Breaking Down the Best - Group Communication (Slack, Teams, Discord, Gmail)

Mike breaks down the real differences between Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Discord so you can choose a communication platform that fits your team size, tools, and day-to-day work. 

We also call out why group Gmail threads, group texts, and WhatsApp usually create noise instead of clarity and how to build a single source of truth. 

 Send feedback or learn more about the podcast: punchmark.com/loupe
Learn about Punchmark's website platform: punchmark.com

Inquire about sponsoring In the Loupe and showcase your business on our next episode: podcast@punchmark.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome back everybody to In the Loop. What is up, everybody? My name is Michael Burpo. Thanks again for listening to In the Loop. And this week we're gonna be talking about communication. So specifically communication platforms, because there's actually kind of a lot of different ways to skin the cat in this situation. And a lot of times I've learned that people don't even really know that there are alternatives, as well as different strengths to those alternatives. And the one that you're using might be the best one for your situation. And I will also say switching is not very fun. However, there's some things to be gained if you decide to choose one of these other ones. At Punchmark, we use Slack, and I would never want to switch away from it because we have almost 10 years of conversation backlogged in it, and we use the search function all the time. I would love to hear what you end up using it, but for now I'm gonna go through breaking down the best on communication methods. Alright, so please enjoy.

SPEAKER_00 1:19

With decades of experience and long-lasting industry relationships, Punchmark enables jewelry businesses to flourish in any marketplace. We consider our clients our friends, as many of them have been friends way before becoming clients. Punchmark's own success comes from the fact that we have a much deeper need and obligation to help our friends succeed. Whether you're looking for better e-commerce performance, business growth, or campaigns that drive traffic and sales, PunchMark's website and marketing services were made just for you. It's never too late to transform your business and stitch together your digital and physical worlds in a way that achieves tremendous growth and results. Schedule a guided demo today at punchmark.com slash go. And now back to the show.

Slack Integrations That Celebrate Wins

Microsoft Teams And The Microsoft Stack

Discord For Voice And Culture

Sponsor Break And Return

Why Group Gmail Becomes Chaos

Group Text And WhatsApp Limits

Picking Tools By Team Size

Make Information Cheap To Share

Feedback Requests And Closing

SPEAKER_01 2:11

Okay, so the first one I want to start with is the one that I like the best by far. It's called Slack. So Slack, if you ever came from uh, for example, uh, did you ever use AOL or AIM, um, instant messenger? I grew up on that, like when I was in, you know, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth grade. And it was really where like everybody kind of did their communication. So why do we use Slack at Punchmark? Well, the thing is, is you can use these group channels. So we have um, you know, these basic channels that everybody's on. Uh, for example, we have one called On the Markt. On the Mark is our general channel. That general channel is really useful for just anything that doesn't have a spot to go. But we have some more specific ones. For example, we have one that's called a channel, is like something where people post into it uh called awesome links. But what's really nice is that it keeps everything kind of combined. And then if I post uh a nice link or something that's interesting, then you can thread your conversations underneath it, which kind of keeps things nicely organized by a topic inside of a channel. You can also do direct messages, so I can message, for example, Ross directly and no one else will see it, but you can also have private channels. What's nice about a private channel is it kind of allows you to control who's able to see it. What's nice about that is for the C-suite and the directors at Punchmark, we have a private channel where we can discuss like business and operational things without it, you know, being searchable or findable by people without uh admin controls. What's also nice about it is we have uh certain project driven channels. And what's good about that is, for example, when it comes to shows, uh, you know, JCK, it's coming up. So we will spin up a new channel. There's no limit on the number of channels you can have. So we might spin up a channel called um JCK 2026, and then everything related to that topic will go in there, and then it's nicely organized. You know, all of uh the show dates, all of the booking information, all the Airbnb information, all of that, it kind of just gets nicely organized. But what I think is really good is that Slack out of the box is neck and neck with all the others. What's really nice about it is these plugins. There's a lot of things that you can do with this, and the you know, the depths kind of go as far as you want to go, kind of thing. But what's nice about these plugins is you can add in integrations to um you know everything else. So we have uh a very important one, which is our HubSpot plugin. We use HubSpot for our communication, but HubSpot makes it so that anytime uh Tommy, our sales um person, makes a sale, we have a thing where if he closes a deal, there's a trigger that immediately puts it into a specific Slack channel, and then everybody knows he made a sale. Why is this important? Well, for a long time, like I said, I feel very strongly about road building. Uh I used to not like that I didn't know when Tommy was making a sale. Sometimes Tommy would have like three sales in a week, and I wanted to celebrate that, but I didn't even know. And then like three weeks later, I would find out, oh, Tommy had a three-sale week, and it's like, oh, we should give him his flowers. Like, come on. And those kinds of integrations make it so that Tommy doesn't have to like remember to write into a channel, hey, I made this sale. The integrations and the automations make it so that actually work kind of works along for you. We also have um an integration with our Jira. Jira is our ticketing system. I already did an entire breaking down the best episode on the Atlassian suite, and Jira is one of those kind of organization and project-based tools. But what's cool about Jira is the integration to it. I have an entire uh fancy system that actually our project manager, um, Lorenzo walked me through setting up where anytime a ticket is updated or moved, moved mean there's progress on it, it updates into uh a specific channel. And what's nice is that everybody in the company is able to view that channel, and they don't have to ask me, hey Mike, um, you know, has Alice and Kaufman updated their products? Well, you can just look in the channel and see the last time it was updated. Uh, nothing is gonna sneak by, if you will. So what I think is great about Slack is just it's very organized, has a great search function. Granted, the searching function um has a limit on the free um version. Uh, we pay for like a pro version, which is, I don't know, probably like$100 a month or something like that. So it is a business expense. So maybe that doesn't work for you. I would say that for Slack, you need to have, I'd probably say at least nine members for it to start working good. We used it right when I started at Punchmark and we had eight members, and right around eight, nine, ten is right when it started to kind of feel like it was like had some momentum. We also have a rule at Punchmark, uh kind of informal rule, but pretty much a rule, where we do no internal communication outside of Slack, which means like if we're talking about Punchmark and we're talking like we're sharing work stuff, we make sure that it is always in Slack. We don't um Gmail, you know, email each other about a project for like, hey, how's this like work going on? We make sure that it's always through Slack. And by clamping down on that, we actually that was kind of like uh something we thought of, I don't know, probably a year after uh we started our Slack use. It makes it so when everything is in one place, there is a single source of truth, and that way when I search, um, for example, sometimes if a client deactivates with Punchmark, I have to go through and I'd find all the information about them so I can put it into one document and provide like a postmortem on the client. And if I search the name, I should be able to find every single thing related to them in actually in two spots. One is Slack, that's all the communication about the client, and then in HubSpot, it tracks all of our emails to the client. So if I look in those two spots, I should get every single detail. I don't have to worry about like, uh, did anyone like text about this or anything like that? We just all go through Slack. I don't want to dive too long into just uh one of these platforms. I will say Slack is my favorite. It also feels a little bit fun, but you do kind of need to tailor back, like sometimes it can be just like really distracting. There's a lot of communication, and with that, what's cool is you can just mute certain notifications. I make it so that my notifications are muted after um 8 p.m. So that no one um it doesn't like wake me up or something like that if there's like a fire. Okay, next. Let's talk about Microsoft Teams. So I, full disclosure, I've never used Microsoft Teams, but I have seen it. Uh my brother Steve has used uh Teams for um certain companies before that he's worked for. It's very dry, you could say. It's just like Slack, except there's no fun in it, um, which makes sense because Microsoft Teams is for um businesses that are already really embedded into the Microsoft ecosystem. So if you remember, I did actually a breakdown of the best on uh the Google Suite. So this is uh Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive, all of those ones. And it's kind of like a Coke or Pepsi sort of situation. And if your company is a Google Suite type of company, which I think there's a great argument that you should be because it's free and it's cloud-based, um, you're probably going to want to use Slack in this case if you're choosing between the two. However, if your entire company is super uh Microsoft based, then you're probably like meaning your company only uses um what is it, Microsoft Word and Excel and PowerPoint, then there's a very good argument to be made that you should uh probably go with Teams. They integrate really well with each other, there's a native aspect to it. Also, if you're paying for like Microsoft, I think it's called 365 or something like that, it usually comes with all the other uh features, and Teams is one of them. Um, I also know that with Teams, you can have like like thousands of members in the same space without it getting like super cluttered, and that is one of the parts of Slack. I think that there's like an upper limit to like how I think Slack's upper limit is like 500 or so. Um, maybe more. I don't know. Someone could correct me. But I'm kind of tailoring this to like what a small business use, and most jewelry stores are a small business. Um, I will say that everybody agrees that Teams is clunky and that it's um not very fun culturally, you might say. Whereas Slack, it has this kind of innate fun to it. You know, everything's like nice colors, you can customize the colors, you can make it kind of feel like your company, whether that's fun or not fun. And Microsoft Teams are a little bit more dry. Um, yeah, I guess I don't have a ton to add to it. It's the similarities between Teams and Slack are very uh they're very similar. And I think the real defining point is what does your team use for um its infrastructure? If you're a G Suite type of person, I'd probably recommend Slack. If you're a Microsoft type of person, you're probably gonna be using Teams. Okay. Here's another option. If you are like let's just say you're a jewelry store and you run everything via text, which I think is not a great solution in my humble opinions, unless there's only like two of you or three of you. Um, another option is Discord. So Discord to kind of set everybody on the right foot or get everyone on the groundwork, it actually started with um video games and like gaming. So what's really interesting about it is that it has the best voice channels possible. So this again probably doesn't not really applicable to a jewelry store, but people like Discord because the voice aspect is existing at all times, if that makes sense. So with Slack, if I want to huddle, which is their version of like a one-on-one voice channel, uh, if I want to huddle with someone, I have to start it and then they have to answer. It's kind of like a phone call. Whereas with Discord, the voice channel always exists. And if you're in the channel, someone can just pop in and start talking, and it'll like you'll start hearing it. So that is kind of more like the aspect of being in like developing culture. I'd probably say Discord is probably like the most readily available for culture development. Um, I used to run a uh Discord, and what I thought was cool was it was easy to enter a Discord. I used to be in a couple of them. Uh, it would get really distracting because I don't like being in, I don't like having a lot of notifications. Um, but I used to run one for when I used to stream my watercolor paintings, and what was nice is it was a way that you could control the communication uh in the algorithm behind it. So if I post on Instagram, then the algorithm it sometimes my friends wouldn't even see my art. Uh, even if they wanted to see my art, if they didn't look at art in general, the algorithm might not serve them mine. However, when you're in Discord, if they're in my channel and I post something, they're gonna see a notification about it. So that's kind of a strength. But when it comes to the communication, what's also nice is there's channels in there too. It's very similar to Slack in that regard. Um, you can also add a lot of customization and bots to it. I've been in some Discords that have the most craziest, way too expansive bot networks that like um it almost feels like you're like a custom piece of like technology. And I think that's what the difference between like some of these, you know, tools that are made for mass communication and others is that they're made to be sandbox or flexible. So out of the box they're okay, but in the box, you know, as you like build, um, suddenly they become very indispensable. Like with Punchmark, if if we were to switch away, it would be it would take me six months of hard work to like unravel all of these things. And I think Discord is very much like that. You can really build some interesting, cool things, like you can set up alerts for yeah, anytime someone makes a sale, anytime anyone visits your website, you make anytime um the Yankees score a run. You can do all those things. Um, yeah. The one thing I will say is there is an aspect of security between these, the three I've just spoken about, between Slack, Teams, and then Discord. And I will say everybody agrees, I mean, Teams is by far the most secure. Slack is is secure, meaning like it's hard for the someone to get in and like steal confidential information. I will say Discord is not really well known for being like super secure, and it can feel like a little bit unprofessional at times, or I guess not unprofessional, non-professional is the better word. So I don't know, I think it's just uh something to consider it. You could also run a Discord pretty successfully with a very low number of people, um, like less than 10. And it's also very uh very generous free plan that I would consider maybe poking around at. So if you're running like your your jewelry store, the communication with all your employees and like your upper level, I would probably consider uh and you're using like yeah, like a group text or something like that, I would strongly recommend maybe looking at like a Discord or um maybe a Slack, but probably a Discord first. Alright, everybody, we're gonna take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsor. This episode of In the Loop is brought to you by Punchmark. We've been hard at work rolling out new e-commerce experiences designed specifically for jewelry retailers, including expanding payment options like Apple Pay, Google Pay, and more. It's all about making checkout faster, easier, and more seamless for your customers so you can convert more sales. If you're ready to modernize your website and unlock better performance, book a demo today at punchmark.com slash go. And now back to the show. And we're back. Next one. I uh I can't stand this one. So this one is Gmail. This is just group Gmail, and this is what uh I affectionately refer to as Boomer Group Chat. And I've talked about the artist guild that I'm a part of, and uh, so this is like the gallery I share my work at. It's in my hometown, and I uh we do a lot of communication in there, well, you know, organizing stuff, when's the next meeting, um, new opportunities, and there's 15 of us, so it's like a basically like a 15-person group chat, and the way we communicate is through Gmail. If I was to open up my email right now for my personal email, I'm looking here. I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Nine of my top 10 emails are different threads with you know, with the guild. And you're just getting constant number of emails. And the thing is, is like there's no hierarchy to it. So, like, hierarchy meaning like threading or or you know, this is a main post with subsequent posts underneath it, and as a result, um, if someone asks a question, hey, are we gonna have this meeting? And someone writes yes, that notification comes through like an like a real full email. And then if someone else says yes at the same time, well then it's yes, yes. And what if the c the conversation branches? So let's just say, hey, are we gonna have this meeting and someone says yes, and someone else says yes, and then someone says, um I don't know, is there gonna be snacks at the meeting? And then if someone is like, uh, yes, and then someone asks what kind of snacks there are, well, suddenly the conversation has three parts to it. Are we having this meeting? Are there gonna be snacks? And what type of snacks should we have? And suddenly it's chaos. And we've been doing this, I've been a part of this guild for a year and a half, and I absolutely hate it. But the thing is, I can't uh get us to migrate out of Gmail because uh the average age of the guild is rather old, it's like 70s, and I'm the youngest, and I cannot imagine getting everybody to uh switch on to Discord or Slack or something. That that's never going to happen. So as a result, we're stuck with Gmail, and I just keep getting more and more emails from them. Um, it also can make it sort of easy to lose certain topics. So, for example, uh I'm the note taker at the guild, and whenever we have um our our meetings, sometimes I'll post the notes back to everybody. But what's really difficult about that is there might be multiple topics in the notes, and then I do feel like sometimes people don't answer all of the topics. And if you were on, for example, Slack or Discord, you could start a topic. For example, you know, here's the three action items that we have. You can make a post about one, two, and then three, and then people could respond by threading that's like a topic. Um, you could thread into the first one your answer, the second one your answer, and then the third one. Um, that's just not possible in Gmail, and it just becomes um pretty chaotic. So if you're using Gmail to organize your store and you're listening to this podcast, which I'm assuming if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably more tech fluent than uh a lot of the other people that I've I work with, then I would consider not using Gmail and switching to one of these other ones. Okay, another one. And this one we're going in like the sending order of satisfaction. This is uh group text. So this is a good solution when you have, I'm going to say, four or fewer people. Um, you can get kind of a lot of stuff done by group chatting, and especially if you use iMessage, you can respond to certain things. I would probably only say iMessage group chats is um a viable option for a business if yeah, you're less than four and everybody is on an Apple device. I think that if someone has like a an Android and it breaks the the group chat aspect of it, which you know, you can't do iMessage group chats with one person on Android, then I would strongly recommend not doing this. I do know one of my friends is a bartender at a place in town and their communication method is via is via group chat. That one, it's kind of they don't have like a lot of high leverage, high detail kind of decision making going into it. It's more like, hey, are we gonna be open today? Are we not gonna be open today? Like who's working today? Who's can anyone take this shift? Can anyone not take this shift? Whereas with like, you know, at Punchmark, like we might be working on a single project for you know a year straight. And having that topic be self-contained is there's an advantage to it because then, you know, as you go through a year, you can scroll back in that topic. Whereas in a group chat, you can't. Okay, let's move on. Um, another one I want to at least bring up, it's called WhatsApp. Man, I hate WhatsApp. I I just hate it. Um, one thing that's kind of interesting. Did you know that WhatsApp is owned by by Meta, by Facebook, which I think is kind of interesting. Um, we always forget that. They bought it for like several billion dollars, and um that's kind of like what a lot of your messaging infrastructure is. Uh, one thing that people uh like I find it useful for is communication with international people. Um, so I have a friend in Argentina, and anytime we communicate, uh, we use um WhatsApp, and that's because you know she has um, you know, a number that's not a plus one, you know, US number. Um, I also find it interesting when uh it's useful when people go to um international uh go travel internationally. And for example, my parents they went to Vietnam, and when they went to Vietnam, they switched their SIM cards, and by switching it changed their phone number. And I found it useful to have everything in WhatsApp as a communication method. But again, this isn't how you should run a business, I wouldn't recommend. Okay, so just to kind of recap, and I would love to hear how jewelry store infrastructure is working. Like, it depends a little bit on how many employees do you have. It's also going to depend a little bit on how high leverage your discussions are going to be. Meaning, like, are things going to be topic and timeline and project based? Or are you just kind of asking like on a day-to-day basis, like, hey, are we open? Are we not open? So that's gonna help with your decision making. Um, to summarize it, it's kind of like Slack is for organized work. Um, again, I'm very partial to it, but that's beside the point. Teams is for enterprise work, and the people I'm talking to on this podcast, it's probably not for you unless you work in like, you know, one of those big companies that have many, many um employees in it. And then Discord is for like culture development and real-time collaboration. And I would actually say it's good for a lower number of employees. I think you could get away with it with like anywhere between four or five and fifteen, twenty, th probably twenty. If you get past twenty, maybe start looking at Slack. Slack is good for like between I think eight or nine, and I don't know. I've never reached the upper limits, 500. And Microsoft Teams is good for like, I don't know, up to like 2000. So those are like uh email is good for just communication one-to-one, or maybe even group one. Uh, if you would get behind, uh get past one-to-one, I think that there's so many other options. I would just recommend you switch into even texting. And then um WhatsApp, WhatsApp is good for international stuff that I might consider. You know, I think it's one of those things, the communication aspect, um, there's kind of a lot of stuff that I'm sort of interested in about it. I think it comes from my UX background. What I find fascinating about the communication is that it doesn't actually come naturally to everybody, if that makes sense. So some of my coworkers, they um are very much heavily reliant on um voice. So the CS team at Punchmark does a lot of group calls and they work, but they just stay on mute, and then when they have a question, they ask it. Where because they need real-time contextual information. So, like it might take you, you know, five or ten minutes to type out the context for a question, and but you could just explain it in you know, one minute of just a quick. So, do you remember this person? Blah blah blah blah blah blah. The voice aspect is a value, and that's one of those cool things about Slack is that they just go through a huddle and they do a long-term huddle together. Uh, I find it good because uh in Slack, one of the things I've spent a lot of time on is having these specific, team-specific meetings. One year, I think it was two years ago, I actually um one of my projects that the bosses gave to me was I created these infrastructural channels for the company. So, like I made a team or uh a channel with the bosses, the three bosses, and each department, and I made it a private channel. So that way they could always ask a question in a group setting. Because it's important to remember that when you ask a one-to-one question, that information stops being spread at one person. Whereas if you ask a question in a group setting, then that information is very economical, it is spread across many. So, for example, let's just say um your access code for your store changes, and then if you were to say, hey, the access code changed, DM me for the uh for the code. Well, suddenly everybody in the place would have to DM you and you'd have to explain it to them, and then it would be one by one by one, and then that's not very economical. Suddenly your time is it's you know uh related to explaining that, and that's a hard way to kind of you know digest that information, but still, if you were to post it into a group channel, suddenly everybody is able to learn at like a much more um exponential rate because then it's up to them to just digest and reach out and find the information themselves. So at Punchmark, one thing we have is an outreach channel for each department. So, for example, for the premium vendor program that I'm leading, I have um a vendor-outreach. So this is where everybody else in the company can ask the vendor people, that's me, stuff about vendors. So anytime there's a new ticket, they ask, they put it into vendor outreach and they say, Hey Mike, so and so is asking this question about so and so, and I say, Oh, thanks. But what's nice about that is you know, let's just say, you know, Michael Jewelry vendor is uh is broken. If someone asks, hey, is so-and-so broken, and I say yes, then if someone else discovers that it's broken, they go to that channel, they see, oh, Michael's jewelry is broken. Well, suddenly they don't have to ask again, and then it actually frees up everybody's time. And again, the information is much more economical. This is the kind of the foundation of um good scaled communication. Again, I'm probably I don't know. I wish I knew. This is not uh something I'm privy to, what the average number of employees at all of our clients is. And I think it would be very fascinating to like, yeah, like see what they're using. Maybe I'll like think about that. Maybe I'll send like a survey out to like our clients, be like, hey, how many employees do you have at your store? And then what do you use your communication method? Uh, that'd be pretty interesting. But maybe if you want to leave a comment on Spotify or email me, Michael at Punchmark, that'd be kind of interesting. All that to be said, that was breaking down the best on communication. And we went over um Slack, Teams, Discord, Group Gmail, group chats, and WhatsApp. I hope you enjoyed. We'll be back next week, Tuesday, with another episode. Alright, everybody. That was the end of the show. Thanks so much for listening. This week's episode was brought to you by Punchmark and produced and hosted by me, Michael Burpa. This episode was edited by Paul Suarez with music by Ross Cocker. Don't forget to rate this podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and leave us feedback on punchmark.com slash loop. That's L-O-U-P-E. Thanks, we'll be back next week, Tuesday, with another episode. Cheers. Bye.