Slack's update & what to do 🤯 - The Slack CM Newsletter Issue 7
This week's words of encouragement
A reminder of how important you are to your members and your company.
A community that I loved recently lost its community manager. Even though the community remained active, it didn't feel the same anymore.
When I thought of the brand, the product, and the community, I thought of the amazing experiences that the old community manager had created.
Once she was gone, I fell out of the community. I even stopped using the product. It made me realize how often my perception of a brand depends on the community manager. You're powerful AF.
Slack's updates on the free plan
First off - Slack's not the enemy. Even though it's very clear that they don't care about us community builders, they have some good reasons.
It's not like we'd ever actually pay for their pro plan, right?
(I'm half laughing & half crying while writing this but you know it's true)
Long story short - Slack is changingDMse aspects of the free plan and the pricing of the pro plan.
Let's look at each update and how it will affect our communities.
Message limit changes
Currently Slack stores your community's most recent 10,000 messages. This includes messages in public channels, private channels, and DM's.
From the 1st of September, Slack will store every message that was posted within the last 90 days.
It doesn't matter if you have more or less than 10k. If it was posted more than 90 days ago, it's gone.
Why are they doing this?
Above all, Slack is a communication tool for co-workers and teams.
Imagine your company uses Slack as its main form of communication. Which one of these two sentences sounds scarier to you.
"You will lose every message outside of the 10k message limit"
vs.
"You will lose every message that is older than 90 days"cond one, right?
The value proposition of Slack's paid plan is far clearer now.
And on top of that, if your team is small, it could take you forever to reach that 10k message limit.
How to prepare yourself for the change
Shameless plug, but you could just use Waves 🙃
Otherwise, there really isn't much you can do, and this change isn't all bad.
It's terrible for small communities but great for larger ones that reach the 10k mark every few weeks.
If you do manage a smaller community, let your members know about this change before they realize that all the links and messages they saved will be gone soon.
You could also start curating your community's conversations.
Whenever you see an important conversation, or a useful link being thrown in, maybe save it for the future.
Voice notes and video messages
We are not speaking about this enough. The message limit update can be bad, but this one has the potential to be a nightmare.
Slack is introducing 'Clips' to the free plan.
Clips are audio and video notes that you can record and send right within Slack. Sounds great, right?
Personally, it scares the hell out of me.
Why voice notes worry me
Sending great voice and video notes is an art form.
Making them short, snappy, fitting, and entertaining is difficult.
More importantly, sending bad voice/video notes that disrupt a reader's flow, is too easy.
It's simple to click on the record button and then go off for 5 minutes. It barely requires any effort.
But would you rather scan through a slightly longer message to find what you're looking for, or listen to a probably unstructured voice note?
Writing requires us to organize our thoughts. And because writing takes effort, we're incentivized to keep it short and to the point.
Imagine if uh... I wrote all my newsletters and or tweets or idk whatever else that I write or think about [ambulance in the background] like this.
That would be terrible, right?
On top of that, think about the added layer of difficulty in terms of moderation.
Anyhow - we can't change the update, but we can prepare ourselves for it.
Preparing your community for voice and video notes
Guidelines, education, and good old manual reminders are the way to go.
You create guidelines around the usage of the video and voice notes.
You educate your users on how to best use the update to help everyone in the community.
You send manual reminders to people who do not respect the guidelines.
What to add to your guidelines
Let me introduce you to the concept of pre-mortems.
You might be aware of post-mortems, i.e. looking at a failed initiative and figuring out what made it fail.
Since the update isn't out yet, we need to do a pre-mortem.
Pre-mortems are a product management technique where before a launch, you put yourselves into a scenario of failure.
Let's imagine the update has been out for 6 months now and it hurt your community. Let's try to figure out why it hurt your community.
Here's what I came up with.
Guideline suggestions
Keeping voice notes short:
Any voice note that is longer than 2 minutes is basically a podcast.
Set a reasonable and suggested time limit for voice notes.
The focus is on maintaining a nice flow of conversations and helping members find and read messages quickly.
Voice notes as replies over posts
Long & detailed voice note replies are great.
They allow your community members to give deep and detailed answers to questions that were asked in your community.
But what about the main posts in your community's channels?
You want to make it as simple as possible for your members to help each other.
Luckily, humans are great at scanning through lots of messages to find the ones where they can contribute.
But we can't listen to a 4-minute voice note just to see if we're the right person to give our support.
Maybe we should set some rules around when voice notes are appropriate, and when they're not.
Sharing private information over video notes
This is especially important in a community of practice where we're often talking about our jobs.
Let's always be careful that we're not sharing any private company or personal information when we record and share videos.
There are bad people everywhere, even in the most loving communities.
Swearing and language usage
I swear a lot. It's how I speak. I can barely control it when I'm having a relaxed conversation.
A lot of people are like me.
But I personally don't swear much when I'm writing.
If you don't want that kind of language in your community, make sure to make it clear.
And that's it!
You can probably come up with way more sections for your guidelines, but the point of this exercise was to sit down and think about what we can do to prepare ourselves for the update.
This week's goodbye👋
I love my new role but I miss the community space so much.
It's not just the hype and possibilities around community building. It's mostly the people.
You really are the greatest bunch of people that I ever worked with and built products for.
Please don't change.
I'll see you again next month❤️
- Kourosh the Waves guy 🌊