Transcript Slide 1

Using Social Media in Project
Management
Barbara L. Ciaramitaro, PhD, PMP, CISSP,
CSSLP
Ferris State University
April 27, 2011
Challenges Facing Project
Managers
• Virtual Teams
• Team Communication
• Changing Time Frames
and Priorities
• Stakeholder Engagement
and Involvement
• Managing Risk
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Internet-based technology tools that allow
individuals to communicate, collaborate
and establish a community with others.
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Changing the way the world does
business.
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How Can Social Media Help?
• Social Media tools can provide easy and open
access 24/7 to all members and stakeholders
of the project team to project documents, dates
and activities, discussion and other
resources.
• Social Media tools support communication,
collaboration, and community within your
project team.
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Community is
the ability to
interact with
each other and
share common
goals.
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Collaboration
is the ability of
people to work
together to
achieve
common goals.
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Communication is the
ability of people to share
information
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Types of Social Media
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Blogs: Blogger, LiveJournal, WordPress,
Micro-blogging : Twitter
Social networking: Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning
Events: Meetup.com
Collaboration Wikis: Wikipedia
Social bookmarking (or social tagging)[6]: Delicious,
StumbleUpon, Google Reader
Social news: Digg, Mixx, Reddit
Multimedia Photo sharing: Flickr, Zooomr, Photobucket
Video sharing: YouTube
Videoconferencing: Skype, WebEx, Adobe Connect
Product Reviews: epinions.com, MouthShut.com
Business Reviews: Customer Lobby, yelp.com
Community Q&A: Yahoo! Answers, WikiAnswers, Askville,
Google Answers
Virtual worlds: Second Life, The Sims Online, Forterra
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• Twitter is a free microblogging service that
allows its users to send
and receive messages
known as tweets.
– Tweets are text-based posts of
up to 140 characters
displayed on the author's
profile page and delivered to
the author's subscribers who
are known as followers.
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Twitter
• Twitter can be helpful in keeping in
contact with project team members. It is
available on both mobile devices and
desktops.
– Update and assigning tasks
– Quick communication updates
– Important notifications
– Scheduling events
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• Facebook is a social networking websites
where users create their personal profiles
and post updates to notify “friends”
about their current activities.
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Facebook
• Establishing a Facebook group can support
community, collaboration, and communication.
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Twitter and Facebook Risks
– Both Twitter and Facebook has been
blocked intermittently in several countries
and has been banned at many businesses.
– Privacy has been an issue, as their user
accounts have been compromised several
times
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Alternatives to Facebook
• Although you can create a page or group in
Facebook to help in project communication, here
are couple of additional tools to consider that
offer additional functionality to support project
teams.
• They also offer more privacy and controls.
– Yammer
– MangoSpring
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Yammer
• Yammer allows you to set up a private social network for your
business to communicate, collaborate and share expertise via
an easy-to-use, Web-based interface.
https://www.yammer.com/
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MangoSuite
• MangoSuite provides a complete environment for project
management including deadlines, milestones, threaded
discussions, brainstorms, exchanged links and uploaded
documents and makes them accessible in a real-time
enterprise micro-blogging platform.
• It works similar how a Facebook feed and commenting
functionality works, sharing something with the group or
project members generates a feed that is visible to the relevant
team; users can then comment on any feed item.
http://www.mangospring.com/
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MangoSuite
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Meetup
• Meetup is an online portal that facilitates
offline group meetings in various localities
around the world. It allows members to find and
join groups unified by a common interest, such
as politics, books, games, movies, health, pets,
careers or hobbies. You can join existing Meetup
groups or form your own.
– http://www.meetup.com/Algonac-Area-Knit-andStitchers/
– http://www.meetup.com
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A blog (web log) is a way to have others hear you .
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Blogs
• Blogs are good tools to allow team members to
brainstorm and share their successes and challenges
with other team members.
• You can start a blog and ask each member of the
team to contribute to it on a regular basis
– They can identify new tools, how they worked, and any
new thoughts or ideas they might like to incorporate.
– Members can sign up for an RSS feed and get a
notification as new articles are posted.
• Wordpress is a common blog tool. www.wordpress.com
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Blogs
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Wikis
• Wikis are a used project team collaboration tool. It
can be used to define new ideas or approaches, discuss
risks mitigations, or share solutions to common
challenges.
• Sometimes helping to create documentation can open
your eyes to new ways of looking at a concept. And
showing others on the team how you see something
can also offer them a new perspective and will
contribute to your project on a new level.
• A list of various wiki software tools is available at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wiki_software
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Wikis
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Interesting Social Media Tools
• 37 Signals has a set of Social Media Tools
that are ideas for building community,
communication and collaboration in project
teams.
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Basecamp
• Basecamp is a web-based group project management and
collaboration tool. It includes to-dos, files, messages,
schedules, and milestones. http://basecamphq.com/
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Campfire
• Campfire is a web-based group chat tool that lets you set up
password-protected chat rooms in just seconds.
http://campfirenow.com
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Backpack
• Backpack makes it easy to keep all of your essential
documents, information, schedules in one place all the time.
http://backpackit.com/
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Highrise
• Highrise makes it easy to keep all of your contract related
information together in one repository. http://highrisehq.com/
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Web Conferencing Tools
• Skype that allows users to make voice calls and establish
videoconferences and chats over the Internet.
www.skype.com
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Web Conferencing Tools
• Zoho Meeting Is a new web conferencing tool that allows
instant setup of web meetings and conferences, desktop
sharing, video and phone calling and other features.
http://www.zoho.com/meeting/
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Web Conferencing Tools
• Adobe® Connect™ is an enterprise web conferencing solution
for online meetings based on Adobe Flash® technology. It
does require backend database support.
http://www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect.htm
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Web Conferencing Tools
• GOTO Meeting allows you to host web based conferences
with up to 15 people.
http://www.gotomeeting.com
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Web Conferencing Tools
• WebEx Web conferencing lets you connect in real
time. WebEx combines desktop sharing through a
web browser with phone conferencing and video.
http://www.webex.com/
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Web Conferencing Tools
• Fuze is a new web conferencing tools that allows
teams to Collaborate with documents, video, images
that is available on mobile devices or desktops.
http://www.fuzemeeting.com/
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Selecting the Right Web
Conferencing Tools
• How many people will you meet with online?
Different tools allow for different numbers of
participants, up to about 1,000.
• Will you need to access your participants’
desktops via the tool? Again, this capability
varies by Web conferencing application.
• Does the tool need to run over a browser like
Internet Explorer—and do all your participants
run this browser--or can it be access via the Web
itself?
• Will you need video and camera capabilities?
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Other Uses of Social Media
• Vendor Research
– Social media is a great way to do
independent research on your vendors by
seeing what other customers say about
them.
• www.yelp.com
• http://www.customerlobby.com/
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Other Uses of Social Media
• Employee Research
– Social media is also commonly used to find out
more information about individuals.
– The majority of HR companies now perform a
social media search on prospective employees.
– As a project manager, this is an effective way to
gain a better understanding of prospective team
members.
– As a project manager, this confirms the
importance of building and maintaining a
strong digital persona.
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Your digital
footprint –
easy to make
- hard to
shake!
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