#SlackDown: A lesson in brand interaction.
Yesterday, users of Slack experienced an end of days scenario. It. Stopped. Working.
For the over 1 Million daily users and 60k+ teams that spend around 2 hours on average EVERY weekday using the platform, November 23, 2015, was a day that will go down in tech folklore history.
Panicked Slackers took to Twitter and provided a seemingly endless amount of tweets poking fun at the crisis situation (some were really good), but what I really noticed was how someone else took to Twitter: Slack.
We use Slack at MeetBall, so I quickly noticed the service interruptions and immediately went to Twitter. My fellow non-engineer and community / social friend Niv showed up in the “while you were away” section of my timeline and I fell upon the tweet shown above.
My initial reaction was: “Who can type that fast?!”
Upon further review it seems as though Slack uses an internal team tool that allows for a coordinated group effort in handling support issues brought to their attention on Twitter. I dug even deeper and quickly realized the magnitude and scale at which Slack was handling their Twitter account during #SlackDown.
As it turns out, Slack had a plan in place for when shit hit the fan and that plan consisted of an all-hands-on-deck social media clean up crew. In the span of a few hours, the official @SlackHQ account tweeted OVER 2,300 TIMES in the form of kind, thoughtful, and funny replies to users tweeting about the service outage.
Most users were delighted by the personalized responses (that’s right, actual human hands typing the words), and a good stat to look at to highlight this is the fact that @SlackHQ gained over 3,300 followers yesterday (more than 7x any other day in the previous month).
As I scrolled through dozens of tweets, it became clear to me that Slack really cares about the community of people that use their product, and that the people that use the product really care about the company. Many users even tweeted kind words of support to Slack in an effort to help them through such a difficult time, including one of the best communities there is, Product Hunt.
It isn’t too hard to find the actual people that were behind the keyboards yesterday (some of them liked my tweet above, including the Slack Boss himself), and they no doubt had an exceptionally crazy day. What needs to be recognized though is what they accomplished, as they put together one of the best examples I’ve seen in how a brand should interact and engage with their audience.
Props to Slack for doing it right. (And thanks for getting it back up and running!)
