.

Mark done is for work Spyglasses cannot see. It wins over what the data says, which is exactly what you want for "read the report and briefed the team". The panel says when a step is standing on your own mark rather than on data, so nobody mistakes one for the other later.

Neither one changes anything measured. Stopping a workflow clears its skips and marks and nothing else.

The Long-Form Guides

Every workflow has a written guide covering the judgement the steps cannot: how many competitors is enough, which prompts are worth tracking, what a crisis note should say. Where that article is published, the workflow links to it as Read the full guide and the library card as Read the guide. Where it is not yet written, the card says so rather than linking nowhere.

From the Organization Page

Some workflows start before there is a property to work on, so they live on your organization's own Workflows page rather than on any one property.

Adding a new brand is the clearest case. Baselining a brand begins by adding it, so its first step is the brand itself. Start the workflow from the organization, press Add the property, and it follows the new property to its own page with step one already checked off. Two people adding two brands in the same hour each get their own copy, so neither is waiting on the other. Prospecting works the other way round and never leaves the organization at all, because the pitch list is one shared checklist anyone on the team can continue.

The same page lists every property workflow, because most of the time the question is "which property is this for" rather than "which workflow". Picking one asks which property it is for, offering only the ones it fits, and hands over from there.

Above all of it sits In progress: everything under way across every property, with whose it is, how far it has got, and a link straight back into it. That is the view an agency wants on a Monday morning, and it is the one thing a single property's library can never show.

Who Sees Workflows

Workflows appear for brand, product, and person properties, for people who have the Brand Dashboard switched on as their property home. They are not part of the read-only client portal, because a workflow walks through pages a portal viewer has no account for, and several of its steps change the property.

Related

• Brand Dashboard. The property home the workflows sit beside.
• AI Visibility Reports. The baseline most workflows start from.
• Projects. What puts prompts on a daily schedule.
• Key Messages. The claims the PR workflows watch.