Many Communication Options = Worse Communication?

Over the last couple of months, I have developed a growing addiction to social media. Where a year ago my main channel for interaction with friends was email, followed by email and Facebook, nowadays it increasingly includes Twitter and shared links via RSS readers. Not to mention FriendFeed, which is a mélange of everything else.

However, no real framework governs all these tools. Some people you contact via email, some people you send messages to in Facebook, some people you tweet. Some people you talk to across multiple channels oftentime continuing a conversation across multiple platforms.

Which is all great in theory – more ways to communicate between people should lead to more and better communications. Except that I’m beginning to think this isn’t actually the case.

I’ve had a couple of examples in recent weeks where I’ve contacted someone on Facebook regarding some issue fully expecting the person to respond via Facebook. Except that the person doesn’t respond until days later and I realize I should have actually emailed (or, heaven’s forbid, phoned) them. 

Or, I find myself having running conversations with people via tweets and private messages on Twitter. Except that Twitter was never built to be an effective tool for two-way conversations and eventually the whole exercise gets so frustrating that I go back to email.

The explosion of social media choices does provide us with a lot more options for communications. But lacking a good framework for organizing and keeping track of these conversations, it mainly seems to increase the noise.

Comments

[Maurice Hornblass]

This is very true. Are there any start-ups that are working on this issue?