Is the Future of Communications Social?

I increasingly view email in the same way I do physical post – quaint, idiosyncratic and evocative of a bygone era. Email just seems so clunky nowadays and so outdated. The level of spam email we all receive doesn’t help. Even with spam filters and email rules about a third of my emails are things I delete without reading. So if email is old school, what’s new school?

For nearly all of our project communications within LearningAge Solutions we now use Basecamp, an online project management and collaboration tool.  Basecamp is searchable, manages the project timelines and files and is the hub of most of our project communications. We supplement this with Google Docs for collaborative document creation, have started using Prezi for storyboarding complex branching scenarios and Mindmeister for top level instructional design.

Most realtime communications between our team (all of whom are based at different locations) are via Skype which we use for chat, VOIP conference calls and sending files to one another. We use our mobile phones for voice calls, SMS and Skype on the move. People in my wider network usually contact me by phone, Twitter or LinkedIn but not Facebook – I keep that for personal use.

All this technology is either free or very cheap and enables collaboration between our globally-based team and clients. It also lets me run my business from my iPhone if i need to. I still check my email daily, however I look forward to the day when I no longer have to. Mobile collaborative, social communication is where it’s at.