Is Please Share really the best Slack app ever created? You must be saying to yourself “whoa, do you really believe you’re better than thousands of apps on the Slack platform?”
No, we don’t think we’re better than anyone else!
Look, we’re just playing around here. Given everything that’s going on in the world right now, we could use a bit more of that, right? Plus, one of our philosophies is to not take ourselves too seriously, so let’s have some fun. We’re only selling software, not curing cancer.
Truth be told, Slack doesn’t even know who we are – we just launched our beta program. Maybe they will one day. That said, do we believe that Please Share has the potential to become a flagship Slack app? Absolutely! Let us explain…
Universally Applicable
There are many different types of apps available to companies using Slack. According to Slack’s website, there are more than 2,000 apps available falling into categories such as Office Management, Communication, Developer Tools, and Security and Compliance.
Since we’ve started building Please Share, we’ve enthusiastically followed many companies who have built businesses around Slack apps. Standuply, Obie, Teamline, Slaask and Polly are a few that come to mind. Without the Slack infrastructure, these companies might not even exist. Yet today, they’ve carved out niches and successful businesses by piggybacking on the Slack platform.
Of course, there are also many examples of established technology companies that have extended the core capabilities of their tools to the Slack platform. The big guys like Google (Gmail, Drive, Calendar), Microsoft (Outlook, Outlook Calendar, OneDrive) and Cisco (Webex) have Slack apps as do many well-regarded solutions not in the Fortune 500 – like Datadog, Mailchimp and Hubspot. With so many great apps, Slack offers businesses and their employees the flexibility to adapt, modify or embrace new workflows that streamline existing processes.
As it relates to what we’re doing at Please Share, it occurred to us that many Slack apps are designed to serve specific departments (Freshdesk, Groove), job functions (Pingdom, Baremetrics, InVision) or certain individuals who, for example, find it easier to manage conversations in Slack than they do their email client.
While we recognize there are exceptions, we believe that one of the unique aspects of Please Share – compared to the community of Slack apps – is that our employee advocacy tool is universally applicable across an entire organization, its departments and its team members who use Slack.
Does that mean we expect every employee to use our app? No, of course not. But the value of Please Share is easy to grasp.
Incredibly Simple to Use
Slack apps vary in complexity. This is primarily driven by the service they provide and the use cases that they solve for. Where polling solutions like the aforementioned Polly, Advanced Poll and Simple Poll are incredibly easy to interact with, other apps require more inputs (with different screens/views) or are primarily bot-driven and rely on command inputs, which may be foreign to many people (myself included). When developing Please Share, our goal was to create an intuitive tool that’s simple to use (brilliantly simple, in fact).
Do we have everything figured out? No. Are there still improvements that can be made? Yes, absolutely. But from our app name to the way the content is presented to the calls to action to the simple menu, we believe that Please Share is almost as easy as it gets for team members to understand and use. In a day and age where people demand great customer experiences and where B2B apps are trying to mirror B2C apps, simplicity can drive greater adoption and usage.
Tangible and Trackable ROI
All Slack apps – okay, most Slack apps – are designed to provide value to the companies and individuals that use them. What that value is, though, can vary greatly. A video conferencing app like Zoom can make it easier to schedule or start a meeting, saving time by not having to navigate between screens or apps. A customer support app like Groove can help customer success team members respond to inquiries faster, route or escalate an incoming message to the right person. And knowledge base tools like Guru can help memorialize relevant company insights to be used by others at a later date.
Valuable? Yes, all of these apps provide value. Is that value tangible? Well, that’s situational and largely dependent on what metrics a company uses to determine ROI.
But nearly every company that exists has content, news, job postings and announcements that they want to distribute as widely as possible. In fact, they’ve often invested significant resources to produce that content or obtain a placement in premiere news publications.
Please Share makes it easy for companies to harness their employees to help distribute valuable content assets. Not only that, we natively track the results of those initiatives and enable companies to associate a dollar amount to the value of clicks generated back to their website.
In that sense, every employee who chooses to share a company update using the Please Share Slack app, can help boost the ROI associated with a company’s content initiatives – ROI that can be translated into specific dollar amounts.
The Best Slack App?
So, is Please Share the best Slack App ever created? At this point, there’s no way to know. Only time will tell. As we noted earlier, no one even knows about us right now.
But if your company is looking for an easy to use solution that works with Slack, that’s universally applicable across your entire organization and that can drive measurable results, look no further than Please Share.