Productivity Boost with @SlackHQ
We introduced Slack beginning of August 2014 @kubleag
The first reaction in general was: Why yet another chat tool? After all, we where happy with Podio. But for some reason we never embraced the Podio chat function. Our chat was about 50% on Skype and 50% on Google.
Due to the fact that part of our team is in Argentina, we depend very much on chat and virtual collaboration tools and we test out anything that sounds innovative and fun.
I’m not going to write about why email is bad or why I believe that Slack does chat better than anybody else on the market and is the money well worth. I’m just going to list some examples and features that we find incredible useful.
how we use Slack
Apart of the usual chat functions, we really dig:
Realtime Social Media Monitoring
We monitor Tweets and mentions that we send etc. via the Slack integration for channels that we own.
For general search monitoring we use IFTT and send it to Slack (this also works with Facebook and Instagram).
Realtime Website Up or Down
Some websites are really important and we must make sure that they are up and running. And it’s good if not only one person sees it when a page is down. We have a Slack channel called updates. There we drop all kind of nerd stuff like if a website is up or down. Using http://pingdom.com/ we trigger Gmail and send it to Slack.
The same process can be applied for anything that comes in via email and needs to be shared with the team in realtime. Like our customer support for @VersityStream.
Mailchimp Subscriptions
Super easy configuration for new Mailchimp subscribers. This is more for fun. It makes us happy when surfers subscribe to one of our newsletters.
RSS Updates
Web blog for ourselves and for clients. Therefore its crucial that we are all aware what has been published. This is also an efficient way to keep teams informed about our own published content. We usually mix the RSS Feed in together with the correspondent social media monitoring.
Stream.Versity.ch Registrations
Since we are in a very early phase of our blended learning service Versity, we like to track new users. So our development team implemented this using https://www.drupal.org/project/slack and configured a rule.
It’s my believe that any team that works virtually will benefit from @SlackHQ and simply loves it. Exciting UX, extremely fun communication and endless flexibility, to name just some of its qualities.
