Tag Archives: slack

What’s your project stack?

Quick thought as I await confirmation as to whether I’m meeting with a client via Skype or Google Hangouts (or whatever the new name is): just as marketing technology has evolved into the marketing stack, project tools have now created a project stack. Not to add to everyone’s tech burden, but I really think every team or project should have a project stack.

This took me a while to find as I initially used “stacked” as an image search term

Since we have so many no-cost-to-user tools out there, marketers have redundant tools for communication (email, Slack, group texts [please don’t], POTS) as well as content creation (Office Suite, Google Suite, LibreOffice) and project management (seems every one of the above has some sort of sharing/management feature). I’m sure we’ve all found ourselves in a project where we friction develops because one or more persons uses one system while everyone else uses another.

Put another way, did you ever have that moment when you realized that a co-worker had five different ways to communicate with you and yet he used none of them? That, raised to the power of three because now there are two additional systems (content creation and project management) to get crossed up on.

The solution? Set expectations and define your project stack.

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Follow the Money to Understand Email Hate

Rival technologies and technologists sure love to hate email. Without naming names, messaging platforms often define themselves as the solution to email, as if email represented a major problem.

OK, I’ll name names: Slack.

Witness this quote from The Verge:

Slack hasn’t killed email just yet [emphasis mine], but the new refurbished post system adds a major feature that was lacking in earlier versions of the software. Now, rather than minimizing the app to compose an email that collated longer thoughts, you’ll be able to draft and edit more complex and detailed messages in Slack itself…

It helps to understand that Slack and its messaging brethren have a financial incentive to “kill email” (whatever that means) while no private company controls email as a platform. As a result, we only hear about the strengths of email as a platform from companies that indirectly make money off of email, such as ISPs (ad revenue) and ESPs (deployment fees).

Compared to any other messaging platform, email has a lot going for it:

Near-total penetration
High degree of interoperability (you can read an email from any ISP on just about any other ISP)
Wide range of message types supported
Oh, yeah, it’s free

However, since email has no business model, as such, it seems amateurish in comparison with the Slacks of the world. Indeed, email standards have evolved over time, thus lacking the consistency of vision that newer platforms generally have. Despite the encomiums for the recently-deceased creator of email, no single person or business entity gets to take credit for email as we know it.

What this means is that while email has any number of detractors who will get paid to weaken it, it has no overarching champion to defend it. Think about that the next time you read any article that includes the words “to finally kill email.”

Why Do People Keep Trying to Kill Email?

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The “email isn’t dead” think piece has become something of a cottage industry. Several email savants, including my good friend Chris Marriott, have written very convincingly of the continuing value of email marketing both to marketers and to consumers.

Rather than add to this august body of work, I’d like to begin another line of inquiry: why do businesses keep trying to kill email?

Do not ask for whom the email bell tolls…

The answer to this question gives us some insight not only on how to keep it alive but also how to make email thrive for your business.

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