Peter Moriarty: If you are brand new to Google Chat, or you are
already using a little bit, and you want to learn a bit more
about Google's amazing communication tool, then this
video is for you. I'm going to take you through all the basics,
and a few little advanced tips as well to get the most out of
Google Chat for you and your business.
Now, whether you're using Google Chat for the first time, and you
haven't used chat programs before, or maybe you're even
switching from something like WhatsApp, or Slack for your
business communications, I've got a video here that is going
to share with you all the things you need to know to get started.
And if you don't already know who we are, my business is
called itGenius. And we help small and medium sized business
owners with their technology. And we take business owners
through a framework called the growth roadmap. And that is
effectively making sure you've got your business technology
straight and organized no matter what stage of business you're
at. So if you're a small business owner, and you're just
a solo operator, or maybe you're hiring your first few employees,
or maybe you're even a scaled organization where you've got
more than 20 people in the business, and you're reaching
for the stars, well, we've got technology, strategy and advice
for you no matter what stage of business you're at. And most of
our advice is centered around the Google ecosystem. And so you
can check out the playlist on our YouTube channel, where we've
got plenty of information for each stage of business, and
advice all along your journey. Now, when we get into Google
Chat, this is instant messaging software, and it's built into
Google workspace. And so if you don't yet have a business
account, we'd recommend you consider switching to workspace.
But you can also use Google Chat on a regular gmail account as
well, it doesn't have all the features, but it does give you
at least some of the basics. Now there's two main places you can
access Google Chat, and one of those is in the dedicated chat
window just headlong to chat.google.com. And you can
access chat logging in with your Google account. But now Google
have built Google Chat into your Gmail mailbox. And so you'll see
there's a little chat pane on the left hand side, which lets
you access all of the rooms that you've been invited to. And also
the instant messaging or one on one DMS you could call them
where you're messaging someone privately and individually. Now,
this works similar to something like Facebook Messenger, or
maybe Instagram, where you've got both individual chats where
you can privately message one person, but you also have group
chats. And Google calls them rooms where you can have
multiple people in there. And group chats can include people
from your company, and also people from outside your company
as well. And so it supports adding people to a room from
outside your organization. Now, of course, there's also a mobile
app. So make sure you get that installed, so you can get
notifications on the go. And speaking of notifications, you
can actually choose how many notifications you want to
receive, you've got options to receive every notification for
every room that you're a part of. Or maybe you want to dial it
back. So when you're on the mobile or if you're using it in
the browser, you only get notified when your name is
mentioned myself, personally, I use the all threads setting,
which means that anything that I'm following, I'm going to
actually see or if someone you know puts out a broadcast
message to the whole of the room, I'm going to get a
notification about that as well. But I know that I can always
snooze the notifications using the snooze function. If I want
to take a break, if I may be disappearing for a day or for
the week or I've got the day off, then I can use that
function as well to manage the notifications. Now you've got a
pretty swell integration with Google Calendar. And so when
you're set as out of office, on any day of the week, it's
actually going to notify anyone who's tried to chat to you that
you are out of the office right now. Now this is a great for
teams who work in distributed offices or setups where you may
have some staff working from home or you've got someone
working in a different time zone, it will actually notify
you if that person happens to be out and about and you may not
expect to get a response quickly from them. Let's go through some
of the basics of getting started with chat. So the first things
first is you want to set up a room and start inviting people.
And you just click onto the room plus button and create a new
room. And you can start setting some of the room settings. Now
the important thing here is whether or not you choose for
people outside your business to be allowed to access this room
or not. For companies security, you may choose Well, if this is
a finance room, you want to keep it internal only. But if it's
the kind of thing like marketing, where you're going to
have contractors working on the business where you may choose to
allow external access. So someone with a Gmail account,
for example, can join that business room with you. You can
also choose whether or not you allow threads, and my
recommendation is ticking yes to that one. That's a good one.
Because threads allow you to organize conversations so that
they're not completely overlapping with everyone. One
of the downsides of using something like Facebook
Messenger or WhatsApp for your chat inside of businesses. Once
you get a large team, you want to kind of have sub
conversations with certain people without them overlapping
over each other. And threads allow you to open one
conversation thread and have everyone chat in there but have
multiple threads going at the same time without all of the
crossover happening when you've got a large room of people. Now
the most basic way that I like to use threads is anytime I'm
starting a new conversation, I'll actually put a couple of
words just up the top which is kind of like the title of the
thread. That's the first thing that I'll put when I start a new
thread. And then I'll go ahead and write my message. And the
reason for that is once there's a lot of messages in a thread
and it collapses down Don't you want to know, which is the title
of the thread that you're kind of working on before you are,
you know, typing away, especially if you've got
multiple conversations going on at once. And speaking of
multiple conversations going on at once, if you want to bring
someone into the conversation from your team, you can mention
them just like you bought on Facebook, by putting in the Add
symbol, and then starting to type their name, you can also
type at all, and that's going to mention everybody in the room.
But obviously, you want to use that sparingly because you're
basically interrupting someone when you mentioned them. And
they're going to get a push notification to their mobile if
they have the mobile app installed. Now, as well as
adding humans to your rooms, you can also work with a number of
bots, we have an itGenius bot for our customers where they can
get access to our support team rapidly right from within their
Gmail. But there's all kinds of other bots like a meeting,
scheduling bot, and even a bot for giving you so you can post
cool gifts inside your chats as you're chatting away with your
team. Now, you just mentioned those and you'll be able to add
them to a room. And some of them you can even chat with
individually, the Google Drive bot will let me know if I'm
subscribed to notifications on a spreadsheet. And someone's added
a new comment in there, I'll actually get a little message
right inside of my chat. So I can see any updates that are
happening in near real time. And the benefits of chat mean that
you're always connected to your team. No matter where you are,
no matter what device you're using, you've got rapid access
to communicate with your team without having to type out an
email or jump into a task system. But that does have a
downside as well. And basically think of a chat system like
walking up to someone's cubicle or someone's desk in an office
and literally knocking on the desk and saying, Hey, are you
available right now, especially if someone has desktop
notifications enabled. So chats are popping up as they're trying
to get their work done? effectively, any chat that
you're sending is going to be interrupting someone's work. So
I can't stress this enough. You want to use chat very sparingly.
And the ideal scenario is that chat is only used for things
that really are urgent and worth interrupting someone over or for
chitchat, you know, the off topic banter or water cooler
chat that we like to call it, where team members can kind of
goof off and spend time chit chatting as they do their work
in a remote setting. Now, many teams in the COVID pandemic have
been forced to work remotely. And chat is a great way of
keeping in touch without having to be chained to your email. And
it's not as formal as the format of email. But it's got better
features than something like for example, Whatsapp or Facebook
Messenger, which are really aimed at being Consumer
Services. One of the other things that I love about Google
Chat is there aren't any voice notes available. And what that
means is you avoid the trap of someone hitting the record
button recording a five minute voice note, and then everyone
else in the team feeling obligated to listen to that it's
just not possible inside of Google. And we find that if we
need to actually talk something out, we can just click the
button and jump straight into a Google meet right within chat.
Because all of Google's tools are deeply integrated into the
chat interface. If you're interested in communicating
something that's not urgent, then I'd recommend you use a
task system instead, maybe something like a sauna, or
monday.com. These systems allow you to record notes and record
comments and distribute communications to your team
without having to rely on email and without having to rely on
instant messaging. The downside of using email for tasks with
your team is you get stuck in your email inbox all day. And
because email is a bit of a more formalized kind of communication
tool, it means that people can get stuck in how they would
normally write an email to a customer. And using that
internally, where with your internal team, you can probably
be a little less formal with the way that you're communicating.
And the focus can be more on rapid communication and getting
shit done together. Now the downsides of using a consumer
based instant messaging application like WhatsApp or
messenger, or even using something like Slack, which we
do have other videos on inside our YouTube channel is that
those are not really best suited for businesses, you may not have
the data security, you may not have a backup, you might not
have a record of all the data. And in cases like Slack, you may
be paying for a double up event application that you can get all
of the same things done inside the Google world just by using
the Google tool. The great thing about using Google Chat is
everything is backed up and connected and secured to your
Google workspace account. Meaning that you can use Google
vault to track all the conversations that have happened
across all of your teams. It means that records are kept of
all of the chats and business communication. So if you're in
financial services, or consulting or illegal business,
you've got a record of everything. And you don't run
into the problem of using free tools, which usually have some
kind of downside that will bite you at some point in the future.
Slack, for example, will have a time limit and a message limit
on the amount of data that you can search for. And so once you
hit a limit of four memory, it's 10,000 messages, you then can't
access any of your history without paying for licenses for
the whole company. Again, that's double up more money, more
effort. And so our recommendation is to keep things
simple, and stick to Google Chat. If you have any questions
about getting started with Google Chat, go ahead and drop
them down below. But the easiest w ay to get started is to jum
straight into the cha interface. Type in the emai
address if you'd like to chat t and start heading away. I
you've got any tips that you' like to add to our team, or i
you'd like to see more in a upcoming video, drop them in th
comments below. Or you can reac out to us. Now if you're a
existing Google workspace user we have an amazing offer for yo
to transfer your licenses to u and get some amazing benefit
and access to exclusiv discounts for your Googl
workspace account. When you joi our genius Academy, you'll ge
access to a google classroo with training for you and you
staff on how to get the most ou of Google workspace, you'l
learn how to access all th tools not only Google Chat, bu
Drive and Docs and Hangouts an everything else that's availabl
in the Google world. Plus you'll get certificates and u
to date quizzes and training o everything that you can shar
with your team. Not only this but you'll get access to suppor
from our professional suppor team. And we're available fo
any specialized projects yo need like cleaning up you
Google Drive or transferrin data from your Dropbox or mayb
even migrating data from Microsoft legacy system into th
Google ecosystem. If you'r looking for a CRM system o
professional add ons to help yo get more out of your Googl
Workspace investment, were th people to help as well. I
you're interested in that offer click on the link below for ou
Transfer-In offer. And you can learn more about that there.
I'll see you in the next video. And if you like this content,
please make sure to subscribe and hit the thumbs up button.
We'd love that and we'll see you soon.