I probably don’t need to detail Slack’s meteoric rise as a messaging app. This chart says it all:
(Chart removed, sadly)
Their growth has been absurd. Millions of teams are using it across the world, and people are going crazy for it. It’s not hard to see why – it has everything you’d want in a messaging app. It has a clean, friendly interface, it’s conscientious of users’ attention, and it’s compatible across platforms. Slack’s value (or valuation) as a messaging app isn’t what interests me about it though.
I’m interested in the fact that it is changing the way online communities interact. By enabling any given user to have multiple ‘organizations’, and any organization to have multiple integrations, Stuart Butterfield and co. have turned their simple “MSN Messenger 2.0” into a sprawling Internet Hydra that could eat everything else on your computer. It is your inbox, online forums, RSS feed, Skype, Evernote, and a million other apps all rolled into one.I, for one, welcome our new Slack overlords.
My time as Marketing Manager (and by extension, Community Manager) at Lighthouse Labs has provided me with the perfect case study for how Slack can be used. Our 8 week coding bootcamp format has given me 3 unique perspectives on Slack’s functionality as a community platform:
- SMB (we only have about 10 full-time employees here at any given time)
- Enterprise (we have over 400 users including students, teachers, and alumni)
- Domain-specific forum (We’ve become a hub for knowledge sharing about development)
(Sidebar: this also makes Slack’s pricing model horribly punitive to us. Educational pricing, Slack! Figure it out!)
We also have a combination of physically present students and remote alumni. All that, plus the fact that developers are the mad scientists of the internet, makes LHL the perfect Slack petri dish for community management experimentation.I’m going to share some of the unique ways Slack has changed my Community Manager role, as well as a few of the ways I can see it being used in the future:
Now
Content Curation
One of more arduous tasks of a CM is curating a fresh stream of content that our audience on Twitter will find interesting. My Marketing Coordinator, Kirtarath, and I have tried to automate this with push services like Google Alerts and BuzzSumo, but have never gotten the traction I would like from our content. The main issue is that I need my content to establish Lighthouse Labs’ knowledge leadership as a top technical school, but my technical fluency stops at knowing the difference between Angular and Node. Behind every coding-related tweet from the Lighthouse account was essentially me doing this:
With Slack, our community actively shares articles with each other, and by extension, with me. Each cohort has a specific channel for sharing knowledge (ex: #web-june2015), and there are a host of other topic-specific channels for all 400 users (ex: #general, #random, design, #devops). Instead of relying on the faceless Google Machine for new content, I have an army of 400 real people telling me exactly what kind of stuff I should tweet. I’ve even taken it a step further and set up a channel called #socialcontent, where our staff share things they think we should tweet (this never happened before):
(Screenshot removed)
The end result is instead of tweeting cut-and-paste articles on Vancouver’s growing tech community with minimal engagement, I’m able to put out stuff that’s directly code-related and most importantly, engages our community much better.
Monitoring
When people discuss the value of social media, one of the big things that will come up is ‘monitoring’. This is keeping tabs on what people in your extended community say about your brand. A good Community Manager is always looking for brand-related trends, news, and most importantly, sentiment. This is something I take pretty seriously.
The traditional way to monitor sentiment is through different “streams”, targeted at what you’re trying to hear. To give you an idea of how this works, are a few screenshots of the monitoring I’ve set up:
(Screenshots removed)
I show all of this only to say that I crafted a comprehensive online monitoring strategy… But in a few months with Slack it has been completely blown out of the water. There are two fundamental problems with monitoring through social media:
- It has to be part of your workflow. You may have noticed above that I have 5 different tabs for monitoring, each with different streams. You can add another 4 on there for Facebook and Twitter direct messages, mentions, and wall posts. Monitoring all of these takes time and conscious thought. As my role has expanded at Lighthouse, I’ve gone from at least looking at these every day to going weeks without reading them. I have a feeling that’s the reality for a lot of busy marketers.
- You only hear what people want to say over social media. In my experience, this comprises of three things: exuberant praise, damning indictments, and useless noise. It also only applies to those who have social accounts. Better than nothing, but not always reflective of the community’s true pulse.
Slack addresses both these issues and allows me to monitor in an entirely new way. First of all, since I am always logged into Slack for its main use (staff communication), it is painless to monitor the community. As I heard a developer once say, “the difference between ‘command-tab’ and ‘click-load-click-load’ can completely change your workflow”.Secondly, because Slack’s context is interpersonal communication instead of me-to-the-world pushes, I get to see what people are actually talking about (to a greater extent). For example, this week two different cohorts of students posted about our new competitor, RED Academy:
(Screenshots removed)
Regardless of their thoughts on it, this is certainly worth knowing and it isn’t something they would be tweeting out. I also get to see how they feel about the latest language updates, the Meetup we hosted yesterday, and which teacher is engaging the most online.
Event Management
Events are a huge part of community management and a major part of Lighthouse Labs. We put on 3 to 5 free events every month. As anyone who puts on free events knows, one of the biggest struggles is figuring out how many people are actually going to go. We have events where 50% of the RSVPs show up, and ones where 150% do (those are usually the ones with free beer).
Part of the issue is our students and alumni. They make up the majority of attendees at our events, but most of them can’t be bothered to RSVP, check their email, or in the case of Demo Day, tell me what their project is about. I don’t totally blame them either – they’re busy coding, and they know they’re welcome come no matter what as part of our community.
With Slack I can ping all of them in 5 minutes and have them see it, instead of taking 30 minutes to create an email in MailChimp and then get a 60% open rate. I can get instant feedback on the events we put on, and coordinate logistics faster than ever. This is especially useful when setting up event details:
(Screenshot removed)
The Future
The benefits I listed above are all essentially using the core Slack functionality – messaging. But as I alluded to above, with integrations Slack is growing to be much bigger than messaging. Here are 3 integrations that I think will revolutionize community management even further:
1. Intercom
Intercom is a universally-loved customer communication tool. By integrating with Slack, both response time and switching time (the “command-tab” factor) can be shortened. This time constraint issue has been the one reason Lighthouse hasn’t adopted Intercom yet.. And that will change soon.
2. Perch
Although there is no formal integration right now, Slack does support other video services (Google Hangout, GoToMeeting, Room) so I’m sure it’s only a matter of time. Especially given the Slack team actually uses Perch.
For community management, this means creative companies can put a face to their brand like never before. Imagine a Slack channel that is permanently hooked into a Perch video portal at their office, where customers could see exactly what’s going on at the office. For culture-focused tech companies that are constantly needing to recruit talent, this could be huge.
3. Slackin
Slackin is a simple button that sets up a link for people to join Slack channels. I’m sure many people reading this post are thinking that Slack works for me because Lighthouse already has a community of students – most products and services don’t have that built-in Slack community framework.
I think that’s going to change.
I can imagine a near future in which when you become a customer (or before), you get invited to join the product’s Slack channel. Code like Slackin and this Typeform hack are making that very easy, and we are already starting to see it in action with companies like Pixate. When this gains momentum, all Community Managers will really have to bow to our Slack overlords.
Oh, and if you’re still not convinced that Slack is the future of community management, I have 2 words for you: custom emojis.