Just heard a story from a friend where they got a message over LinkedIn via their internal messaging system that they actually felt compelled to respond to (I know). My friend didn’t want to actually talk over LinkedIn messages, so she said “how about we move this to email?”.

I’ve done this a handful of times myself, literally with LinkedIn. Chances are what comes in over LinkedIn is pure garbage.

But in the rare case you get an interesting message, moving it to email immediately is a fair move.

But instead of the person my friend was talking to saying “sure, that sounds good, I’ll email you.” they said “here’s an invitation to our Slack workplace.” Oh, sure, of course, would you like to crawl inside my shirt with me too? lolz.

I’m sure some people are all loosey goosey with their Slacks, but not most of us. Slack is sacred ground. Slack is almost more personal than giving out our phone number.

The worst thing though is that they ignored her ask. That’s like ok bye bye territory for me.

What it reminded me of though is grocery stores.

I don’t know how popular this still is, but at one point in my life, every grocery story I ever went to wanted to make sure I had a little keychain plastic dongle thingy.

A “discount card” the one above is called. I’m not convinced they actually did anything useful for me. It felt more like a system for tracking shoppers to gain data about buying patterns. But it had another benefit to the store. If I actually put this thing on my keys, that means that, even inadvertently, I’m looking at their logo probably dozens of times a day. The branding is burning into my mind. What store am I going to go to? Some random one or the one that is burned into my mind?

That’s what the “join my Slack” thing feels like. Sure, I could send you an email, but even better, let me put my logo into the ever-present sidebar of an app you use all day long.