Using Social Media for Project Management

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Is Social Media a Useful Project Management Tool?

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Total votes: 2
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dhaughey
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I'm interested to read and hear project managers are using social media as a communication tool on their projects. As a fan of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the like, I find it an exciting prospect. However, I can't imagine project managers are tweeting their status reports - are they?

What is social media useful for and are there issues around privacy or disclosure of confidential information. I'd like to give it a go, but where to start?

I'd be interested to hear from project managers who have first hand experience using social media in their projects on how they've found it.

Cheers for now,
Duncan
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dhaughey
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Since posting I've been doing some research and found several articles talking about use of social media in project management. Here’s two of the best:

Elizabeth Harrin’s post 'How Social Media Changes Project Management' on her highly regarded blog, A Girl's Guide to Project Management is in the form of a case study, one project manager using social media and another not. It looks at what the differences are and suggests uses for social media when working in virtual teams.

As virtual teams are becoming more common the ideas in this post are relevant and provide useful ways to keep on top of projects using web 2.0 technologies.

In his post 'Social Networking Techniques in Project Management' Tim Gilchrist looks at how much better people perform in social networks, outside the constraints of a corporate environment. What happens when we remove the barriers and people are free to collaborate? Part of it is that favourite old chestnut, better communication.

Tim's view of why social networks are better than traditional hierarchical corporate networks is a good read.

It's not only anecdotal evidence. In a survey of 250 people in 32 countries Elizabeth Harrin found, '53% of survey respondents carry out meetings online. 49% use social media tools for project status updates and 43% said they manage their project team with social media tools.'

So it seems that project managers are making use of social media tools.

I'm just off to tweet my status report! BFN.

Duncan
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