Tagged with: reader question • Social Media
It’s time for a reader suggestion thread and, yes, you can win something 
Today’s question is:
How can people use Social Media (Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, LinkedIn, Flickr, Youtube, etc.) in their projects?
Please place a comment with your tip on using Social Media. It might be how you are using it to communicate on your team, it might be how you’re reporting to your stakeholders. Don’t hold back.
As a little incentive I will give an ebook version of my book “Surprise! Now You’re A Software Project Manager” to the most original entry (so make sure you include your email address in the comment box – closing April 30th).
Check out an article on Projects @ Work on how PMs can use Twitter; http://www.projectsatwork.com/content/Articles/248481.cfm
We are working together with multiple vendors together on one integrated system and use a simple blog to provide status overviews of the releases.
Very simple, you can view it from anywhere in the world.
I have started projects using online mindmaps for shared brainstorming – and also have emailed maps done with software. We conduct webinars to discuss the status.
I’d love a web based project management system that takes the mindmap into Gantt workflow charts.
LinkedIn’s Huddle app makes accessing that easier – while not a full project management system.
My team communicates with each other, our target audience, and prospective guests with all of the above mentioned systems.
I’m a bit of a skeptic. For project data and updates, I still prefer something more structured. I certainly wouldn’t want to have to look through pages of a blog or a hundred tweets to remember why we made a decision on a certain requirement and then to look for a status update to determine if that requirement has been built and tested. In general, I believe projects typically already have too many silos of information and that adding a social media silo will only add to that problem.
If there is a use for social media I would believe it would be along the lines of team building and growing relationships as mentioned in the Project @ Work article mentioned above. It could also be useful as a network of people from which you can learn best practices and ask questions about problems facing a project. It might also be useful for locating resources and staffing a project.
-Derek
How can people use Social Media (Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, LinkedIn, Flickr, Youtube, etc.) in their projects?
I would like to express my personal opinion on this. During the starting stage of the project these socical medias are very much helpful. As per my persoanl experience i am working with one of the Leading electronics company’s Software R&D Lab, i have felt many timess.
When start a new project, we cannt assure all our project members are having good knowledget on that area. During these moments i had started to explore Youtube and blogs for more ideas and latest research on those areas. Many times Youtube helped me a lot to get more idea about it.
Many experts speech on those area had helped our team to get more understanding so that we impressed all our stakeholders.
I have not used Flickr and LinkedIn mostly for my project needs.
Thanks
Jahir Saleem
At Projectplace we’re not leveraging social media for project work just yet. We’re very impressed with how Liquid Planner offers microblogging to keep stakeholdes informed and we’re letting it inspire us greatly. We’re designing what we hope will become the Stakeholder communication hub to rule them all.
I’m also trying to convince my colleagues that we should offer a “social media business intelligence agent” that can keep the project team working on the most important things first. Please help me in convincing them that it’s a brilliant idea. =)
Hello Bas,
The various purposes of social media network sites as an individual are Making friends, playing games, participating in polls and quizzes, interacting with peers across the globe for Q&A and other ways of knowledge sharing. The purpose and gravity of purpose varies from purely professional sites (like LI), to social networking sites (like facebook). The two mentioned are widely varying in their concept and methodology.
A corporate or an organization is still hesitant to share their business critical information (project status etc.) on such platforms due to some or the other fear. So far I have seen many organization using LI for building strong knowledge networks for knowledge sharing (in groups at LI) or for hiring skilled people. But not seen any organization using these social site for the purpose beyond that.
This is purely my opinion.
Best Regards,
Jaideep
I try to get the team members I value most to join my networks on LinkedIn and Viadeo. Projects are by definition limited in duration and we jump from project to project as they complete. It is important to keep the links open with the best people you encounter and have a chance to work with in your projects. You may need their expertise on a future project, they may see opportunities for you…
I have, off late, started using Google Sites as a tool to provide basic information of project to the team members. Latest updates from the clients, organization and team are some of the items i have placed in the site. Since it is an online tool, anyone with internet access can easily view the current status of the project.
I think this is a good collaborative tool for a project team to venture in.
A PM can definitely make the most out of this tool to effectively manage projects.
Hi Bas De Barr,
Thank you for the constant updates.
I particularly use FaceBook in everything during the initialization of a project.I gather my troops from this social network, issue instructions and demand been brought abreast through the same media.
I realized that most of my project teammates spend an awfully great deal of time in these social networks yet find time to beat the deadline, in the Estimated time and even if Critically late we still manage to pull through.
I once proposed we try something besides spending to much of our time updating status and stuff and someone put fireworks in a monkey’s ass and sent it to me.Of course I got the message and never mentioned it again.
Regards
Kanyi
We integrated so called project blogs in our solution since we believe this type of communication to be more efficient than emails.
Also we use Skype and Twitter for minor updates.
Hmmm . . . what is the definition of “social media” . . . something that wasn’t supposed to be valuable for business and now is? OK, just a little joke. Actually, I think wikis are social media. I use wiki’s extensively in projects, and I think they are a much more substantial form of social media because they allow people to “hang out” together in a space that preserves the results of their presence. When someone on our project makes a change to our wiki I’m immediately notified and feel encouraged that I’m really part of a team that’s working together to accomplish something that matters. Designing and executing our project together on the wiki is like building a home together. I look forward to moving our wiki into virtual reality so we can add a 3-dimensional “surrounding” to our project world. Right now people are using Second Life to “meditate together”, so I guess we can use it to collaborate on projects! – Scrappy Kimberly Wiefling
One of the biggest challenges in the project world has been and remains communications — poor communications can defeat otherwise excellent project teams. While more is not necessarily better communications and overlooking the needs of specific target audiences is disastrous, social media of all types provide a real-time, powerful tool to PMs, stakeholders, and project teams.
In much the same way that the early web, email, tele and video conferencing, VPN, and IM allowed us to virtualize teams, social media offers the promise of creating community, continuity, and collaboration through communication in those teams. It is already doing so in our social, marketing, and business lives.
The power of Twitter, as one example, lies not just in the real time conversation but in its search capability. Hash tag, keyword, and @ searches of both current and past twit stream allow users (and project managers) to see specific data, set up alerts for specified content, and coordinate or integrate results. Team members or stakeholders using #status, #issue, #[WBS item], #[project name], are some examples.
Wikis for projects hold great promise in opening the door to real, usable lessons learned in the enterprise. If set up and managed correctly, this kind of wiki becomes a living repository for project information about what works, what doesn’t, and how to fix it when it goes wrong.
Everyone in the enterprise should have a blog and know how to use it. Projects should have blogs as well — it becomes the status report or the burn down chart for anyone with access and content can be pushed to subscribers. Single entries can be printed to PDF for archiving. Properly indexed blogs (keywords) are searchable.
Tools such as Ping.fm and others provide a single interface for posting to all media — blogs, Twitter, or Facebook and can be a source book of all postings.
Public SM tools, however, are not for projects. Organizations should set them up in their own environment, behind company firewalls and accessible on the intranet via VPN or whatever secure protocol is in use. Public posting of project information is dangerous, probably violates company security policy, and may be a huge liability.
That said, SM provides an real-time, powerful, interesting and valuable set of tools for project managers and teams. Community, continuity, and collaboration through communication is the future.
I really ,agree with the most of the comments here, on that we use it during the initialisation to find suitable candidates to fill project vacancies, I also can find an SME, for part time consultations, and beta testers from the SMEs to give their opinions, also on some open source projects we can use it get the feature wish list, from the audience, I also agree we can’t discuss business critical issues on such public places, this would be very sally.
My thoughts on this are along the lines of what Derek V. stated.
I’m with the Marketing team and currently we don’t use social media that much to communicate with our clients – at least not yet. I can see the advantage to it but to bring everyone on board is a project on its own.
However, to connect with colleagues and other professionals, websites such as facebook and LinkdIn (to name a few) is very beneficial for various reasons. It starts off with a social agenda hence it’s termed as ‘Social Media’. The resources for ‘Social Media’ in this era successfully accomplish the task of mere communication which is an absolute integral part in today’s ever changing society.
Cheers!
-Sharjeel
I like to use Facebook to keep up to date with the team. It adds an extra element of bonding when teams are geographically separated. Its a great way to build in a level of interpersonal alliances that can otherwise be hard to build in the cycles of meetings and tussles over functionality.
Its also great to use Sharepoint for document management and sharing. It can be so much easier than trying to control folder structures.
It is always important to use tools targetted around the the individual requirements of the team and project. Its too easy to jump on the latest tech bandwagon without really analysing the benefits on a case by case basis.
Hi Bas
There are many uses like the ones explained in the previous comments.
I want to add another one: In our projects, the Software construction team members use blogs to publish and to share reusable code among team members, and Twitter to notify themselves even to another projects construction teams.
-JC
Wow! Thanks for the great feedback! With a very broad area of application. This will take some time to digest
A Blog for each project can certainly be an easy way to communicate to all stakeholders & team members.
I’m working on establishing a Ning site with the goal of having lead team members posting updates on challenges and opportunities they are facing. These would not be expert advice posts but would help people within the organization and potentially outside of it see the complexities and challenges that are being worked through.
I think an important dimension of the question would be the difficulties of having mixed levels of social technology useage within an organization. Some people use social technologies extensively for personal and work purposes. Others just use email. That can be challenging.
:M
One of our project managers here at Clark County NV uses YouTube to record a verbal project status. His project spans departments yet there is no place to post project related data that every department has access to. His solution – record his status and send out the link. He’s also used YouTube to describe his project management course that he gives through the County’s training department. Check it out – Go to YouTube and enter Citydave1.
Hi Ricky, thanks for the youtube example. Looked it up… interesting.
On the Agile projects I work on we take the User Stories and turn then into Wiki entries which are updated by the team as we go (or at the end) and then handed over to the client. This way, rather than the doorstop of dead trees that describe what everyone thought would happen before we started, we leave the client with a record of what we built instead. Since it is a wiki, it is an easy thing for them to maintain after we are gone.
With Twitter, I keep trying to work out a way to use it as a lightweight method of updating team members on progress, but what I keep coming back to is that I’m trying to turn it into SMS for a group – which is already there.
Facebook I have found to be valuable in that people I work with virtually, who I become friends with on Facebook have commented when we meet in person that they feel like they already know a lot about me from what I post about myself and family. In some ways, it serves as a tool to build a personal brand which can give you an advantage from a social engineering perspective when you are working with new team members. However, it an also very easily work against you if you are not careful.
We use DeskAway.com as our project management tools – since we built it
We use the Status Updates feature to send updates to all project stakeholders. Using the RSS feed everyone knows what everyone else is upto and working on.
We use the ‘Blog’ feature to manage knowledge that comes out of discovery or completion of a particular projects.
We rarely use twitter, fb or linkedin for pm.
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Thanks for participating everyone!
Ricky got the book
I am so happy with you article concerning social media, but i want to know if you ca use social media like twitter,facebook ,blog and youtube to market tourism company
Hi Japhet, thanks for stopping by. I am not familiar with the tourism industry (except in my holidays
, but a good starting point is always ChrisBrogan.com
A twitter like project feed can help everyone keep updated about what other team members are doing.
This social stuff may have a place in business as a tool, but the tool must be applied properly and used properly. I have yet to see this happen in a manner that didn’t create a waste of time. The reasons that this caused a waste of time is the flaws interface, the web site, the display and a keyboard. and the amount of unneeded data that must be consumed to see pertinent data While the access speed is now almost on non-variable, the display size and people skills are. It requires that the people has fast access, adequate display ( be able to read message efficiently ) and can type. I have found that most peoplein business can’t touch type and forcing them to use these services to get information creates a HUGH waste of time.
All that being said, I am in the middle of conversion with a printing company and have suggested that they implement a twitter type system between all the printing machines and the office / graphics / maintenance. This would allow people to be aware of time to complete jobs changes, possible additional materials needed and maintenance issues that can be addressed in a non-real time manner BUT need to be addressed and not forgotten ( if it is not written, is was not said ). This is possible now because almost all modern printing equipment have a computer as the control station and that can use that for communication in a noisy and larger manufacturing area multi-building), where phones and personal are limited .
If you need a tool to manage your software development projects,
I can reccommend
http://www.ganttzilla.com
It includes complete set of features for web-based creation, editing, viewing, discussing, versioning, secured sharing and publishing of project plans.
It’s free!
We made quite an interesting podcast on this topic with Elizabeth Harin (Girls Guide to Project Management) Lindsay Scott (how to manage a chamel) and Owain Wilson from the Association for Project Management. You can listen to it at http://www.parallelprojecttraining.com/podcasts.html
Hi Parallel,
I will certainly check it out, as I know Elizabeth and Lindsay, so it must be worthwhile.
BTW If you are interested, I just wrote something at Gantthead about this topic:
How Social Media Solves Communication Problems
http://www.gantthead.com/blog/The-Project-Shrink/2025/
I have built a site for students to manage their projects online. It enables people to create their own private pages where they can schedule meetings, chat, write an outline, create polls etc.
It’s totally free so pls have a look. Thx