Feb
13
2019
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Block Kit helps deliver more visually appealing content in Slack

Slack has become a critical communications tool for many organizations. One of the things that has driven its rapid success has been the ability to connect to external enterprise apps inside of Slack, giving employees what is essentially a centralized work hub. This ability has led to some unintended consequences around formatting issues, which Slack addressed today with two new tools, Block Kit and Block Kit Builder.

Block Kit lets developers present dense content in a much more visually appealing way, while Block Kit Builder is a prototyping tool for building more attractive apps inside Slack. The idea is to provide a way to deliver content inside of Slack without having to do workarounds to make the content look good.

Before and after applying Block Kit. Screen: Slack

Bear Douglas, who is Slack’s director of developer of relations, says developers have been quite creative up until now when it comes to formatting, but the company has been working to simplify it. Today’s announcement is the culmination of that work.

“Block Kit makes it easier for people to quickly design a customized app in Slack. We’ve launched a no-code builder that will let people design the messages that they show inside Slack,” she explained.

She said that while this tool is really designed for people with some programming or Slack admin-level knowledge, the ultimate goal is to make it easy enough for non-technical end users to build apps in Slack, something that is on the road map. What enhancing these tools does, however, is show people just what is possible inside of Slack.

“When people see Block Kit in action, it is illuminating about what can be done, and it helps them understand that it doesn’t just need to be your communications center or [something that pings you] when your website blows up. You can actually get work done inside of Slack,” she said.

One other advantage of using Block Kit is that apps will display messages consistently, whether you are using the web or mobile. Prior to having these tools, workarounds might have looked fine on the web, but the spacing might have been off on mobile or vice versa. Block Kit lets you design consistent interfaces across platforms.

Among the tools Slack is offering, none is actually earth-shattering, but in total they provide users with the ability to format their content in a way that makes sense using common design elements like image containers, dividers and sections. They are also offering buttons, drop-down menus and a calendar picker.

Both of these tools are available starting today in the Block Kit hub.

Jul
17
2018
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Dialpad dials up $50M Series D led by Iconiq

Dialpad announced a $50 million Series D investment today, giving the company plenty of capital to keep expanding its business communications platform.

The round was led by Iconiq Capital with help from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Amasia, Scale Ventures, Section 32 and Work-Bench. With today’s round, the company has now raised $120 million.

As technology like artificial intelligence and internet of things advances, it’s giving the company an opportunity to expand its platform. Dialpad products include UberConference conferencing software and VoiceAI for voice transcription applications.

The company is competing in a crowded market that includes giants like Google and Cisco and a host of smaller companies like GoToMeeting (owned by LogMeIn), Zoom and BlueJeans. All of these companies are working to provide cloud-based meeting and communications services.

Increasingly, that involves artificial intelligence like natural language processing (NLP) to provide on the fly transcription services. While none of these services is perfect yet, they are growing increasingly accurate.

VoiceAI was launched shortly after Dialpad acquired TalkIQ in May to take this idea a step further by applying sentiment analysis and analytics to voice transcripts. The company plans to use the cash infusion to continue investing in artificial intelligence on the Dialpad platform.

Post call transcript generated by VoiceAI. Screenshot: Dialpad

CEO Craig Walker certainly sees the potential of artificial intelligence for the company moving forward. “Smart CIOs know AI isn’t just another trendy tech tool, it’s the future of work. By arming sales and support teams, and frankly everybody in the organization, with VoiceAI’s real-time artificial intelligence and insights, businesses can dramatically improve customer satisfaction and ultimately their bottom line,” Walker said in a statement.

Dialpad is also working with voice-driven devices like the Amazon Alexa and it announced Alexa integration with Dialpad in April. This allows Alexa users to make calls by saying something like, “Alexa, call Liz Green with Dialpad” and the Echo will make the phone call on your behalf using Dialpad software.

According to the company website, it has over 50,000 customers including WeWork, Stitch Fix, Uber and Reddit. The company says it has added over 10,000 new customers since its last funding round in September, 2017.

Mar
23
2018
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Storytelling for B2B startups: Avoiding ‘buzzword bingo’ to make your wonky enterprise company worth talking about

If there’s one thing I learned from my time as both a journalist at The Wall Street Journal and Forbes and, now, advising a global venture capital firm on communications, it’s that storytelling can make or break a company.

This is especially true the more complicated and arcane a company’s technology is. Stories about online-dating and burrito-delivery apps are easily understood by most people. But if a company specializes in making technology for hybrid-cloud data centers, or parsing specialized IT alerts and cybersecurity warnings, the storytelling task becomes much harder — but, I would argue, even more important.

Sure, a wonky company will still be able to talk easily to its customers and chat up nerdy CIOs at trade shows. But what happens when they raise a Series C or D round of financing and actually need to reach a broader audience — like really big, potential business partners, potential acquirers, public investors or high-level business reporters? Often, they’re stuck.

It can be painful to watch. When I was a reporter, I was amazed at the buzzwords thrown at me by some technology companies trying to get me to write about them. For fun, my colleagues and I would put some of these terms into online “buzzword bingo” websites just to see what indecipherable company descriptions they would spit out. (Example: “An online, cloud-based, open-source hyperconverged Kubernetes solution.”) Often, when pressed, PR representatives couldn’t explain to me what these companies actually did.

These companies obviously never made it into my stories. And I would argue that many of them suffered more broadly from their overall lack of high-profile press coverage; large business publications like the ones for which I worked target the very big-company executives and investors these later-stage startups were trying to reach.

Now, of course, I’m on the other side of that reporter/company equation — and I often feel like a big chunk of my job is working as a technology translator.

A natural-born storyteller

So why is this B2B storytelling problem so common, and arguably getting worse? Lots of reasons. Many of these hard-to-understand companies are founded by highly technical engineers for whom storytelling is (not surprisingly) not a natural skill. In many cases, their marketing departments are purely data-driven, focused on demand generation, ROI and driving prospects to an online sales funnel — not branding and high-level communications. As marketing technology has gotten more and more advanced and specialized, so have marketing departments.

As a result, many B2B and enterprise-IT companies are often laser-focused on talking about their products’ specific bells and whistles, staying in “sell mode” for a technical audience and cranking out wonky whitepapers and often-boring product press releases. They’re less adept at taking a step back to address the actual business benefits their product enables. Increasingly, this tech-talk also plays well with the legions of hyper-specialized, tech-news websites that have proliferated to serve every corner of the technology market, making some executives think there’s no need to target higher-level press.

Everyone has a story to tell. It’s up you to figure out what your company’s is, and how to tell that story in a compelling, understandable fashion.

One prominent marketing and PR consultant I know, who has worked with hundreds of Silicon Valley startups since the 1980s, says she is “shocked” by how poorly many senior tech industry CEOs today communicate their companies’ stories. Many tend to “shun” communications, considering it too “soft” in this new era of data-obsessed marketing, the consultant Jennifer Jones, recently told me. But in the end, poor communications and storytelling can create or exacerbate business problems, and often affect a company’s valuation.

So how do you get to a point where you can talk about your company in plain terms, and reach the high-level audiences you’re targeting?

One tactic, obviously, is to ditch the jargon when you need to. The pitch you use on potential customers — who likely already have an intimate understanding of your market and the specific problems you’re trying to solve — is not as relevant for other audiences.

A big fund manager at Fidelity or T. Rowe Price, or a national business journalist, probably knows, for example, that cloud computing is a big trend now, or that companies are buying more technology to battle complex cybersecurity attacks. But do they really understand the intricacies of “hybrid-cloud” data center setups? Or what a “behavioral attack detection solution” does? Probably not.

The David versus Goliath angle

Another tip is to put your company story in a larger, thematic context. People can better understand what you do if you can explain how you fit into larger technology and societal trends. These might include the rise of free, open-source software, or the growing importance of mobile computing.

It’s also helpful to talk about what you do in relation to larger, more established players. Are you nipping away at the slow-growing, legacy business of Oracle/EMC/Dell/Cisco? As a journalist, I once wrote a story about a small public networking company called F5 Networks that specialized in making “application delivery controllers.” But the story mostly focused on F5’s battle with a much larger competitor; in fact, the editors titled the story “One-Upping Cisco.” That’s the angle most readers were likely to care about. Journalists, particularly, love these David versus Goliath type stories, and national business publications are full of them.

Start focusing on high-level storytelling earlier, not when you’ve already raised $100 million in venture funding and have several hundred employees.

Another key storytelling strategy is leveraging your customers. If your business is boring to the average person, try to get one of your household-name customers to talk publicly about how they use your technology. Does your supply-chain software help L’Oréal sell more lipstick, or UPS make faster package deliveries?

One of our portfolio companies had a nice business-press hit a few years ago by talking about how their software helped HBO stream “Game of Thrones” episodes. (The service had previously crashed because too many people were trying to watch the show.) You can leverage these highly visible customers for case studies on your website. These can be great fodder for your sales team as well as later press interviews, as long as they’re well-written and understandable. Try to get more customers to agree to this type of content when you sign the contract with them.

From “Mad Men” to math men

Finally, there’s the issue of marketing leadership inside tech companies. In my experience, most smaller, B2B or enterprise IT-focused startups have CMOs or VPs of marketing who are more focused on data and analytics than brand communications — more “math men” than “Mad Men.” This isn’t surprising, as these companies often sell data-rich products and have business models where PR and general advertising don’t directly drive sales (unlike, say, a company making a food-delivery app). The CEOs of these companies value data and analytics, too.

I encourage B2B tech CEOs to focus on hiring CMOs with some brand/communications experience, or at least a willingness to outsource it to competent partners who are experts in that area. After a couple of early rounds of funding, you should be outgrowing your highly specialized PR firm (if you even have one) that focuses on a narrow brand of trade publications, for example. These firms usually don’t have contacts at the bigger, national business and technology outlets that are read by big mutual fund managers, and the business development folks at Cisco or Oracle. Hiring ex-journalists — not technical experts — to write content and develop messaging can be a good idea, too.

In other words, start focusing on high-level storytelling earlier, not when you’ve already raised $100 million in venture funding and have several hundred employees. By that point, it can simply be too late: Your company has already been typecast by the trade press and written off by higher-level reporters, and sometimes even potential business partners, as too niche-y and hard to understand.

As a journalist, I learned that everyone has a story to tell. It’s up you to figure out what your company’s is, and how to tell that story in a compelling, understandable fashion. If you do, I’m pretty sure the business benefits will follow.

Oct
23
2017
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Cisco scoops up BroadSoft for $1.9 billion to boost communications tools portfolio

 One thing is clear, Cisco is not afraid to use its considerable cash on hand to fill in holes in its product portfolio. Today it wrote out a big fat check for $1.9 billion to acquire BroadSoft, a Maryland company that delivers unified communications via service providers. The purchase gives Cisco a new way to sell its communications tools as it shifts its focus from a pure networking… Read More

Apr
15
2016
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Mitel buys Polycom for $1.96B in enterprise communications consolidation play

earth, connected, flight patterns As more enterprises move their communications services over to IP networks and cloud-based services, we’re seeing an increasing amount of consolidation as the businesses that serve them continue to grow to provide end-to-end services — and to shore up against smaller, newer and less expensive offerings from the likes of Slack, Skype, Google Hangouts and more. Today comes that… Read More

Apr
01
2016
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Can Slack transform enterprise communication once and for all?

slackdroid_2x Those of us who have been around the block a few times have seen multiple attempts to kill email and change the way people communicate in the enterprise. Slack is just the latest, but one that has captured market share and money along the way. Consider that just today, Slack got $200 million in funding on a whopping $3.8 billion valuation. It launched just three years ago and has raised… Read More

Mar
14
2016
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The suddenly exciting future of enterprise communications

cansstring Enterprise communications is not a sector that typically generates palpable excitement. In the enterprise, the plumbing is never as exciting as the fixtures, and people spend more time noticing what communications enables than how it’s delivered. It doesn’t help that enterprise communications is often dismissed as slow to innovate, given its high capital costs to deploy new… Read More

Mar
04
2016
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Source: Microsoft mulled an $8 billion bid for Slack, will focus on Skype instead

slack rope When Slack announced new voice and video services earlier this week, the enterprise messaging startup signalled a move into territory dominated by the likes of Microsoft’s Skype. But it looks like this is not the only moment when the two company’s paths have crossed in recent times. Microsoft eyed Slack as a potential acquisition target for as much as $8 billion, TechCrunch… Read More

Mar
02
2016
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Facebook adds 36K Telenor employees to Facebook at Work as it gears up for global launch

sommer_075-high-1250x585 Facebook at Work — the enterprise version of Facebook that lets businesses build their own secure social networks — has racked up over 60,000 companies on a waiting list while still in closed beta. And as it gears up for a full global launch and new features like an app platform later this year, Facebook is announcing its newest big customer. As of today, Telenor, the… Read More

Jul
08
2015
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Creating A Universal Remote Control For Business Communications

connectedschools In the ultimate paradox, we have spent the last several years untethering our workforces while technically intertwining our personal and professional lives. Yet, for many, the notion of BYOD often results in a feeling of being AWOL. With 25 percent of knowledge workers out of the office on any given day, the ability to remotely connect back into corporate communications and collaboration tools… Read More

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