In the last 5 years, there has been an increase in visibility of artificial intelligence as assistive
technology for companies and employees across all industries and sectors. From marketing to
manufacturing, artificial intelligence is applauded for it’s ability to improve productivity for its human
counterparts by helping to automate tasks and allow workers to focus on skilled, detailed tasks.
Conversely, employee advocacy groups, industry analysts and some futurists believe the increased
use of artificial intelligence puts workforces in danger by offering alternatives to using people to do
everything from communicate with consumers to filling orders or building products.
Despite growing concerns about the use of AI, many communicators are already experiencing the
benefits of incorporating AI through tools like chatbots to solve basic consumer problems, answer
questions or drive content discovery.
For this assignment, you will create a Facebook Messenger chatbot for a brand. You may choose the
brand you are using for your New Media Strategy Project or you can select a different brand. You will
need to assess the communications challenges using a tool like a chatbot may help solve for the
brand and decide on an outcome the brand would like to achieve once a consumer has engaged
with the chatbot.
Below are some sample challenges and outcomes to help as you consider your brand’s challenges
and outcomes.
• Low visibility of thought leadership or website content; drive traffic to online content by using the
content to help answer basic consumer questions
• Long lead time for finding and addressing customer service issues; offer automated support via
chatbots to answer questions or redirect to more detailed support content
• Lack of education or knowledge about a specific industry, product or service; direct to online
content to help educate and inform consumers
To help you achieve those outcomes, your chatbot will need to include 3 responses to potential
consumer questions that redirect to online content.
Your assignment deliverable should include:
• A written document with an overview of the challenge and outcomes you hope to achieve
• Follow the steps below to build a Facebook Messenger chatbot for your brand
• Provide a link to your Messenger chatbot
Your final deliverable will be due via Turnitin Monday, April 16 before 6:30pm. Please plan to spend
2-3 hours creating your chatbot and drafting the written portion of your assignment.
Building Your Messenger Chatbot
Prior to starting your chatbot build you will need to:
• Create a test Facebook Page. (Or create a Facebook profile, if you don’t already have one.)
Read through this support page or steps on creating a Facebook Page. When creating
your Facebook Page DO NOT use the name of an actual company or brand. I would
recommend using “Test Page”, “Test Company Page” or another similar name to denote this
Page is a temporary Page to be used for testing only.
• Collect online content you would like to embed in your chatbot responses/user experience.
This content can include URLs to branded sites, blogs or social media channels, images,
photos or graphics, etc. Use content that you think will best help inform, education or assist
your target consumers. You will not need to share this content within your assignment
deliverable, but it will speed the process for building your chatbot if you have all of the
content linked or stored in a single place.
• Have a baseline understanding of a Messenger chatbot user experience. If at any point you would
like more detail or help before moving on, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me.
• A basic user experience flow for a chatbot starts with a consumer engaging the chatbot,
typically by opening messenger.
• Engaging or opening messenger with the chatbot will automatically trigger a welcome
message from the chatbot, with pre-determined responses the consumer can select.
• Once a response is selected by the consumer, the chatbot delivers the content associated with
that selection.
• The chatbot will then automatically deliver an additional response directing the consumer to
more content or to return to the original response prompts.
• The user experience cycle starts over with the chatbot delivering content based on the
consumers response selections.
Build Your Chatbot
• Go to chatfuel.com and create an account using your Facebook profile.
• Select your test Facebook Page to link to your Chatfuel account. Keep in mind your chatbot cannot
be created if Chatfuel is not granted access to a Facebook Page.
• Select the Create a Blank Chatbot template.
• Edit the pre-written welcome message to better suit your brand and consumer.
• Create 4 Blocks with content you would like to share or redirect your consumer to view. One of
these Blocks should be a Main Menu block that redirects your consumers back to your main
response selections.
Chatfuel defines Blocks as the automated responses your consumer will receive with they
select a pre-determined response from your welcome message.
• Create a workflow for your chatbot to guide consumers from one content piece to another.
• Click on the Welcome message button and edit your welcome message. You’ll want to include
a Button for your Main Menu content Block, or create Buttons for each of your Blocks. These
Buttons will serve as the responses consumers can click to engage with your chatbot.
• You may choose to link back to the Main Menu Block in each of your content Blocks. These
circular references allow your consumer to never be more than one click away from home
back to a “home” location.
• Test your chatbot by clicking on the Test This Chatbot button in the top right corner of your
Chatfuel dashboard. You will them be prompted to View On messenger.com.
• It’s a good idea to test your chatbot as you go to make sure your messages are appearing as
you’d like them to appear. For this assignment, I’m not concerned with complex response
capture and content delivery workflows— as basic chatbot that delivers content that makes
sense for your audience is perfect.
• One you’re satisfied with your chatbot experience, connect your chatbot to your test page, if you
haven’t already. By connecting your chatbot to your Page it will automatically make it available to
consumers.
• Pull the URL for your Facebook Page to include in your assignment deliverable so I can like your
Page and engage with your chatbot.
As a result of ongoing data privacy issues at Facebook stemming from the Cambridge Analytica event, the platform has disabled new or previously unconnected apps from connecting to Facebook Apps including Messenger. This means if you are creating a Business Page for your homework assignment and connecting it to Chatfuel for the first time, your chatbot will be barred from connecting to Facebook Messenger.
As an alternative submission for this assignment, I have posted a Submission Template in the Homework Assignments folder with instructions to capture screenshots of your final automated workflow. If you have more “content blocks” than included in the template, please feel free to add additional pages. The template is posted in PDF, Pages and Word formats.
If you have questions about the build or what’s needed for the assignment submission, please reach out.
