Using Emoji-based Workflows in Slack 👍

Ah, emoji — beloved by surreptitious flirters, introverts, inside jokers, and anyone trying to channel passive aggression without crossing a line. At Postlight, we ♥️emoji. They’re an important part of making someone feel welcome, gathering casual feedback, and reducing the number of messages sent into the Slack-sphere. 

As Slack has gobbled up email at many workspaces, emoji have become an important lexicon of the work culture therein. The first day on the job can be an unnerving one, learning the local ins and outs of Slack etiquette (will a :thumbsup: suffice as feedback, and is :dancing_burrito: too informal for this thread?) But adopting an emoji standard within Slack is rewarding and time-saving.

At Postlight, we take our Slack emoji, or Slackmoji, seriously. We even have our own channel to auto-share new emoji the team adds to Slack (which happens on the daily, then they cycle in and out of fashion). After all, you can never have too many low-res cultural references at the ready.

But with the introduction of a clever new Slackbot, emoji have taken on a more productive bend at Postlight. Now they play an important part of our workflows for marketing, product, sharing company news, and more.

How We Introduced Slackmoji into Postlight’s Workflows

Reacji Channeler is a good bot created by Slack after the Slack team itself found the app useful internally. They originally envisioned using the tool for a crowdsourced employee handbook. With the app, you can:

1. Create a Reacji channel in Slack using the command /reacji-channeler :emoji: #emojichannelname
2. Encourage your team to use said emoji throughout any Slack channel that your team shares
3. Watch the aggregate of those posts be crossposted automatically to the new Reacji channel

For those visual learners in the house, here is an example used at Postlight for our “lolz” channel, which uses Reacji to aggregate all posts tagged with a cry-laughing or a “LOL” emoji:

We use it to compile all the lolz (which ain’t much, but is honest work). Beyond that, we have created channels to help our team stay organized and streamline several of our processes. Here are some examples.

Slackmoji for Content Aggregation :TC:

Beyond being a communication tool, Slack is also a huge archive of what an office finds interesting. It can be a fascinating RSS feed of news, resources and opinions hand-picked by a team organically. Our Managing Partner Gina Trapani decided to put this to the service of the marketing department.

Aggregating articles for a marketing newsletter or social media feed is a lot of work, as any content marketer knows. Constantly coming up with new, relevant stuff is difficult for one person. The process of brainstorming can involve dozens of random sticky notes, digital or otherwise, and a surplus of Google Alerts that are difficult to parse through in crunch time. 

But Postlight employees were already sharing different articles daily across our dozens of Slack channels. So Gina created an emoji named after our blog, “Track Changes,” or :TC:, which became the de facto emoji for any article that the team found interesting, helpful, or funny enough to share widely.

Then she created a Reacji channel to aggregate all those posts in one place.

Now the process of finding articles to share and tapping into the insights of our team is as easy as browsing this Slack channel. We can see everything that has been posted and tagged for our publication. Voila: We repurpose our internal communications for marketing, like magic. Good bot.

As a bonus, this simple automation turns our newsletter and Twitter feed into an authentic peek behind the curtain of Postlight. Instead of nagging their colleagues to send articles of interest, marketers (like us) can take advantage of content curation that happens naturally.

We use this same workflow with :instagram:, an Instagram emoji, which aggregates into #postlight-instagram. This flow helps us easily aggregate company culture photos for the ‘Gram. 

Slackmoji for Sharing What You’ve Learned :TIL:

#TIL, or Today I Learned, is a popular lingo for describing anything you just learned. Our Slack TIL channel pulls in everything tagged with a :TIL: emoji. It aggregates handy tech tips, trivia-ready facts, and pop culture references, so we can all keep up with the times.

Slackmoji for Celebrating Great News :tada:

Team culture is important, and in a transient chat world like Slack, big news can get missed. That’s why Postlight created the good-news Slack channel. It surfaces stuff worth celebrating throughout our engagements, projects, and groups. It brings in everything tagged with a :heart:, :clappinghands: or :celebration: emoji, so we get the very best pet photos and exciting announcements in one memorable place.

Slackmoji for Product Ideation and Development with :Labs:

How often do you find yourself in the middle of a strange, niche pickle and think, I wish there was a tool for that? With an office of almost 60 people it happens often enough to do something about it. So we channeled the phenomenon into collaborative brainstorming.

Postlight periodically launches special projects called Labs which are tools, apps, and experiments created often in the name of fun or solving micro-problems. Coming up with genius problem-solving ideas on the spot is tricky. So — you guessed it — we created a Reacji channeler in Slack to tag ideas as they pop up. With our system, you can tag your own post or someone else’s, if you think a particular problem or question lends itself to a Labs solution.

When it comes time to roll out a new Labs project, we have a whole archive of real-world ideas ready to be built. And presto, our entire team is turned into product ideators.

Rethinking the use of technology (even emoji) is kind of our thing at Postlight. If you’re interested in more insights from our team on product, UX, business and more, listen to our podcast or get in touch about partnering on a potential digital project of your own.

Kayli Kunkel is the Marketing Director at Postlight. Want to talk marketing or emoji? Drop her a line at kayli.kunkel@postlight.com.