“I wasn’t CC’d on that.”
“Did you send me the latest file?”
“My Spam filter might have snatched that up by accident.”

Ah, internal miscommunication. I don’t know if anything can hold a company back more than that. It’s mind-numbingly frustrating when you don’t have all the necessary parties working in unison within your four walls. And e-mail doesn’t solve the problem like some would think it does because there’s always someone who missed this or that e-mail. Well, I’m proud to say I’ve found something better that, while it may not remedy such a problem, will definitely help matters.

Recently, we bought a tool for our agency that provides tremendous value to our clients as well as our own internal communication called Basecamp. If you don’t know what Basecamp is, you should go to 37signals.com and check it out. Basically, it is a communications tool that helps everyone within the company and clients get on the same page in regard to messages, documents, video and more. From an internal standpoint, sometimes Intranets are intended to perform this way, but they just don’t work out quite as well.

WIthout sounding like a spokesperson for 37 Signals and their product, let me just say that Basecamp is very simple to set up, you can set the number of projects you have in the system or have unlimited projects (we do). Plus, it goes a long way toward collaboration because the people involved on the project can make their own comments on the file in question. There’s no more “I didn’t see it” in regard to the file because once you log in with your own username and password…you see the latest version.

I can’t forgo e-mail because, well, that isn’t practical for the rest of the world that uses it. But if the world all at once decided to communicate via Basecamp and social media tools like Twitter/LinkedIn/Facebook, I could definitely make that work.

Check out Basecamp at 37signals.com and let me know what you think.

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