Social Media for Project Managers

One of the biggest challenges in the project world has been and remains communications -- poor communications defeats otherwise excellent project teams. While more communication is not necessarily better communications and overlooking the needs of target audiences in crafting specific communications is certain disaster, social media of all types provide a real-time, powerful tool to PMs, stakeholders, and project teams.

In much the same way that web enabled tools like email, tele/video conferencing, VPN, and IM have been used in the past to facilitate virtual teaming, social media tools present the promise of greatly enhanced community, continuity, and collaboration through communication within teams. It is already doing so in our social, marketing, and business lives.

The power of Twitter, as one example, lies not only in 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], and @projectmanager 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.

What if everyone in the enterprise had a blog and knew how to use it? Projects with blogs, comments, and feeds are not uncommon -- a blog may become the status report or burn down chart for anyone with access. Content can be pushed to subscribers and comments allow interaction. Single entries can be printed to PDF for archiving. Properly indexed blogs (keywords) are searchable.

Some projects with widely distributed teams have used Facebook successfully. In addition to the personal status updates on Facebook, there are many choices of tools either built-in or available as add-ons.

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 probably not for projects. Organizations should set them up in their own environment, behind company firewalls. Accessible for team members is via intranet, 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.

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