Introduction

What is social media?

Social media is part of WEB 2.0 where people use the internet for interactive, social interaction on communication technologies. Social media is about an engagement with online communities and allowing user generated content. It is participatory, community based and interactive.

Why social media?

So, why is social media relevant to projects , and project management? Nowadays, it is common for project team members to be distributed geographically while working on projects. This increase in virtual teams makes the communication process more challenging and it’s difficult to build strong relationships and high levels of trust. The use of social media channels to collaborate in real-time, can help strengthen relationships and build trust among team members.

Social tools are driving a faster flow of knowledge and information within and across organizations. Social media provides companies with the ability to quickly identify, organize and deploy teams, to collaborate across borders and between departments, and see a measurable organizational benefit.

YouTube

For the project manager, YouTube offers hundreds of videos on project management methodology. More people prefer video to text with certain types of information. If you have distributed teams, set each group up with the means to create video updates. Not only will your status reports be more engaging, but putting faces to names creates a closer, more respectful team.

Yammer

Yammer is like Facebook’s equivalent, but in the corporate world, focused on the company. With Yammer, you can share announcements, create a team calendar of milestones, create pages for different interests, and upload documents.

Also consider posting your team’s latest screenshots of the app for team members to comment on and share video updates or team photos. Yammer allows for more in-depth updates and comments can also be grouped into a “thread” beneath each post.

• Project documentation – you can put all the project documentation on a blog.
• Major milestone announcements – blogs are a great way to keep your team informed of the major phases that are coming up, as well as to recognize the good work your team has accomplished as milestones are passed.
• Interesting pictures – keep blogs interesting by posting pictures of a product in various stages, or of people who are making a product.

About the author: Linky van der Merwe is the Founder of Virtual Project Consulting, provider of project management best practices and recommended resources to aspiring and existing project managers .