Social Studies
Too embarrassed to ask just what the heck a tweet is?
Here’s a social media primer:
TWITTER is a site where users post 140-character-or-less updates
known as “tweets” and follow others’ tweets. Think: “Project one day
ahead of schedule, boarding plane to Mumbai.”
BLOGS (from “web logs”) and WIKIS (from the Hawaiian word for “quick”)
are collaborative forums where registered users create and edit content. The
best-known wiki is, of course, Wikipedia.
LINKEDIN has become the business social network. The site has more
than 53 million users worldwide, about half of whom are in the United
States. It’s popular in Europe as well, and India is experiencing the
fastest membership growth.
QZONE is one of the largest social networks in the world. With
Facebook and Twitter blocked in China, QZone has become the go-to
option there, attracting over 200 million registered users.
FRIENDSTER fell from favor in the Western world but remains popular in
Southeast Asia.
Owned by Google, ORKUT is especially popular in Brazil and India, with
more than 70 percent of its users from those countries.
VK is Russia’s preferred social network, while Europeans
join BADOO, and MIXI is big in Japan.
so the team could have a visual update
of the project’s status.
Mr. Endres recently used online discussion boards to manage the flow of
information on a prosaic but essential
project: relocating his company’s office.
Only one month in, he was already
seeing the benefits of keeping everyone
up to date—namely by stopping the
chatter of the rumor mill.
“We can simply put your question
on [the site] for everyone to see, and
within a week the management group
can answer that question,” he says.
in defining the big picture for teams
that span oceans and continents.
Everyone has seen team members
firing off instant messages to someone
sitting right next to them, but that
misses the point.
“It doesn’t make much sense if you’re
working in the same room,” argues Mr.
de Baar.
After all, the beauty of the World Wide
Web is that it covers the whole wide world.
“There will always remain some
things that are done better with a local
team. But the arguments for distributed
teams are increasing,” Mr. de Baar says.
“You now can locate someone within
your organization with some obscure
expertise and work with them.”
>>What are the
security risks of
social media and
other web-based
collaboration tools?
Mark Lobel, a principal at
PricewaterhouseCoopers,
discusses this and other IT
security issues in a new
podcast exclusively on
PMI.org/pmnetwork.
CLOSE RANGE
Many project managers see applications
for social media not on a local level but