Want to tell an in-depth story over chat? You’ll need a map
It’s much more than just copying and pasting a traditional text article
Longform articles don’t always play nice as native social media content. They’re often incompatible with the way news is packaged and consumed on social platforms—and they’re simply impossible to cram into tight character limits. When I see a long Facebook post that requires me to click to “see more,” I usually scroll past it.
In an attempt to make longform content more social media friendly, I turned what could have been a 1,200+ word article detailing misconceptions and fault lines in news coverage about North Korea into a conversation with a chatbot, because what better way to communicate a nuanced idea than through a conversation? Right?
In case you’re not familiar, chatbots are designed to simulate conversation through voice or text. You can find them on Facebook Messenger, Kik, Slack and any voice assistant. They’re used to deliver news articles, give you the weather forecast and even take your food delivery order.
For my story, I used a service called Chatfuel to create and host a chatbot on Messenger. The goal was to publish it through Facebook account of Annenberg Media, a student-led news outlet at the University of Southern California. I learned the hard way that creating a longform chatbot is more complicated than you might think, and I never did get to publish the story. But luckily for you, I made some initial mistakes so you don’t have to.
1. Map your conversation
Unlike a text article, a conversation can go in many different directions. Accounting for that on Chatfuel can be confusing, since its interface doesn’t include a conversation-mapping feature. It essentially works by creating “cards” that can be populated with text, images, links, etc., and connected to one another through buttons you create.
So, before opening Chatfuel and playing with it, I recommend mapping out your conversation. Otherwise, you might waste a lot of time (like I did) trying to string together your story on Chatfuel as you write it.
What I eventually did was open a Google doc, transcribe the responses from my interviews and divide them into topics. As with most text articles, I organized those topics in order of decreasing importance before turning what I transcribed into dialogue.
To make my document more easily adaptable to Chatfuel, I put reader “responses” in parentheses and dedicated a bullet point to each chat bubble, which translate to one card on Chatfuel.
2. Remember to put the “chat” in chatbot
If you gave your readers only one option to choose from to advance the conversation, you would just create a text piece for readers to (frustratingly) tap through. What makes a chatbot so engaging is that readers can choose how they want to progress through the story.
So, I anticipated letting readers choose which questions they’d like to ask the experts I interviewed, such as “What’s difficult about reporting on North Korea?” and “What are some of the biggest misconceptions we have of North Korea?” I also built in options for readers to ask follow-up questions, such as “How does that affect coverage?” and “What about defectors?” I also allowed options for readers to end the conversation early.
To add interactivity to a chatbot, you can create menus using either the “quick reply” or “buttons” functions. I recommend quick replies, since they disappear once the reader taps one of them. This is important because, with buttons, users can technically scroll back up and tap on a different/the same option, which would essentially let them “rewind” the conversation.
The biggest challenge with “quick replies,” however, is the 20-character limit. Not much can be said in 20 characters — especially if you want your readers to ask questions.
To work around this, I dedicated a chat bubble at the end of every card to being a “menu,” followed by the quick replies. I even included emojis as a shorthand that correspond to each question.
3. But don’t give up too much control over the conversation
Again, accounting for all the different possible paths of a conversation can be confusing. The more consecutive decisions you allow a reader to make, the more complicated your bot will be.
To illustrate why this can make your job very difficult, I’ll go over a challenge I faced when trying to write a section of my story where I wanted to let readers choose from more than one option to continue the conversation.
After writing about the difficulties of reporting on North Korea, I wanted to give readers the options to ask, “How does that affect coverage?” or “What about defectors?”
If they chose the first question, I wanted them to choose from learning more about defectors or about misconceptions of North Korea. If they chose the second question, I wanted them to choose from how limitations affect news coverage, or misconceptions of North Korea.
This meant that some cards would have the same content, but the menus would present different options. For example, the two defector cards circled in orange below gave the reader the same information, but their menu options were different depending on how readers got to that card. If they chose defectors first, the menu would display buttons that corresponded to cards in Chatfuel labeled “how” or “mis.” If they chose defectors second, the menu would only display “mis” (since they already chose “how”).
To keep track of your user’s choices on Chatfuel, I recommend using abbreviations, like the ones seen above in green. So, if a user were to pick challenges (“cha”), how those challenges affect news coverage (“how”), and defectors (“def”), in that order, they’d choose these cards: “challenges,” “cha-how” and “cha-how-def.” Hopefully you get the idea.
I gave my reader a maximum of two choices, which is much easier to manage in Chatfuel. If you follow the different paths, you’ll notice that readers are forced into eventually choosing the options in red, which are points I don’t want them to miss. Thus, it’s not a matter of if they’ll get to those parts of the conversation, but when.
If this tedious and confusing process of accounting for these decisions could somehow be automated, longform chatbots could be more scalable and complex, like this BBC article’s “Catch me up” bot.
4. Be considerate of your reader’s time
You’re not copying and pasting your text article, but that doesn’t mean you can’t apply some of the same concepts embodied in a traditional news story. They spare no time delivering the most important information, and your conversation shouldn’t either. People have limited time, and so we should respect that time by telling them up front what they can expect from your conversation, regardless of what platform they’re reading on.
Hook your readers with charm or be willing to give them your most important or interesting points first, in case they exit early. You’ll most likely be doing the former if you’re delivering a story.
Again, I made sure that readers would be funneled into seeing my most important points, and that they’d have the option of ending the conversation early.
When you’re more direct, readers will either be more likely to walk away with its gist, or be engaged enough to read on. It’s a win-win situation.
It’s tempting to start with an ice-breaker and make small talk before getting to your main point. I made that mistake by making readers explore the origin behind words such as “isolated state” and “hermit kingdom” before building up to the misconceptions we have of North Korea.
One thing that is important to include at the beginning of the conversation, though: a quick rundown of how the chatbot works. It’s important to orient your readers and let them know what to expect and how to move through the conversation.
Just remember that at end of the day, however, you’re still writing the news, so readers expect news.
5. Make it conversational — duh!
Finally, something that might seem obvious but can often get lost: make your chatbot conversational. Talk to your reader as you would with your friends, with the added benefit of rigorous proofreading. Emojis, images and gifs are all on the table. Don’t forget typing animations either, as Chatfuel doesn’t do that for you.
I took a note from the Quartz app and added emoji responses, which say much more with fewer characters.
A favorite native feature of mine was also Chatfuel’s “gallery,” which I used to redirect to news articles.
A good rule of thumb is to try to ensure each block of messages you push doesn’t exceed more than one screen length. If it does, users might have to scroll back up if they can’t read fast enough. And if you can’t help it, make sure your typing animations at least give your readers enough time to read!
When all is said and done, remember that you need to have a plan for your chatbot and keep your conversation simple. Otherwise, you might lose sight of the most important part — the story. If I had started my story with the tips I shared in this post, I might have been able to publish before the semester ended (the screenshots are all from a test page I set up for this experiment).️ But I still learned a lot and hope you did too. If you are able to write a longform story on chat, feel free to share your experiences by writing a response to this post!
