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Add Slack broadcast learnings to handbook (#17339)
* Add Slack broadcast learnings to handbook Add practical advice from running a Pylon broadcast: pinging Sales more than once with a final send-time warning, excluding legacy/archived channels and channels with recent negative sentiment, optionally excluding existing users, sending as yourself rather than as PostHog, a light self-aware tone, a rough every-couple-of-weeks cadence, and how replies arrive plus when to hand questions off to TAMs/CSMs. Generated-By: PostHog Code Task-Id: 0185e227-a042-4951-9c44-4be8483c3b2d * Update contents/handbook/marketing/slack-messaging.md * Update contents/handbook/marketing/slack-messaging.md * Update contents/handbook/marketing/slack-messaging.md * Update contents/handbook/marketing/slack-messaging.md * Update contents/handbook/marketing/slack-messaging.md * Apply suggestion from @joethreepwood --------- Co-authored-by: Joe Martin <84011561+joethreepwood@users.noreply.github.com>
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contents/handbook/marketing/slack-messaging.md

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@@ -19,29 +19,50 @@ Broadcasts go to every shared customer and partner channel, so they're best rese
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- [Maintenance and incident comms](/handbook/marketing/incident-comms) where customers should be aware of disruption.
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- Invitations to betas, events, or programs aimed at existing customers.
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Because every customer sees the same message, keep broadcasts infrequent and high-signal. If a message is only relevant to a subset of accounts, it's usually better to let the account owner share it directly.
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Because every customer sees the same message, keep broadcasts infrequent and high-signal. As a rough guide, **no more than one broadcast every couple of weeks** as it's easy to tip over into spamming people. If a message is only relevant to a subset of accounts, it's usually better to let the account owner share it directly.
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## Check with Sales before sending
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Broadcasts reach live customer and partner channels, and Sales or the TAMs may know of sensitive accounts that should be excluded from a particular comm. Always give them a chance to flag any before you send:
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1. Share a brief update in <PrivateLink url='https://posthog.slack.com/archives/C090RCG671C'>#group-cs-sales-support</PrivateLink> describing the comm you're about to send and who it will reach.
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2. Allow at least **24 hours** for salespeople and TAMs to respond with any accounts that should be excluded or any other concerns.
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3. If no feedback is received within that window, go ahead and send your comm – you don't need to wait for explicit sign-off or be blocked.
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3. **Ping more than once.** A single message is easy to miss. Follow up a couple of times, and give a final heads-up with the scheduled send time (e.g. "this is going out at X") so people have a last chance to flag anything.
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4. If no feedback is received within that window, go ahead and send - you don't need to wait for explicit sign-off or be blocked.
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Pylon broadcasts should be treated like email messages and added to the Marketing Messaging calendar as standard.
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This step is required, but it keeps PMMs unblocked while giving the people closest to our customers a simple way to catch anything sensitive.
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### Excluding channels before you send
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Beyond accounts that sales or CS flags, scan the audience yourself for channels that shouldn't receive the message:
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- **Drop legacy and archived channels.** Pylon's audience often includes old or inactive channels. They're usually obvious from the name – exclude them so the message only lands in live channels.
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- **Check for recent negative sentiment.** It's worth quickly asking an LLM to scan the `#posthog-*` channels and surface any negative sentiment from the last two weeks. This usually turns up a handful worth excluding.
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- **Consider excluding people already using the feature.** If the broadcast is nudging people towards something, exclude accounts that already use it – or word the message so it still works for them (e.g. framing it as "in case you missed these features" rather than assuming they haven't seen them).
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## How to send a broadcast in Pylon
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1. Log into the [Pylon admin](https://app.usepylon.com/) using SSO with your PostHog email address.
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2. Find the broadcasts feature in the Pylon UI and create a new broadcast.
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3. Select the audience – typically all customer and/or partner Slack channels. Double-check the audience before sending, as the message goes to live customer channels.
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4. Write your message. Keep it short, friendly, and link out to the [changelog](/changelog), blog post, or docs for the full detail.
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5. Preview, then send.
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5. **Send the message as yourself, not as PostHog.** Pylon lets you choose the sender - sending from a real person feels more personal and gets a better response than a faceless company message.
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6. Preview, then send.
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## Before you send
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- **Write copy that follows our [style guide](/handbook/content/posthog-style-guide).** These messages land in customer-facing channels, so they should read like a helpful heads-up from a teammate, not a press release.
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- **A light, self-aware tone works well.** Leaning into the fact that it's an automated broadcast (rather than pretending otherwise) tends to land well and pre-empts any "stop spamming us" reactions.
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- **Link, don't dump.** Point people to the canonical source (changelog, blog, docs) rather than pasting long updates into Slack.
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- **Coordinate with related comms.** A broadcast usually accompanies an email and/or in-app announcement. Make sure timing and messaging are consistent across channels.
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- **Remember the audience is live customers.** Once sent, a broadcast cannot be unsent from people's Slack, so review carefully.
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## After you send
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Broadcasts generate replies, and how they reach you isn't always obvious:
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- **Replies land in a thread in your private Slackbot**, which isn't shareable with the rest of the team. If a customer replies *outside* the thread in their channel, you won't see it at all unless you're already a member of that channel.
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- **Expect a lot of questions.** Use judgement on what to answer yourself versus what to hand off:
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- Simple, generic questions (e.g. "where can I read more?") are fine to answer directly.
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- Account-specific questions (e.g. "how would *we* use this?") are usually better routed to the account's TAM or CSM, who have the context to answer well.

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