>TIP
Make it personal. Along with all the assistance
managing projects, social media can also help you
develop your skill set and build yourself as a brand.
“Project managers are using social media for their
own purposes,” says Bas de Baar, a Zandvoort,
Netherlands-based independent consultant and
blogger. “Personal development is a big one.
They’re also using it for self-promotion, to promote
what they’re doing outside the boundaries of
the company.”
In that case, social media can also
help in ironing out different approaches
to work.
“If you take communication styles
and direction styles that you use for a
co-located team and you try to use
them on a distributed team, they don’t
always work,” Mr. de Baar says. “It’s a
different ballgame.”
That’s where social media comes in,
offering instant collaboration and infor-
mation exchange—no matter where
people happened to be.
Social media has a very low threshold for entry, too. “You can ask almost
any junior manager to write a blog post,
so in that sense it’s also a great mechanism to get your sponsor involved or
draw in other people and stakeholders,”
he says.
There is one rather large caveat:
Project managers unaccustomed to open-information work environments may
have a difficult time adjusting to a data
flow that goes up, down and sideways.
“There are a gazillion reasons why
people would not like transparency,
from office politics to having no experi-
ence in it or just because it’s a change,”
says Mr. de Baar. “You have to start
thinking about working with colleagues
on the same page, literally—in a wiki,
on discussion boards—to get more
in-depth knowledge on a subject.”
THE RELUCTANT SOCIAL
NETWORKER
Budget-wise, using social media seems
like a no-brainer. The cost benefits are
certainly cheaper than flying everyone
to corporate headquarters for a meet
and greet. And implementation is often
more a matter of time than budget.
Of course, you still have to convince the naysayers, says Kimberly
Wiefling, founder and president of
Wiefling Consulting LLC, Redwood
City, California, USA.
“Some of my buddies are working
with more traditional businesses that
think social media is just for teenagers
to keep track of their friends,” she says.
And that sentiment wasn’t uncommon
—until very recently, when Ms. Wiefling
says she spotted a shift. Organizations are
being forced to take note of social networks because, like it or not, they’re
already involved.
“Some of these companies are totally
unaware that they are being mentioned
in the social media, whether they participate or not. I show them examples of
where their people have profiles on
LinkedIn and Facebook, and there are
