The 5 Top Tools to communicate online

Are you currently at home and want to continue working, wonder how can you deliver your keynote, conduct that strategy workshop or project stakeholder meeting, team retreat and communicate effectively right now?

How can we talk to our customers online,  collaborate with our team,  hire experts, negotiate and present our Service and Products like a TV Star online?

In this post, I´m not sharing all the tools you can find on Google,  but I´m sharing what  I personally use and what I learned from collaborating with other successful business owners.

1.  Whatsapp    Chat- Call-Video- short Messages - 5min

I was a big skype fan for many years traveling the world the Skype app was my HOTLINE to my family and loved ones and a min of Telephone was 5 USD and more.  Today we use Whatsapp for short Messages and pictures, and we have a Family chat a team chat, and some private clients.  I love the videos and Pictures and that I can write a message and we can make a popup group for any event like a birthday party or team meeting.  The Whatsapp Call function is the best! We reduced the costs of voice communication significantly. And the BMW had this Whatsapp functionality build into the car display. Awesome to pick up wifi calls on the road. Looking forward to better internet connections on the highways.

10 Tips for using Whatsapp!

1) Upload your photo and connect with people you want to talk to family friends and clients and team members.

2) Start a new conversation with something like:

Dear... 

3)Finish with an emotional  greeting  like:

much love, or all the best, kind regards,  yours... etc

4) Respond to ongoing chat and conversations with comment or emoticons

5) Use a lot o motivational  and inspiring emoticons like:

👏🥰💋❤ 😂🌞😍

6) Have team Group Video chats up to 8 people

7) Share pictures and short video messages

8) Install the Whatsapp on your computer so you can save all documents and pics right away into the relevant folder and you can send attachments like pdf 

9 )Build Whats a group for your family  friends, team projects, use video chats

10) Make popup groups for birthday parties and meetings 

 Here is a link to download https://www.whatsapp.com/

Costs: it´s totally free

Device: work s on mac and PC and any smartphone.

Condition: You just need an internet connection on your phone or computer

Limitation: all conversations in one channel and not easily searchable 

2. SLACK -  get organized-faster than email-have fun -5 min

This is for you if you want to get more organized, find information in your chat fast,  with an easy to use the search function, and so much more.

It's a must if you have more than one group, a distributed team, you want a dedicated channel for different projects Now as we are at home and maybe you have 100 or 100o of projects, clients - it will be hard do find your information in the chats, find the video or the picture from a year ago or to have all the links to documents at your fingertips.

But you probably agree it would be great to have as well a structure by projects or departments so you know where to look first.

Slack is a great work and project app that I use for communication with my Team and designers for chat and approval of any issue and morning standup meetings.

10 Tips for using Slack!

1) Set up your channels and invite people to the respective channel.

2) Keep messages short and save time in an instant communication

3) Create extra channels like:

• One channel for each Project. P1, P2, P3, ... and archive the channel once finished
• Channel for  your Leadership Team or your family board - you can discuss appointments, vote on options, have polls, chat and do Decision making, inform about an update, share documents 
• Channel for Clients - C1, C2, C3...
• Have fun channel where everybody can upload  video and 

4) Mute channels you do not want to see permanently but you go in and control whenever you want

I do not need to follow all project channels so I do not get notifications on the phone when I do not want

You can automatically sync your Slack status with your Google Calendar so everyone can see your availability,  respond to invites, and get updates when a calendar invite changes, join a call directly from your calendar reminder.

5)  share links to Documents in google and dropbox 

6) install the app on your phone so you can save much time by reviewing the design sent by my designer popping up and I can approve with the click on y phone which with fingertip in seconds.

We can vote as a team for options w in seconds and I can go on my Laptop for and look at all conversations like in a cockpit and the best I can search for keywords and checking to all conversations.

There are a private chat function and video chat as well.

Awesome easy to use but the bigger your team and client base you may want to set up some communication rule of the game to play the same game and have fun.

Here is a link to sign up https://slack.com/get-started#/

Costs: it´s totally free up to at the start but when you have a larger team you will pay

Device: work s on mac and PC and any smartphone.

Condition: You just need an internet connection on your phone or computer

Limitation: I would not use this tool for video training,  presentations and  conflict negotiation and project workshops

3. ZOOM-- meet online -negotiate- present-collaborate 30 min- 4 hrs

Once you have a conflict or a complex discussion I would definitely move away from slack to ZOOM my favorite Video Meeting app today.

I can do a Meeting, we can record if you agree and have Rev .com or a coworker transcribing the record g so we have minutes of our meeting with time stamps. That´s awesome, right?

However to have an efficient Zoom meeting we need to prepare like for a normal in off meeting with agenda and invitations

It os iéasy but I strongly recommend you to spend that Tome. I use Powerpoint to give the meeting a structure, I like to prepare templates you can write results onto the tables while we are talking.

There is a whiteboard functionality and you can draw on your tablet lie on a real whiteboard snd have participants adding and drawing.

You can present your slides.

Maybe you start with a poll ad ask how are you today.

This is a must for all workshops, team meetings, and seminars.  The opportunity to make role play online in breakout rooms is fabulous and easy to use. You can click and send 2 and more people into such  Room for the exercise and much better you can checking a visit each Breakout-Room . How to make sure they work on the subject? You need to prepare templates, specific tasks, and descriptions in writing. If you want to learn to delegate like a pro please reach out and get coaching and training with us or other organizations. The art of facilitating is a gamechanger to your leadership.

To stay safe and secure in your Room please read my recommendations:

1. do not use your personal ZOOM room ID that is permanent but that you create for each meeting or each Team a special ID to be sure nobody breaks into your personal meetings.
2. Use the option of a waiting room. This is set by default so you can control manually all entry, I only check cit of when I want y small team to chat with each other in the room before I join.
3.  protect your meeting with a password if you want to prevent foreign people to join meetings and private negotiations.
4. Setup your meeting so that participants need a Zoom account  

Why I do love ZOOM for my training sessions?

The streaming quality is awesome and yma yus ett to streaming facebook group and youtube calls as well. I use ZOOM to stream my presentations into a facebook group. However the landscape is changing : I learned today that facebook will improve the streaming service and provide Zoom like experiences for free inside Facebook including virtual reality and  ZOOM might focus more on safety of   Business communication. So lets be excited to use that when it comes.  All tools have  a learning curve and the more you are using them today the easier it become tin the future.

But when it comes to presentations and you want to have like a webinar function we use additional the event feature in  Kajabi

Now if you have a big audience and you want to introduce a product or service via webinar you may use the amazing build in ZOOM webinar function or you may add a tool to your portfolio called Kajabi.

Here is a link to sign up https://www.zoom.us/ 

Costs: it´s totally free up to 40 min meeting but when you longer meetings  you will pay a monthly fee that is today 14.95 USD

Device: work s on mac and PC and any smartphone.

Condition: You just need an internet connection on your phone or computer

Limitation: you have recording space up to 1 GB  that you can share and you need to ask clients to install ZOOM on their computer or phone to join the meeting.

For larger presentations and conferences wit stakeholders  you may check out tools like

REMO https://remo.co/conference/

Blue jeans conference https://www.bluejeans.com/

For group meetings a facebook group is awesome.

Awesome for e a conference feel as you have all panels on your mobiile  home and can what ist for them.

 4.  Email 

You will need to use email to send longer text, arguments. proposals and letters to  connect and serve and build relationship. Choose one you like. Here the 2 great options to have your business communication .online.

4.1. Gmail :

its free with a [email protected] and comes with the G suite  starter .up to  5GB.  You can upgrade to a paid versions and have your [email protected] account and email with Document drive including a  Calendar, Word, Powerpoint and Excel for Google and much more.
https://accounts.google.com/signup/v2/webcreateaccount?flowName=GlifWebSignIn&flowEntry=SignUp

4.2. Microsoft 365

Email hosting and on your computer fro  10 US$ per month today and it comes with the suite of other apps and storage. Beside email you get  all great office tools you need  online and offline. https://www.office.com/ and the beauty is you have  all your data saved in the cloud.

Today please be brief and structure your message in a way  that your team members are more likely to understand what you want them to do.

Be polite and avoid exlamation marks. If its urgent make a call or send a text or voice message and ask them kindly to read your email.

• Include a clear, direct subject line
• Use a professional email address
• Think twice before hitting 'reply all
• Include a signature block

Take your time to review your writing and  adda nice inspiring positive first opening line. Please remember:

Email  is the wrong  tool for conflict negotiations. Please use the right voice or video meeting tool.

My favourite Tools for Email automation is:

4.3. Kajabi:

for Small and midsize Business: https://app.kajabi.com/r/nWV4e8VF/t/h62sl2th Try  it for free 28 days. 

reach out for free support at [email protected]

In Kajabi you  you can  build a facebook like community, a forum inside and create webinars events for your clients, store your video recordings from Zoom Meetings in a secure bub and much more.

 5. Teams

That is the Microsoft  answer  to  Slack  and  it is included in the paid pro version Microsoft ofice. This will replace all skype for business apps and the  TEAMS app is used for conversations  in all large corporations who historically used Microsoft applications.. In my experience as of today it is less fun than slack but it is sperfect into the Microsoft suite .

Please make your choice and keep app diet. So less is more but use the great opportunities wisely and enjoy the new possibilities.

 What tools do you use? What information should  we add? Please send your advice and feedback to [email protected] .