#SlackDown

I recently read Jason Meeks' post on Slack’s outage that happened last week. If you missed it, check it out, it was a great read. TLDR: During the outage, Slack's social team tweeted out over 2,300 times (holy moly!!!) in a matter of a few hours to show solidarity to its users while maintaining its usual playfulness. I couldn’t help but want to expound on this topic.

I can definitely feel for the Slack team. I have worked in the SaaS space for close to four years now, many of them in the social media/community part of the business. I have experienced a few show stopping bugs along the way and it is painful. I can't think of something that causes more panic than unexpected product down time.  This is especially true for those who rely on your product to run their businesses, Slack is certainly no different.

I can tell you that Slack’s ability to turn angry, upset, worried customers into happy ones didn’t just have to do with the way the team handled the situation that one day. Rather, this was a lesson on culture. Companies that intentionally build great cultures and focus on the sacredness of what that means, are the the ones who are able to come out on top even when show stopping bugs occur. People can feel that. That culture permeates every interaction a company's employees have with their customers. For Slack, that equity was already in the bank.

I can bet that many of the customers that tweeted about the outage had previously been touched by Slack’s culture. I know I had been, even with the smallest interactions I have had with their team on Twitter. The trust was already built up.

There is a great lesson to be learned here. Social media is just an extension of your brand’s culture. If your culture sucks, if your company is just using social media to push an agenda or is only responsive to customers in times where damage control is needed, you will never have enough equity with your users to overcome those times.