The past 5 years has seen a massive surge in technology and socially connected networks and interfaces. Long gone are the days of couriering artwork to clients and having massive bloated teams – causing huge expense to the client.

Now, I know the internet has been around for years now, and a lot of the innovations I will speak about have been theoretically possible for a number of years – but only now are we starting to see the large-scale uptake by business and consumer alike. 

Though there are far too many technologies to put them all down in one article, I have picked out three that I feel can really drive your business productivity and expansion. 

Crowdsourcing

Whether you realise it or not, you have probably used a crowdsourced platform in the past week, maybe even the past day. Crowdsourcing is the concept of using a mass group of individuals (the crowd), to achieve a given task.  

One of the best examples of this can be seen in Wikipedia. If you haven’t heard of it Wikipedia is a public encyclopaedia, complied by millions of people from all over the world. Instead of having a dedicated company or team behind the site, the Wikipedia platform has been opened up to the general populace, who add it’s vast entries. 

How can you make use of this? Well the information provided by crowdsourcing can be used for research and more. If you have a small project coming up – why not open it up to everyone, through social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook? 

Collaboration

Obviously, we have been working in teams for some time, but usually in the same place. Where new media and technology has made massive bounds is in the area of remote working. By using tools such as Google Docs and Dropbox, staff can work from the office, without actually needing to be in the office – and all for free, without having to set up massive VPN’s and fileservers.

If you have not tried Dropbox, I encourage you to give it a try. It is a file management system, that not only backs up all your data online, but also syncs it across all your computers, or your team’s computers. In a similar way Google Docs allows for documents, spread sheets and presentations to be created and stored online – you can even have a team working on the same file at once. If you have any remote staff, sign up for these two amazing technologies and you will see a massive boost in productivity, I guarantee it!

Creatology

Now this one is a bit of a sneaky one, as it is not as commonplace as the other two I have spoken about. At Wonderful we swear by it and feel it could change the way marketing companies work, just by adopting this ethos. 

The term creatology was coined in 1972 by Rafael Nelson M. Aboganda for a paper they had written for the Philippine Inventors Commission. The basic concept is around understanding the science of creativity. 

We have taken this ideology and worked it into everything we do. As an example, if we get a new web project in, we don’t just consider how the site will look, or even how it will be developed – we look at every detail, including demographic testing, user interaction and experience, reasons for usage and much more, as well as the traditional design and development requirements. 

Through the adoption of creatology, giving equal weighting to both creativity and technology, we design much higher quality work that considers every aspect of use, not just because it is the latest buzz. 

Though these three concepts are just scratching the surface of what can be done in this new media age, I hope it will give you a good starting point. If you would like to find out more about any of the above – feel free to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it :)