Basics of Oracle SRM: Workflow & Automation

I knew you’d be back! At this point in the Oracle SRM Basics series, you are probably addicted to the possibilities of social posting, analyzing, and engaging. In this post, we intensify the addiction with the home base of the entire platform: Workflow & Automation.

Oracle defines this area as the place “where you control your account settings, configure your resources and users, and configure your topics.” Workflow & Automation is the control tower of the other SRM functions I have walked you through in past blogs. It’s a pretty big deal, if you ask me! Understanding this functionality is crucial for making your social channels work properly, having the right team members in control and customizing. Let’s get to work!

The first tab in Workflow & Automation is Profile. This is where you set up and edit information about yourself as a user. You can set your timezone and assign yourself an image for team members to easily identify you. More importantly, this is where you keep track of the Social Properties, Bundles, and Teams you have access to.

Next is Resources, where we at Relationship One spend most of our Workflow & Automation time. Here you can zoom in on specific teams, which is helpful for the Workflow tab that we will soon discuss. Below is a snapshot of the Social Properties section of this tab in Relationship One’s instance of SRM.

All of the social channels you operate live here. In the top right, you can choose to add other properties which allows you to post to them via SRM. The gear menu to the right of each property gives you the option to edit or delete. Editing allows you to choose which users and teams can access certain channels in SRM. Every once in a while, your social channel will need to be reauthorized, which can also be achieved here.

Workflow & Automation ensures that your social posting is controlled and managed by the right people. This happens within the Users tab. Here you will find a list of employees that have profiles in your SRM instance and how many roles they are allowed to play. This area is vital for governing which users are posting, editing, deleting, and analyzing content. Roles can be adjusted by selecting the gear menu to the right of each user.

Are you still with me? Workflow & Automation is the brains of SRM, and it structures your social processes so you don’t have to! It may be a lot of information, but trust me, setting up this part is imperative to avoiding social mishaps. Let’s get back to it!

Account is the next tab, which includes the general settings of your SRM account. That’s a pretty straightforward area.

Let’s move on to Workflow, where there is an opportunity to govern the process of publishing to and engaging with your social channels. Below is a sample Workflow I created in our instance.

You can create a step-by-step plan for making content, publishing it, and promoting it here. Choose from multiple step options and assign each phase to a user or team to complete. This ensures multiple eyes have checked a post and minimizes risk of mistakes.

The Automation tab works hand-in-hand with Engage (need a quick review of Engage? Check out Basics of Oracle SRM: Engage). You can choose to automatically label, assign and delete certain keywords that appear in your Engage inbox. For example, you can label posts that use profanity by defining them in an Auto-Label keyword and then have them immediately deleted. This saves you time and ensures that negative posts are destroyed before they reflect on your organization. You can also assign specific keywords to team members who are experts in that particular field.

Last, but not least, we have Plugins. Plugins are third party partners who have developed apps that work with SRM. A few examples: Oracle Service Cloud, Siebel, CRM on Demand or bit.ly to Engage. At Relationship One, we connect our bit.ly account to Engage in order to customize the shortened URL in our posts rather than display the default “pub.virtue” that is associated with SRM. In order to do the same, create a bit.ly account and connect with Oracle Support to complete the integration.

That’s all folks! Well, for Workflow & Automation anyways. The control center of Oracle Social Relationship Management is pretty cool, huh? Today, you conquered the brain. Next time, we’ll wrap up with Content & Apps.

Peace out, social geniuses.