As a team, I wouldn’t say we’re slaving to a Chatbot, but there is a for sure feeling of cyborg in the air. At this point, if you’re not tuned to this channel, then “you don’t know slack!” about how to wring the most creativity and efficiency from your marketing team.
Our agency brims with loud, happy people who live/love to brainstorm. We pull it together in front of the clients on presentation days, and of course best behavior when on site, but otherwise – it’s a daily free-for-all…in a good way.
And if it’s possible to have a new BFF, a friend actually mutual to us all, it would be Slack. A messaging app that is good enough for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, it’s good enough for our squad of crazies — although the topics discussed in our channels are undoubtedly more wildly entertaining.
What Has Slack Done for Us Lately?
While hesitating to use the tired term “revolutionize how we communicate” – it has. One “super cool” office determined they are 30% more productive since using Slack. How they seriously came to that determination or if it only made for a great headline doesn’t matter, as that actually might be about right. (I think we are more like 35% more productive though – but thanks for playing. Our receptionist will be glad to validate your parking.)
I can tell you that everyone from our graphic designers in Tampa to our media specialists in Pennsylvania are using Slack probably 70% more than they are using email. I sort of pulled that number out of the air (like those other guys did) but the speed we converse is lightning-esque.
Slack Animals
So the topology of Slack consists of team/project channels, private channels, and direct messages. You can check out the tour on the site, but suffice to say, whether on desktop or app, it has changed how we communicate internally:
- Our email boxes are no longer the behemoths they once were – a larger percentage of their contents contain client correspondence, pretty much eradicating the crap ton of project email chains and even (Thank God!) some meetings.
- Although our business model embraces keeping us under one roof as homegrown, in-house talent, we are looping select outside resources in for specific projects with great success.
- Besides the direct messages via desktop, the app works cleanly and pretty brilliantly.
- By adding the plugins to the websites we host – the appropriate team members get a link and image alert via Slack when the content team adds a new post to CRUSH’s or a client’s blog for the link to share on social.
- We have become advanced, super-sleek hybrids who Slack docs and details during the course of our round table sessions.
- We are getting a TON of mileage out of our selection of BS channels where no holds are barred and the truly twisted culture of creatives are exposed in their natural habitat.
- The channels we’ve devoted to specific clients or website builds and social media marketing plans have saved us tons of time and speak to our love of the text message.
- As potentially immature as it may sound, the fav feature is the /giphy one – offering a twisted spin of the wheel for the always unexpected, it goes a LONG way some days to keeping everyone fired up and cracking up.
Here’s Slack’s current ad campaign to further inspire ya:
AND Slack’s blooper reel – hilarious!
So we brainstorm, send links to schedule new website tests, laugh like there’s no tomorrow and strategize; and when a team member is traveling to our Philly office or meeting with a client – there’s pretty much nothing they miss with an at-a-glance update project by project.
And finally, we don’t only use Slack as a tool to advance the progress of projects and joke around, our #CRUSH-Wellness channel is tracking our in-house fitness competition run by Jenny, one of our web developers, where everyone is reporting their daily steps to Slack via iOS Upload.
Like an Apple Watch which you can easily live without until you own one, we’ve got the blue-shirted Slack tiger by the tail and ain’t no way we’re letting go. Guess we’re officially Slack happy?
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