Colleen O'Connor December 8, 2020 | 06:33:27
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Slack Tips And Tricks You May Not Know (But Desperately Need)

In major tech news, Salesforce recently purchased Slack for $27.7 billion. Why does the sale make sense? As we’ve seen, Slack is great for staying connected with co-workers on a daily basis. According to a recent TechCrunch article, the Salesforce COO says that the deal was worth the price because it lets Salesforce bring together all the pieces of their platform. It’s a platform that has expanded over the years from pure CRM to include marketing, customer service, data visualization, workflow and more. Slack gives Salesforce a missing communication layer on top of its other products, something especially important when interactions with customers, partners or fellow employees have become mostly digital.

How Slack helps PR pros

PR pros are communicators. Emails are a great way to communicate, but they’re rarely the fastest. Slack cuts down on email back and forth and helps us work faster and smarter. At Crenshaw, we Slack on a daily, even hourly basis about everything. But there are so many tips and tricks people aren’t using that could help them work harder and smarter. Check out some Slack tricks you should know.

Go mobile – This one’s a no-brainer. Download the Slack mobile app for iOS and Android. Slack’s mobile app should always be at your fingertips. It is especially helpful if you are away from your computer and need to quickly communicate with your team. 

Highlight keywords – If you’d like to be notified for necessary messages and avoid the unnecessary ones, consider setting specific keywords to let Slack notify about them.

Reminders with Slackbot – Slack has built-in time-based reminders that can cue you to events on your calendar. If you have a meeting at 3 pm and are extremely busy in your working schedule, then instead of keeping it in your mind, you can set your meeting schedule on Slackbot and get it before the meeting starts. You can also set daily reminders like to log hours everyday at a certain time so you don’t fall behind! 

Pin important messages – If you want everyone to pay attention to an important message, just pin it! This is much easier than sending the same message to everyone separately and it will also be easily accessible at a later date and time. 

Integrate with apps – Slack has a wide app catalog for users to integrate into their daily workflow. Some of my fave apps are: Harvest, to log hours right on Slack, Zoom, to start a meeting faster, and Google Drive, for notifications that a doc is being edited. Check out the full app library

Do Not Disturb – Have you ever been in a meeting where you are sharing your screen and Slack notifications keep popping up on the side of the screen? This is every PR pro’s nightmare. Change your status to “Do Not Disturb” to avoid unnecessary notifications. 

Customize the sound – Are you subscribed to multiple Slack channels and want a way to know where the message is coming from? In your settings, you can change the sounds of notifications to differentiate what sound belongs to each channel.  

Custom emojis – Sometimes words can’t express what you are feeling. Slack has a wide array of emojis but also allows users to add custom ones. In our workplace, we have custom emojis for Starbucks, Chick-fil-a, and a dancing Drake emoji. They add a little something extra to messages!

Create a to-do list – You can easily save messages and turn them into a to-do list. Just highlight your message and hit ‘save’ to access later.

Make a voice call – Did you know you could make phone calls over Slack? If you need to speak to someone quickly and don’t have their cell number, just click the small phone icon on their profile and you’re instantly connected.

Share webpages faster – Often, PR pros will want to share an article with the team to discuss how to create new reactive pitches based on news. Install the Slack chrome extension for faster sharing. 

Survey your team – Ask your team their opinion about something more quickly with the Simple Poll app on Slack. This app will help gather thoughts and feedback from teammates on company culture, ideas and brainstorming. 

What is your best kept Slack secret? Let me know on Twitter @colleeno_pr

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