that I’m going to do a good job on today’s demo because this is one of those apps that

I think if you really give it its due, it might be life-changing for you. But it’s

a little bit complex to understand and a lot of people say it’s just another thing when

really it’s another thing that eliminates a whole bunch of just another things. The

app that we’re going to be talking about today is Slack and I’m just going to give

you a quick background of why it’s so relevant for me.

My team is growing. I’ve got a virtual team now of three people in addition to myself

spread all over the world and as my team has grown, I’ve found that I’m getting stretched

to my limit communication-wise because each one of my team members likes to use a different

tool for communications. One of them loves to communicate with me on Facebook messenger.

Another loves to communicate with me in Skype Messenger, the instant messaging side of Skype.

One uses email. Actually, they all use email fairly well but the bottom line was that I

was getting stretched into all of these different places and beginning to lose cycles, beginning

to lose the amount of time to find something and I was worrying that I was going to miss

something important because I wasn’t looking in the right place for something that was

relevant. Along at the perfect time comes Slack in my

life. It’s been around for a little while and teams are really discovering that it works

for them. It’s this new phenomenon of a different type of information overload which

I’m calling, for lack of a better term, fractured communications, the fact we’re

using all of these different channels to communicate with and we can get lost between the channels.

Information can get lost and things can get off the rails. Slack gives us a unified communication

interface that allows us to all work in the same space and they make it worthwhile because

they give us a whole bunch of benefits if we commit to communicating in Slack itself.

You want to have a quick look? I think you should stick around because we’re looking

at Slack today on DottoTech. I have to apologize for the bit of a long

intro but Slack is a tool that takes a little bit of time to get your head around. Now I

mentioned to you the reason that I really like Slack and why Slack is working so well

for me. It allows me to bring together into one place all of the people who I need to

communicate with on my team and flow all of our communications into the one space. There’s

a mobile app which I’ll show you in just a few moments but right now I’m in the desktop

app. There’s also a web-based app that you can use so Slack allows you to access your

account from any tool that you happen to be on, be it your smartphone, your computer or

even using web access from somebody else’s system.

Now Slack divides itself into kind of two broad areas. The first area is your teams.

Now teams could be companies, they could be departments or they could be project-based.

The second thing we have are the channels. Channels allow us to be more granular with

information so we might have a marketing team for our company. Within that marketing team,

we might have an events channel, a promotions channel, channels set at that level or it

could be more granular and we could have a channel set for a single event. We’re going

to Social Media Marketing World; here are all of the details and here’s all of the

conversation around that. Into each channels comes all of the different

accounts and the individuals can join into channels, which means they’ll be flagged

in the conversations in the channels. You can also direct message back and forth and

communicate at any point with all of your team members, which is the main way that you’re

going to be using Slack for the most part. It works like another instant messengering

application at that point. Now people always ask well, how is this different from email

or other instant messengers? It’s different than email because it’s very instant and

it’s very team-based so your information is not getting lost in the big email and there

isn’t as big a barrier to entry as far as opening your email, downloading your email,

opening it and then replying. It’s much instant messenger-y.

It’s not going to be for everybody. It doesn’t replace email completely. It reduces the amount

of email you do because most of your external communication with clients and prospecting,

those sorts of things are still going to go through email but with your team, your team

should have far fewer emails and you should have no more of those CYA emails where people

are copying you back and forth and you’ve got a huge email nested thread to read through

in order to find the relevant information. Slack completely eliminates that productivity

vampire. That alone probably makes it worth it for some of you to embrace Slack.

But it does more than that. It also gives us one place to store common files. It’ll

allow us to integrate with tools like Google Drive and Dropbox but it also has its own

file management and file storage system. In the free version, you get up to 5 GB of space

per team so you’ve got quite a bit of space that you can store files. But you can also

integrate other corporate tools or other tools like Dropbox if you choose to so it’s really

how you decide to set up your own system. Communication happens just as you’d expect.

You can send information back and forth to people, saying hey, how it’s going all through

the instant messenger app site. You could have nice communication going back and forth,

all threaded and tagged together. If you’re communicating in channels, everybody within

that channel will get the notification. You can also set up private groups. If you’ve

just been working on a small little thing or you want a private management group that’s

slightly separate, you can set them up as well. So it’s very flexible as far as how

you set it up. The way that you enroll different team members

and enroll people in Slack is you just invite them in. Send them an invite, they get it

by email then they sign up and then they’re brought in. the App itself is free and most

people I know are still using the free version of the app. Where you start to have to pay

is when your message archive that you want to be able to search is larger than 10,000

messages or when you need more of that 5 GB space per team for storage. There are a variety

of different entry points that you can go to the paid version.

I mentioned that 10,000 message limit. That’s one of the real strengths of Slack, the ability

to be able to search back on messages at any time. Far faster and far more efficient than

finding information in email or anything except, the possible exception in my mind, of Evernote.

The search is lightning fast and very accurate. So if you decide that it’s a tool you’re

going to use ongoing in your business, then upgrading to that larger than 10,000 message

bucket that you can search because it’s very valuable because then you can search

back through your whole historical archive. Now you don’t have to worry. That’s not

something you have to make a decision on early on in your Slack career because it takes a

long time to reach that 10,000 messages and even if you wait beyond that to decide that

you’re going to go for the paid tier, you only see the first 10,000 messages but the

others are still stored for you and available for later.

They use a fairly deep and good level of encryption as far as security goes so you’re in very

good shape as far as all of that and it’s very flexible. You could set it up for multiple

teams. I’ve got it set up for my DottoTech team, for the four people that I work with.

We also have it set up here to support a course that we’re teaching on Slack. I’ll put

a notification of that at the end of this video. We’re actually using Slack as a delivery

mechanism to teach it. We just launched this last week but we have some 40 or 50 students

already taking the course and each of the modules we set up as a channel. If you go

and look, you see the different media types. Here we’ve got a video available, which

is basically the introduction to the whole course running in YouTube that they can view

right within Slack. Isn’t that cool? And the integrations go way beyond that. I’m

going to have to do another demo showing the video conferencing integrations, how it works

with Dropbox and other tools, Evernote. It has got integrations with a large variety

of tools. Pretty much it’s kind of like Evernote in the fact that everybody wants

to get a piece of Slack so they’re all building their applications with Slack in mind. There’s

native integration already for tools like Trello, the task and to-do list manager, for

Wunderlist, Asana. We’re seeing all of them coming down the pipe and finding ways to integrate

with this tool to make sure that they take advantage of Slack’s communications capabilities.

I promised I would show you the mobile app before we’re done and if I didn’t promise

you, I should have promised you because the mobile app is just as good as the desktop

app. Here it is. I’m launching it on my smartphone. They do a good job of kind of

working your way through the tools. Here if I swipe to the left, it brings up all of the

different settings. I can switch teams. I can only see one team at a time in the mobile

app but I can switch back and forth between the different teams just that easily. If I

swipe to the left, I’ve got all of my channels and I’ve got all of my teams and I’ve

got all of those communication tools available to me there as well. So you can see that the

mobile app really is identical to the desktop app in form and in function so all of your

training and all of your learning on one platform translates across into the other. Of course,

it’s iOS and Android and everything in between so it works on pretty much all of the different

mobile platforms as well except Blackberry. It doesn’t work on Blackberry. Sorry.

I could spend hours on Slack and I’m probably going to do a few more demos on Slack coming

down the pipe, especially if you let me know in the Comments area if you want to know more

about Slack, if this is a tool that you like and that you want to know more about. But

it’s one that I’m really excited about. It’s changing how I work and I can see the

benefit on a daily basis. I hope you found this video today to be useful.

Now there are three ways to stay in touch with us here on DottoTech. The first is subscribe

to this channel, the second subscribe to our newsletter and the third is DottoTech is a

community-funded site supported through our partners at Patreon. If you want to know about

the different perks involved in being a patron supporter, I encourage you to drop by our

website. And as a completely self-serving note before

we’re done, I’m going to put a link in to this page which is the description of our

Slack Made Easy course. If you’ve decided you like what you see of Slack here and you

want to learn more about using it, why not take a look at the course? You can be a member

of the group that I was just showing you. We basically use Slack to teach you how to

use Slack. It’s a $40 investment and you will learn how to use Slack quickly, effectively

and get you in and productive as quickly as possible. So we’ll include the link in the

description field. That’s all the time we have for today’s show. I am Steve Dotto.

Until next time, have fun storming the castle.