The way we now choose to engage with brands and in turn how we expect brands to engage with us has evolved. 2013 will be a year of continued innovation in the digital marketing space, as brands seek to better understand us as consumers and communicate with us in new and more effective ways.

We are not really connected to each other either, experiencing real human interaction and spontaneity. You can send me an email from the other side of the world and I might read it within minutes. I can follow and memorise your every tweet without us ever experiencing each other's smiles in real life. It may be communication, but of what quality is it?

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I will never listen to another voicemail in my life. We are never ever, ever, ever getting back together. Like ever. Why are the tools of modern communication so broken?

What a wonderful array of communication channels we have at our fingertips these days. So capable, so varied, and all so very instant. But why is it that the more we have, the less contented we feel?

He works for IBM Madrid, lives in Gran Canaria and his boss is based in the United States. So why on Earth did Luis Suarez decide to give up email? The social software evangelist tells Kate Bassettabout his take on life outside the inbox.

Our dependency on email is impacting our working lives, even causing us to question whether we have lost the art of effective communication. Yet at the same time, we see a new generation of employees thriving through their mastery of the more modern world of social networks - where communication is everything.

Is email doomed? If Atos, an international IT services company, has its way, it will be - by 2014, anyway. Atos is convinced that while email's ...

Some say that email will eventually be consigned to the history books. But are they right? And could you adapt your working and social life to other f...

So a really big HAPPY BIRTHDAY to the email attachment - panacea and pain in equal measure. Without it the development of modern communications would have been seriously hampered and yet with it we are open to viruses, scams and storage nightmares.

As James Murdoch has recently found out, managing your emails can really be quite a chore. It can be easy to miss important emails, see but not re...