Though still technically in our beta period, as we prepare to add Please Share to the Slack app directory and ramp up our promotional activities, one of the questions we have already received from customers is “what’s the best way to onboard team members and coworkers to Please Share?”
This blog post will provide a few suggestions, but first we want to provide a little background. Please Share is by no means the first employee advocacy solution on the market. By most accounts, employee advocacy might be considered mature technology – at least within its own little market niche.
The Old, Legacy Solution Approach
Other solutions (which we won’t name in this blog) have been around for many years, most before Slack ever existed. Because of this, they were designed differently than Please Share. For example, most competing solutions have web-based portals for admins and employees to access, and many have mobile apps for employees to use.
Provided how these solutions are delivered, the onboarding process can, in some cases, take months. There’s training for the admin, content to upload and sync, training for the end users, and interfaces to register for, download and log in to.
While not overly complicated, – employee advocacy should never be complicated – there are a number of steps that companies must go through to introduce an employee advocacy solution, onboard and train team members, and roll out the strategy.
A New Streamlined and Modern Approach
Please Share has taken a completely different approach in that we are the first employee advocacy specifically designed for Slack. This alone provides a number of inherent benefits. For example, as a Slack app, Please Share…
- Operates in a solution that your team members already use on a daily basis
- Leverages an interface in which your team members are already familiar
- Works in all Slack clients – web, desktop and mobile
- Has relatively little operational overhead (i.e., we can keep our costs down)
The benefit of using Please Share vs. other tools is that you can quickly introduce an employee advocacy solution without spending a lot of money while also improving engagement results because we make it incredibly easy for companies to use.
Onboard Your Team Members
So what’s the best way to onboard your colleagues to Please Share? As with most technology solutions, it depends on your company’s culture. There is no right or wrong approach, but here are a few suggestions that you may want to consider.
Send an Email
For companies that rely on traditional communication to the inbox, introduce Please Share to your coworkers with an email announcing your new employee advocacy strategy. It’s quick, effective and cheap. We’ll even help you out by providing some starter copy.
Subject: A new app to make it super easy to share our social media messages
Hello, all.
We’ve just started using a service called Please Share, which provides a much faster and easier way to share our social media posts using Slack.
In the [Name of Slack channel you selected] channel, you'll start seeing some posts with buttons that say Post to Twitter and Post to LinkedIn. Once you’ve connected your Twitter and/or LinkedIn accounts to Please Share, you will be able to post updates directly from Slack in a matter of just a few seconds.
Alternatively, you can use the “Web sharing options” to share content without connecting your social accounts to Please Share.
There are a number of support videos on the Please Share help page, which can also be accessed via the menu icon that appears in every update.
Thank you for helping us promote and distribute noteworthy company news and announcements.
[Your Name]
Invite Everyone to the Slack Channel
Another way to introduce Please Share to your coworkers is just to invite them to the channel (e.g., “announcements,” “public-relations” or “marketing,” etc.) that you’ve designated for posting share requests (from the Please Share web app).
This can be done on a one-off basis, as part of onboarding new employees, or by inviting the entire company or a specific department to the channel. Take a look at Slack’s website for more details on how to invite people to a channel.
Make an Announcement at a Companywide Meeting
Regularly scheduled all-hands meetings are a great opportunity to introduce Please Share. You could use Slides, show one of our videos or maybe even demo how Please Share works. If that’s too much work, however, you could also just say something like this…
“Hey everyone. We’d appreciate it if you would help us share company news on social media channels. We’ve just introduced a new service that makes this incredibly simple for you. Just check the [Name of Slack channel you selected] channel in Slack and use the Post to Twitter or Post to LinkedIn buttons to share updates. It literally takes less than 5 seconds to share content – 30 seconds if you add your own comments to the update.”
Using this approach, it could take less than a minute to introduce Please Share as your employee advocacy solution to your company. Pretty efficient, right?
A Bonus, but Daring Suggestion
If your employees are seasoned technology users, you may opt to do nothing at all and let employees discover Please Share on their own. Assuming that you’re posting updates (aka share requests) to a channel that people are aware of (and not a channel that no one’s been invited to), you may not have to even make an announcement.
Please Share was designed to be brilliantly simple to use, both from the Please Share administrator perspective as well as the employees who share content.
When one of your team members sees an update, he or she will naturally click on the Post to Twitter or Post to LinkedIn buttons. If not signed in (which will be the case initially), Please Share will prompt them on how to do so. And if they have questions, they can always access the help page via the menu icon that appears in every update posted to Slack.
This is an unusual onboarding approach, but if it matches the company culture, there’s nothing wrong with growing adoption organically.
Ready to Get Started?
Introducing an employee advocacy strategy at your company does not have to be complicated or take months of onboarding and training. Companies can add the Please Share app to their Slack workspace, post their first update, and introduce the services to their coworkers in just a matter of a few minutes.
Are you ready to give Please Share a try? Sign up for our beta program today.