3 Apps to Save You Time on Work Chat

Do you often find yourself scrambling to get everything done? The good news is that taking a few short seconds to install an app can save you hours. If you use Slack to communicate at work, learn how to make this collaboration tool work most effectively.

Apps for Slack

Reacji Channeler

Imagine that you want to send the same message to various people on a regular basis. In the past, you might have tediously copied the message from one channel to another. Now, you can use one command to choose an emoji and designate it to a specific channel. Anytime someone uses that emoji in a public channel, the message will instantly be shared on the channel you chose. For example, you can tell your team to share new insights in the Ideas channel by using the lightbulb emoji in any channel they are using. Or, you can instantly send kudos to an Employee Appreciation channel for deserving team members by adding the thumbs up emoji to a congratulatory comment. Not only do you save time switching back and forth, but also you can rest easy that all the right people will see all the important messages.

MailClerk

One of the biggest time wasters is switching between programs and applications. Enter MailClerk, described as “the email bot.” A bot is a software application designed to perform a task quickly. MailClerk allows you to form an email group of people who don’t use Slack. Without leaving Slack, you can receive and reply to emails from your external email account. What’s the benefit? Consider this scenario: With MailClerk, you can set up a team inbox for your Customer Support employees. Not only can they exchange emails from clients needing help, but they can also receive alerts, notifications, and newsletters in one convenient channel! No more minimizing screens and logging into separate email accounts for those team members. Instead, they can jump right into helping the client. It’s like coordinating all the features of a help desk within Slack. Think about your company. Would this app enhance its ability to serve your clients promptly and efficiently?

Screenhero

Do you sometimes struggle to get your colleagues to share your vision? Screenhero can make things easier than ever to illustrate your ideas. With this add-on, you can simultaneously share your screen with multiple members of your team. While you do so, you can use the voice chat feature to communicate, and everyone can use their mouse cursors to manipulate items on the screen. How does it work? Simply set up a Screenhero account for yourself and each member of your team. Then, in Slack, type /hero@username for each workmate you would like to invite to view your project. Which project? You can write code with your partner in Tokyo, design marketing with a specialist in Dubai, and get feedback from your best friend in the office next door! You are limited only by your own imagination.

Even if you have a lot of messages to send at work, there’s no reason to panic. By choosing the right apps, you can customize Slack to meet your communication needs. Screenhero, MailClerk, and Reacji Channeler are just a few of the apps that are available to Slack users. Why not visit Slack’s app directory to peruse what they have to offer? Besides apps to streamline communication, there are more than fifteen other categories of extensions, such as office management, customer support, and even travel, social, and fun. Just imagine how much more your company can accomplish with the time you will save!

6 Grammatically Questionable Epitaphs

Gravestones are meant to live on long after the person they represent has passed. It’s important to make sure they’re both well-deserved celebrations of life and completely accurate, since correcting these stones can be an arduous and expensive process. In honor of “Plan Your Epitaph Day,” which took place yesterday, here are six famous examples of epitaphs with grave spelling or grammatical errors.

William Gaddis, Writer

For a celebrated author, grammatical or spelling mistakes can be the kiss of death. That’s why it’s both perplexing and unfortunate that the gravestone of renowned author William Gaddis, two-time winner of the National Book Award, includes a spelling error. Gaddis’ epitaph includes not only his birth and death dates, but also an excerpt from his first published novel, The Recognitions. Unfortunately, the engraver misspelled the novel’s title as The Recongnitions. Many suspect that the author’s family members may have overlooked the mistake in this familiar title.

Ed Koch, Politician

Like many men who want to retain control over their legacy, Politician Ed Koch designed his own gravestone. The only pieces of information that the one-time mayor of New York City left out of the final design were the dates. While the finished product included a correct death date, the engraver transposed the numbers within Koch’s birth date. Instead of December 12, 1924, his epitaph reads 1942, shaving about 20 years off his life.

Zora Neale Hurston, Writer

Though she is a beloved writer today, Zora Neale Hurston was originally buried in an unmarked grave. When this misfortune was discovered, and her resting place was moved to a more prestigious burial ground, the engraver unceremoniously misspelled her middle name. Admirer and fellow writer, Alice Walker, arranged for the tombstone to be corrected to read “Neale” instead of “Neil.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Writer 

When celebrated writer Isaac Bashevis Singer died, his wife included the title “Noble laureate” in his epitaph. While Singer may have been noble, he actually won the 1978 Nobel Prize for literature. When family members brought the error to his wife’s attention, she requested that the epitaph remain unchanged. It wasn’t until many months later that a new gravestone corrected both Singer’s title and his misspelled middle name.

Stephen Hemlin, Family Man

While the blame for grammatical epitaph errors often lies with grieving and distracted family members, some are clearly the fault of the engraver. The family of British family man Stephen Hemlin designed a gravestone with a customized epitaph, only to find that the engraver inserted both a grammatical error and additional language. Instead of the family’s desired and correct phrase, “too dearly loved,” the epitaph unfortunately read as the cringe-worthy phrase, “to dearly loved to be forgotten.”

Elvis Presley, Crooner 

Fascination and intrigue perpetually surround Elvis Presley’s life and legacy, and his gravestone is no exception. While there’s no argument about the spelling of the singer’s first and last names, his middle name has a history of confusion and botched official documents. Presley’s parents intended for his middle name to be spelled “Aron,” which is how his name appears on his birth certificate.

Later in life, Presley attempted to change the official spelling to the more familiar “Aaron,” only to find that poorly handled documents already listed his name that way. When he passed away, Presley’s father made sure that the name was spelled the way his son intended: “Aaron.” Though this story continues to baffle diehard Elvis fans, rest assured that this apparent spelling mistake is actually correct.

Despite unhappy mistakes, these stories can teach us an important lesson. Even when you’re distraught at the loss of a loved one, be sure to edit thoroughly before finalizing an epitaph. Have you seen any poignant or ironic gravestone errors?

7 Star Wars Leadership Lessons

May the Fourth be with you!

Today may be a day dedicated to puns, fandom, and a galaxy far, far away, but it probably doesn’t mean you’ve suddenly learned a Jedi mind trick to keep your manager from asking for that project, presentation, or report. If you’re like me, you’re trapped at work, wishing you could be cosplaying The Force Awakens with your family or baking an R2-D2 cake.

Unfortunately, Star Wars Day has yet to be recognized as a national holiday. In better news, both the Dark Side and the Light Side have a lot to teach marketers about life, love, and the pursuit of the target demographic. Let’s see what the Jedi (and the Sith) have to say about marketing leadership.

Kylo Ren Is the Ultimate Counterexample of Disaster Response

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What do you do when the rebel scum hits the fan? Let’s use Kylo Ren as a counterexample for marketing leadership: he’s impulsive, hot-tempered, and incapable of inspiring his team.

So whether your social team makes an epic blunder, or a key executive spouts politically incorrect things in an interview, take a deep breath. Your next move will define who you are as a leader. Don’t repeat Kylo’s mistake by responding without thinking. You can make a disaster recovery plan, check for vulnerabilities, and apologize afterward, but the most important PR response will always be internal, so take care with how you handle crises with your team. Others will look to you as a leader for the appropriate mode and tone of response, so set that tone from the moment you hear about your organization’s blunder. Unlike Kylo, you can’t just slash the controls and shut everything down.

Balanced, Yoda Is

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Yoda may be an obvious choice when talking about any sort of leadership, since he has dispatched his fair share of sage leadership advice. But instead of focusing on “there is no try,” what if we looked at Yoda as a whole? Overall, this Jedi master emphasizes the psychological aspects of the Force, and marketers could stand to learn a few things. In our constant fight for eyes and ears, we sometimes forget what our target customer needs.

Does your customer really want another viral video, or are they trying to figure out how your product works? Do they need another tweet about National Pancake Day, or would they prefer a help article that answers their common questions? I believe Yoda would say, “Clear your mind, and ask them, you should.”

Admiral Ackbar Is Not a Trap(ped Leader)

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We all know this meme-worthy line, but do you know the context in which it’s said? Admiral Ackbar is managing multiple moving parts of one initiative, and he’s strapped for resources, manpower, and the skill to bring about the results his team needs (sound familiar?). Trying to balance brute force with agility and speed, he discovers that his chances of success have been slashed by factors outside his control. When he utters this now-famous line, he’s expressing the shock we all feel when things don’t pan out. But does he throw in the towel, even though he has few resources and he’s facing impossible goals? No! Ackbar pulls his team back to regroup, concentrating their energy on achievable KPIs. Once the shields are down and the time is right, they strike–ultimately winning the war.

With decreasing budgets and increasing expectations, digital marketing can sometimes feel like a losing battle. When leading a team into a difficult, resource-strapped situation, it may be time for us all to take a lesson from Ackbar. We need to identify the areas of potentially sky-high ROI, without wasting our team’s time and energy on losing battles in the interim. Although it may occasionally seem like a trap, with expert guidance and focus on the right metrics, our teams can (and will) win.

Emperor Palpatine Has No Vision

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Emperor Palpatine is ego personified for all the galaxy to see, and he’s also a great example of the overconfidence that has led to some pretty terrible marketing campaigns. Think of New Coke or the creepy Burger King mascot. You could also harken back to a number of poorly planned corporate social media blunders. When ideas like these fail so gloriously, occasionally I ask myself, “How could this have happened?” The answer: a Palpatine perspective on idea generation.

There’s a common phrase in journalism (and other highly edited writing) that you have to “kill your babies.” This infanticidal euphemism simply means that sometimes you have a great line of copy, idea, or wide shot that simply doesn’t fit in the larger piece and must be cut. Some marketers could stand to learn from this, lest our egos about having the best idea in the room become more important than the ideas themselves. It’s often prudent to take a step back; show someone else your killer campaign, press stunt, or even blog idea; and allow them to give brutal, honest feedback. After all, we don’t want our work compared to Empire.

Leia Has a High IQ–and a Great EQ

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Leia’s famously improvised line is key to the love story of Star Wars. But it also shows that she has a significant amount of emotional intelligence (EQ), since she recognizes love in a hard-to-read paramour. Although Leia clearly has a very high IQ, her EQ helps the character-driven story to progress, and it’s something we could all improve in our customers’ experiences. Knowing what your customers want is the first step to creating a great experience, but really empathizing with their pain points is the next step in that journey. Marketers are now tasked with the entire customer experience, so we should focus on understanding the emotions our customers feel when they have a negative interaction with our brand. Do your customers love you? Do you know?

Can You Correct These 16 Basic Grammar Mistakes?

Limericks: The Lowest Form of Poetry?

There is a well-known line, often attributed to Samuel Johnson, but preceded and followed by myriad others, that the pun is the lowest form of humor. If so, the limerick, a form of verse that depends on clever assonance and double entendre, is certainly the lowest form of poetry. In this post, we will shine a spotlight on the limerick, and see if the cockroaches scurry.

To the best of anyone’s knowledge, the limerick originated in England sometime before the fifteenth century. Early in the life of this form of poetry, limericks were created primarily for children.

Here’s an oldie, but goodie:

Hickory Dickory Dock A mouse ran up the clock The clock struck one And down he run Hickory Dickory Dock

Limericks began to gain widespread popularity in the mid-to-late eighteen-hundreds with the publication of Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense in 1845 and 1872. Lear’s verses centered on nonsensical themes, and he violated every law in the “poetic rulebook” by using a word to “rhyme” with itself and occasionally destroying the anapestic foot.

For this reader, seven hundred years of poetic tradition has trained my ears to flinch when I hear someone waste words within a rigid form. With the vantage of history, we moderns can rise up in our highfalutin’ indignation at offenses like this one:

There was an old person whose habits

Induced him to feed upon rabits When he’d eaten eighteen he turned perfectly green Upon which he relinquished those habits

Here, Lear rhymed “habits” with “habits,” and actually dropped the doubled “b” in “rabits.” Ouch.

Dictionary.com gives the origin of the term “limerick” as a reference in a popular drinking song, in which the refrain, “Will you come up to Limerick?” follows an extemporized verse. You can imagine the verses of the poem growing increasingly ribald as the beer flowed freely. In fact, given its tame domestic origins, the limerick has gained a unique reputation for bawdy subject matter and salty language.

The science-fiction icon, Isaac Asimov, along with John Ciardi, penned one of the seminal works in the study of the limerick. He captured the essence of the limerick with nuggets like these:

39. Fit for a Marathon

To the ancient Greek writer Herodotus,

Said a pretty young thing, “My, how hard it is!”

Said he, “Do you fear

I will hurt you, my dear?”

And she said, “Are you crazy? Thank God it is!”

Asimov and Ciardi do not source each of the limericks included their book. It is safe to say that many of these little gems had been passed down orally for generations until someone inscribed them for safekeeping. A more contemporary limerick demonstrates how the form is used in a more modern context:

126. Comic Strip

A well-known reporter, Clark Kent

Had a simpering, mild-mannered bent.

But he grabbed Lois Lane,

And he made it quite plain

What his cognomen Superman meant.

Poetic forms closely connected with the limerick can be found as early as fourteenth century England — quite a bit before the town of Limerick staked its claim. And while our language has evolved over the centuries, the English language, with its plethora of conjunctions and articles, provides humorists with a host of tools to fit the rhythm of the form.

Anyone can write a limerick. All you have to do is read some of the examples here, which will refresh your ear to the meter, and then give yourself a character (first line) and a situation (second line). Find a surprise ending, and away you go!

e.g. There once was a (person) from (place),

Who (action) to (something) his face,

When (something) (occurred),

(Inserting a word),

To (person) comes certain disgrace.

In honor of Limerick Day today, surprise us! Are you game? What is your favorite limerick – we’re waiting to smirk, chuckle, or ROFL at your responses.

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