Online Discussions

To Pick Up Where Email Falls Off

While most of your jobs involve creative materials, not all do. Some collaboration is about strategy, research, positioning, and branding. For this, you rely heavily on email, which works well some of the time, but doesn't work at all much of the time.

Email works well for point-to-point communication between two people. Just don't attach any large files or invite a third, fourth or fifth person in the discussion.

Email was built for conversations between two people, but doesn't work at all for group discussions that go on over time among many people. Email cannot ensure that everyone is always on the same page. Email "reply alls" run rampant and in short order, it becomes impossible to understand who is saying what. The likelihood of misunderstanding increases dramatically, when you take into consideration different operating systems and email clients. Look at how this identical email displayed in different email systems looks on different computers.

Online discussions solve the problem when email just doesn't cut it. Everyone on the team will see the same discussion, regardless of computer type, browser, or location. Discussions are organized, so you can see a who actually replied to a reply to a reply. And, there is no problem uploading and downloading large files.