PM Network - March 2010

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.