Harvard Biz Review uses Slack to distribute content

Harvard Business Review is using communications tool Slack to get some of its content in front of readers, reports Lucia Moses of Digiday.

Moses writes, “HBR decided to use Slack’s ‘Slackbot’ automated-assistant feature to deliver a collection of 200-plus best-practice articles on topics ranging from how to deal with a narcissistic boss to how to respond when an employee gives notice. The articles all follow the same template, with distinct sections like case studies and do’s and don’ts that are easily disaggregated. It broke those articles up into those distinct chunks and messages them to subscribers one chunk at a time.

“Once a Slack team owner installs the bot, they can invite other users to sign up. Subscribers can choose the frequency of the messages (daily or weekly) and delivery time.

“‘One of the things that impressed us early on about Slack is how it makes work life simpler and more productive,’ said HBR senior editor Maureen Hoch, head of a three-person team that created the HBR bot that was just approved by Slack. ‘And so does our content. In that way, Slack made more sense for us.’

“The bot, created with help from Boston-based firm Vermonster, works on a one-to-one basis; down the road, HBR may want to explore delivering messages to groups, since lots of employees use Slack in teams. The messages are automated, but users can input simple commands like ‘case’ to get a relevant case study or ‘link’ to get a link to the full article.”

Read more here.