I asked Darby to turn off her Slack notifications earlier this summer. The constant pinging from her office was driving me slightly mad.
As with any new tech, it’s how you choose to use it. Thankfully, Slack has many customization settings and a bevy of How-To videos to dive into for new users. Slack also has commercials and we like well-made commercials.
I particularly like how the Slack sounds, which were heretofore annoying (to me), become musical as the spot progresses.
Why Slack?
According to its design partner Pentagram, Slack is a collaboration hub that is changing the way people work and communicate, helping workers be more productive through a cloud-based set of proprietary collaboration tools.
According to Slack, Kin + Carta’s global network of more than 1,600 technologists, strategists, and creatives collaborate in Slack to optimize client experiences. In the following video, Kin + Carta employees describe why they turn to Slack instead of email inside the organization.
It may be worth noting that I don’t believe Slack is a natural replacement for email. I think Slack is for threaded autonomous team conversations, while email is for documenting work processes, updates on projects, et al.
In my view, the two work well together and complement one another.
New: Slack Across Orgs
Slack’s founder, Steward Butterfield, sees it much differently than me and the company’s new product, Slack Connect, sure looks like an email replacement.
In 2003, Butterfield co-founded Flickr. As CEO, he helped build Flickr into one of the largest web services in the world. Ergo, when he says he has a better solution than email for business conversations, I want to hear him.
I also want to hear these animated characters.
“All kinds of people on all kinds of teams use Slack to do amazing things.”
Agreed.
What About Adpulp’s Slack?
Adpulp’s Slack is newish and still pretty quiet from day-to-day. To liven things up, I recently invited our Emerging Voices to our Slack and now I’m about to invite a handful of PR pros that I like and respect.
Also, I’m curious about the value of opening Slack to our readers. If you have an opinion to share or you’d like to beta test the reader model for our team environment, let me know and I’ll invite you.
