M+E Connections

How Slack Can Help M&E Companies Create a Digital Headquarters

Slack’s platform can help media and entertainment — and just about any other type of company — create the digital headquarters that all firms need today, according to executives at Slack, which Salesforce recent acquired.

There are “three practical ways that customers like many of you are transforming their work to make it better with a digital headquarters,” Tamar Yehoshua, chief product officer at Slack, said Sept. 22 at Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.

“First, customers are breaking down silos,” she pointed out during the conference session “Welcome to Your Digital HQ.” What that means is “they have one place for their people to communicate, collaborate and make decisions,” she noted.

Second, “they’re embracing flexible work [by] allowing people to communicate and work when and how they want” and, last, “they’re automating their work [by] plugging in tools and systems that they use every day into their channels,” she explained.

On Slack, over 2/3 of connections are between people on different teams and 93% of Slack users report it helps them stay connected as a team, she noted.

New Enhancements

The company is introducing new improvements to the Slack Connect Hub “so that it’s much easier to see all the organizations that you’re currently connected with and all the channels within those organizations,” Yehoshua said.

Slack also wants to “reduce the burden for inviting people to Slack Connect, so we’re launching a new capability” enabling enterprises to “sponsor connections with anyone” so they can connect with any customers and partners whether or not they were previously Slack customers, she noted.

Slack Huddles, meanwhile, is the “fastest-adopted feature we’ve ever launched,” with people using it, on average, 90 minutes a week, she said of the recently launched audio-first tool that helps users to communicate and work from anywhere.

The typical length of a huddle between team members is only 10 minutes long, she said, noting that’s much shorter than having a one-hour meeting.

More than 43% of Slack users are in different time zones, she also pointed out. With a new feature launched on Wednesday, users can natively record and upload short video and audio clips, she said.

She provided additional data points, including: 90% of Slack users report it helps them work remotely; there are 925,000 custom apps at work in Slack now; 80% of Slack users who build workflows are non-technical and the Slack Workflow Builder allows users to “create lightweight apps without writing a single line of code”; and 46% of Slack users say it helps them increase their productivity.

Slack’s “Coming-Out Party”

The session was “kind of a coming-out party” for Slack “as part of Salesforce,” according to Stewart Butterfield, Slack CEO and co-founder.

“Slack launched seven and a half years ago and it’s been a pretty incredible ride,” he said. “Today there are millions of people using Slack [including] nearly 800,000 unique organizations throughout the world. We have more than 177,000 [paying] customers in 150 countries.”

Those companies include leaders from nearly every industry, including media and technology, he noted.

“More than 1 trillion messages… have been sent in Slack” to date and there are more messages sent every day in Slack than there are tweets on Twitter, he said. “In fact, at peak times, in a single second, we deliver 300,000 messages.”

Slack’s mission from the start was to “make peoples’ working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive,” he recalled.

“Trillions of dollars of the world’s GDP is already mediated by work that happens on Slack” and that stands to have a major impact on the global economy, he told attendees and those watching virtually online.

“Slack integrates with everything,” he said. “It’s not just the 2,500 third-party apps in our app directory. It’s the ease and simplicity of integrating internal systems and tools.” It is also “endlessly flexible” to fit into the way that people work today, he noted.

Slack customers include Target. During a video interview with Butterfield shown during the presentation, Mike McNamara, Target CIO, noted that his company invested heavily in technology ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic and that paid off during the past year and a half.

“It was huge. It was everything. If we hadn’t made the investments leading up, there’s no way we would have had the 2020 year that we had,” according to McNamara.

Target needed a core commerce platform that was “scalable, stable, secure… on which you have the agility then to create new tech and new apps and new features and functions for our team members and our guests with speed,” he explained. It selected Slack.

“Our business went nuts last year,” McNamara said. “Between March last year and the beginning of April  — like in three weeks — effectively, the digital business grew three years. It kind of doubled in size.”

Benefits of Slack include its user interface, which he said is “simple,” “easy to use [and] secure.” With it, he said: “You’re able to create private channels, public channels. You can mix and match. It’s exactly what we needed,” according to McNamara.

And the application programming interfaces (APIs) Slack provided helped Target to “integrate Slack into all of our technology processes,” he said.