Finished the session on Blogging today for the 6-week Marketing Workshop. Here are some stats about social media.

When is the best time to publish your blog post? See the science here. “For the most traffic, publish on Monday at 11am EST.”

Why Tweet? Well, here is a blog with some tweet stats from twitter.

Borrowed from Bloom County 2015 by Berkeley Breathed

Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!

Thank you for reading my blog.

Wishing you peace in the holiday season and throughout the new year

“Smiling begets a warmer (work, home) environment. Thanking begets an environment of mutual appreciation.” – Tom Peters

“What if you could run your whole job from a messaging app? Imagine doing your expenses or requesting human resources forms through a simple chat interface, or using an instant message to respond to customer complaints or to start a conference call with your colleagues.” [NYTimes] That is the future for Slack, the messaging app that was the penicillin of apps.

The NYT uses Slack in-house as a content tool.

“the company is also creating an $80 million fund to invest in apps that can be integrated with Slack.” It already integrates with apps — the plan is for Slack to be the single interface for work.

Slack Etiquette or a primer on how to use Slack from INC.

Hiring tip from Slack’s CEO: “each potential hire at Slack have three characteristics, regardless of job function: empathy, curiosity, and diligence. He also wants to see employees who think of their roles in the context of creating a lasting business.”

Slack’s old-fashioned motto: ‘Work hard and go home’. “working hard doesn’t — and shouldn’t — mean working endlessly.”

Slack’s goal is to eliminate work email. Many users claim that it does cut down on email. It presents another noise channel however. But they did just add a Do Not Disturn button! “The goal, according to Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s co-founder and chief executive, is to transform Slack from a messaging app into something even more central to people’s jobs — a chat-based control panel for the modern workplace.” [NYT]

This was on Facebook about Slack from Crowd Companies:

That’s what Slack is designed to do. I just hacked up Slack this weekend. Using middleware software Zapier, I used some easy-to-program and light syntax to integrate Slack to our CRM system, Newsletter software, WordPress, Twitter, and Member management system at Crowd Companies.

A few business rules I implemented: New member (what’s what we call customer) added, it triggers to slack. Also if we have a prospect accept a proposal to become a member, the CRM tools triggers a notification to Slack so the whole team can see. There’s a few other rules I’m experimenting with.

It’s not just about aggregating data, using Zapier we can publish content written on Slack to other systems. For example, I programmed a slack channel to update our CRM system with important member information.

We’ve grown a bit, and Angus Nelson was observant in finding ways to reduce email, and we’ll experiment with slack as a tool to do this. Oh hey Stewart Butterfield I can see why you’re worth pinky finger billions of dollars now, this is much more than just a chat tool, it’s a light weight programming interface that aggregates and publishes data. I joked it was a “black hole sun” as it sucks everything in, then illuminates what’s important. Can we reduce pesky emails? Maybe, just maybe.

News about Broadband first

Some encouraging news, Minnesota ISP US Internet Offers 2.5 Gbps, 5 Gbps and 10 Gig Speeds! FTTH. Pricing here.

Akamai: Average US Broadband Speed is Now 12.6 Mbps — and Pew reveals that at 20+ Mbps, a majority of Americans have only one choice: cable. Reminder: the FCC definition of broadband is 25 Mbps x 3 Mbps (up from 4×1).

New study shows that Business Broadband has to be at least 4 Mbps upstream, according to Telecompetitor.

Why Cable Companies Are Actually Expecting Subscriber Increases in 2016. (Mainly due to broadband).

FCC gives smaller ISPs a pass on Open Internet rules.

Strategy and other stuff

Lessons from digital telcos: Five initiatives to improve business performance by McKinsey

2015 Capex Trends for Competitive Network Operators

Lessons from Barnes and Noble.

Reasons business go to cloud: (1) increased agility; (2) lower cost or CAPEX; (3) Elasticity; (4) Breadth of functionality; (5) Go Global in minutes. [tmc]

My view of the UCaaS news.

I talk about Slack often since it came to my attention earlier this year. In less than 2 years it launched (in February of 2014) and grew to 2 million daily users. It is trying to kill email. It is increasing productivity in some organizations. It needs to be used correctly.

Coming in 2016: Training! Get some!