Social Media for Project Managers

By Elizabeth Harrin

Social Media for Project Managers goes beyond Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to explore a whole range of collaboration tools available online like wikis, microblogs and document management tools. It aims to show the practicality of using these collaborative tools to support the project management process and how they are being used in the larger, ever-changing business environment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Project Management Institute
• Release date: Jan 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781935589396

Book preview

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Chapter 1

What is Social Media?

You're ready to take your first steps into the world of social media and enterprise collaboration. You've probably heard a lot about these new technologies and are interested to find out how they can help you manage your projects more effectively. That's why you have picked up this book. We'll cover a lot of ground in the subsequent chapters about how you can deploy social media technologies in your workplace to support your project management practices, which I hope will be new to you.

But here's the first surprise—social media isn't new at all.

The Rise of Social Media

Social media and social networking may sound like new terms but people have been using the internet to communicate with each other since the 1980s. Admittedly, the early bulletin board systems and chat rooms were not terribly sophisticated, but they did allow people to leave each other messages—and that's communication. As the technology for building web-sites became easier to use, the internet evolved from a place where techie experts shared bits of code with each other to a domain where anyone could publish anything.

And they did.

Humans are predisposed to connect with each other. We like communities and we like being part of something; we're social animals. Along with the dot-com boom of the 1990s came technology to help us do that, and to make it easier to smarten up the hideous websites we had been building previously. Blogger and LiveJournal—two hugely successful blogging platforms—were launched in 1999 and by 2003 blogging was a recognized pastime, with many businesses hosting their own corporate blogs for marketing purposes. At the same time, faster internet connections became available and businesses and residential users started switching to connections that didn't take five minutes to download one page. Suddenly, easy-to-use technology and widespread take up of broadband meant that millions of people were online, ready to talk and collaborate with each other.

Whether it is an old-style forum, a tiny personal blog, or a structured corporate blog—these are all opportunities for us to connect with other people. Helping people make connections is the direction the web is heading, and that is the underlying force behind what we call Web 2.0.

What is Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 is a term that is defined differently by different people, but the basic idea is the same. It signifies a shift away from brochureware websites to those that allow readers the opportunity to participate somehow. In the past, websites were flat, static pages of information: online encyclopedias, electronic brochures for hotels, lists of courses available at a college. Now, with Web 2.0 tools, you can edit those encyclopedia entries, you can leave messages in an online hotel guestbook, and you can chat to students already taking courses before you make the decision to enroll.

Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo (2010, p. 4) call this the conversational web. There is a belief—a philosophy, if you like—that the internet is a space that can foster interaction and conversation. That belief came first, and the technology followed to meet the needs of internet users.

That shift away from brochureware provided the opportunity to get more personal, and one of the key features of Web 2.0 is the emphasis on personalization. Personalization means that you can tailor how websites appear, what you see first, and even modify the colors and design. Hotmail, the popular (and free) Microsoft® email system, has a number of different themes to change the look and feel of the screen. Companies use portals that require customers to log in to do the same thing. Communication is more tailored, and the audience has more of a say.

If it all sounds complicated, you might be surprised to hear that ease of use is another fundamental principle of Web 2.0. Those early internet adopters—academics and computer programmers—might have had the time and inclination to sit around working out how to make sense of the internet, but the average 21st century user does not. We want things quickly. We want things to be easy. And we want things to follow broadly the same usability standards that we have in other tools to make it easier to pick up a new piece of software. Developers call these intuitive interfaces, but the web is rarely truly intuitive. It is simply that users have learned a way to understand and decode what the various icons and menu options mean because they have a certain logic and follow what the user has seen before. For example, a picture of a floppy disk means save, although floppy disk technology has died out and many young people using computers today may have never seen one in real life. Using the same standards for different applications means that we can switch between them faster, and usability is a key feature of Web 2.0.

Blogs are not the only Web 2.0 tool. There are a number of pieces of technology, for example social networks like LinkedIn, which make use of the Web 2.0 principles of interactivity and collaboration. They all fall under the umbrella of Web 2.0, and we'll look at some of those and how they can work in a project environment later.

Of course, none of this would be possible if web users weren't prepared to take that step and start using the internet for communicating with other people. It just goes to show that we will take any opportunity open to us to create a sense of society. However, while it might look like people are doing any old thing online there are actually some fundamentals that give the social media space some structure. Understanding these will help you better adopt Web 2.0 tools for your project.

The 7 C's of Social Media

There are seven guiding principles of social media that form the basis for the structure of the social media space:

• Community

• Collaboration

• Communication

• Constraints

• Connectivity

• Channels

• Content

Let's look at each of those in turn.

Community

When groups of people come together with a common objective, you end up with a sense of community, almost by default. However, what creates a sense of community is the ability to interact with each other, and this is something that the web allows us to do more so than any other form of media. You can ring in to a radio show, or write a letter to the editor of your daily newspaper but traditional forms of media don't engender community. You can find communities for all kinds of things online—from PMI's Virtual Communities on various facets of project management to independent groups talking about green project management, critical chain project management, or any other topic. The internet allows groups of like-minded people to come together, and project managers can tap into this. After all, your project team is like-minded, with a common objective: to deliver your project.

Collaboration

This is the foundation on which all social media tools are built: the fact that people want to work together and the internet can make that easier. Barefoot and Szabo (2010, p. 7-8) describe it like this:

Collaboration has become a Web 2.0 cornerstone, in part because it endorses the many-to-many model valued so highly by the content creators who live there. Working together online has done a lot to break down the Web's reputation as a hostile, unfriendly, and unsympathetic place. Collaboration assumes trust and good faith, and the Web is chock full of examples where people bring the very best of themselves to a project, whether raising money online to help fight cancer or making research available for free to anyone who needs it.

Online collaboration technology has made it possible to work across time zones, languages, and with people you have never met. Becoming closer to those project team members miles away is the project manager's dream. Anything that can help foster better working relationships across the project has to be a good thing, right?

Communication

Hand in hand with collaboration comes communication. If collaboration is the multi-faceted linking between groups of people with common interests, then communication is a more one-way version of the same thing. Regardless of how collaborative your team is, there are times when you need to tell them things. Project board reports are a good example of this. Your sponsor needs to know the current status of the project. You and your team may collaborate on producing it, but once the board report is prepared, it is a straightforward communication exercise.

While Web 2.0 tools are great for collaboration, they are also hugely beneficial to the way in which we communicate information, by providing us with more options. Social media and online tools also give us a greater ability to personalize messages. Instead of one message to everyone, you can slice your audience into groups and provide them with targeted communication—which is more likely to be interpreted and understood the way in which it was intended.

Communication also needs to be honest and transparent. One of the underlying principles of Web 2.0 ways of working is that what you read, listen to or see is as truthful as possible. If you cannot share the project information that someone is asking for, say so. Aim for transparency with all your social media dealings—internal to your organization and externally as well.

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Walmart: A failure of transparency

Although the blogosphere might not appear to be a particularly ethical or transparent place, there is a strict code of ethics among bloggers. One of the first challenges to this behavioral code came from Walmart, the U.S. supermarket giant.

Laura St. Claire and Jim Thresher took a road trip across the U.S., parking their RV in Walmart parking lots each night. Along the way, they took photos of their journey and Walmart employees, and documented their trip on a blog called Walmarting Across America. The blog was sponsored by Working Families for Walmart. This was not an independent organization, but—in fact, had been created by Walmart's public relations firm, Edelman.

Eventually, the realization broke that the blog was not the story of two independent journalists travelling across the U.S., but rather a PR activity designed by Edelman. Other bloggers and mainstream journalists took this as a breach of trust. The criticism leveled at the Walmarting Across America blog and Edelman was that there should have been transparency about who was funding the road trip. The lack of transparency about the relationship between the Walmarting Across America bloggers, Edelman, Walmart, and Working Families for Walmart constituted a public relations crisis for Edelman, especially as Edelman waited several days to respond to the growing condemnation from the online media.

There are two lessons to be learned from this experience. First, in the online world, transparency is king. Using a private corporate social media tool, it is unlikely that you would suffer a public PR crisis, but the advice still applies. Second, if you make a mistake, admit it as soon as possible. If you need time to investigate and get the facts straight—say so—along with an estimate of when you will be able to comment further. Bear these two simple things in mind when you are working with social media tools, and you will have a stronger chance of avoiding backlash from your colleagues and clients.²

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Constraints

The online space is not a free for all. There are constraints and expectations for online behavior. Out in the public domain online, there is a strong expectation that you will share things in an honest and transparent way. These are values that I suggest you encourage with your private, project-team-only social media adoption.

Internet users are hidden inside a monitor—you are not actually face to face with someone when you are using social media tools. A little photo of someone next to a username may well be the closest you ever get to meeting the person at the other computer. This opens up the online system to abuse. It is a lot easier to say things online that you would never say face to face. Constraints and good practice around how to interact with other people online have been consolidated into what is called netiquette—manners for internet users. There is more on this in Chapter 7.

Connectivity

You can only be part of the online debate if you are connected to other people via the internet. In the past, it used to be the case that we would get the latest gadgets at work first; a BlackBerry® or a Mac, for example. They would then spill over into our personal lives for home use. This isn't the case any longer. It is now far more common for new gadgets to be purchased for personal use and then taken into the office—where we expect them to be compatible. Connectivity used to be limited to a home or office computer, but now individuals can connect via mobile devices like phones or games consoles, which allow gamers to play each other even if they aren't located in the same room, or even city.

Personal mobile devices now provide us with connectivity on the move, and many people carry their internet connection with them wherever they go. This is why it is naive of companies to think that banning tools like Facebook from office computers is productive—individuals can access these sites from their personal devices in working hours regardless of corporate policies.

Channels

A channel is just a word to describe the way information gets delivered. As a project manager, you need to decide what channels—technologies, software tools, platforms, hardware—you are going to use. Different channels work well for different types of content, so if you want to share photos, you'll choose a different channel to if you want to get people working on the same document at the same time.

Content

Content is all important in the social media world—perhaps the most important. If you are sharing information that is boring or irrelevant, people will stop listening and collaborating with you. There is so much going on—online and offline in the ‘real’ world—that people don't have the time or concentration span to pay attention to drivel. This is why so many personal blogs and websites fail—no one cares enough to read them and, without an audience to interact with, the authors get bored and stop writing.

You have to avoid this at all costs with work-related uses of social media. It's a fine balance between being engaging and creating an environment where people feel they can share a part of themselves beyond a thumbnail photo and turning an online project space into a flurry of irrelevant messages that the team tune out.

The web also provides the functionality to tailor content to the person seeing it. This is a great advantage for the project manager, as it helps to keep the content relevant to the audience. You can use social media tools to filter information so that your project sponsor sees a high-level summary, the team gets everything, and your external supplier only gets relevant, non-sensitive information. Cutting the data that you share in various different ways saves you the bother of having to produce different versions of the same status update or additional reports.

Living in the Clouds

There's a final C that you will hear mentioned frequently in relation to working in a web-enabled way—cloud computing. Cloud computing is the delivery of infrastructure, an operating platform and software delivered over the internet as a service. You can buy storage space, platforms to build your own applications or access to software applications. The latter is often called Software as a Service (SaaS).

Cloud computing means that companies don't have to invest in data centers or massive server rooms, and they can avoid the cost of having to host and maintain the software themselves. If your organization gets busier, you pay the cloud computing supplier a bit more money and they scale up the solution for you to cope with the demand. And if business trails off, you can scale it back down. It is a flexible way of managing your IT needs, and it's fast. Simply choose your software and vendor, pay the license fees and you are on your way. No waiting for the IT team to order equipment, install it, and connect it all up to your local network, which also means lower capital costs of making the investment in new software.

The cost argument is of great value for project managers looking to deploy social media tools in their organization. Many enterprise collaboration tools and hosted social media software packages are available through the cloud (i.e., online). The start-up costs are low, and if it doesn't take off, you can cancel your subscription. You won't be left tied in to ongoing contracts or with expensive servers sitting idle.

Cloud computing solutions aren't welcomed by everyone and at the time of writing they are not the de facto way of doing business, although I predict that this will change and the appetite to work in this way will increase over the coming years. As the software is hosted on an external server, IT departments and governance specialists often worry about the security of the company's data. Using cloud services means giving up some control, and that can be uncomfortable. Cloud providers can provide security guarantees, and some will allow you to visit their facilities to see the levels of security yourself, which will aid in alleviating these concerns.

Cloud computing solutions have also been criticized for not being green, meaning that they are energy-hungry server farms with a high-carbon footprint. If this is a concern for you and your organization, research the hosting company fully before committing to doing business with them.

The cloud is used for all kinds of applications alongside social media and enterprise collaboration tools. We won't be discussing cloud computing concepts in great detail in this book, but we will look more closely at dealing with security concerns in Chapter