Project Management Social Media "Influencials"

 

The results of Fast Company's Influence Project have been available for a while now. In a nutshell, the Influence Project asked people to enter themselves on the project site, and more importantly, asked everyone to get others to do the same. Those who were able to get the most people to enter were denoted as the Most Influential.

The project leaders were not exactly sure what would happen - or what it would mean when something did happen - but were able to describe the results and discuss them briefly here. They even named some New Influencials here (that some commenters felt were old influencials).

Even though social media has been used in organizations for years now, a growing comfort with newer, more robust technologies among all workforce generations allows us a chance to consider new possibilities for a moment. Rather than "settle for" using these technologies to improve internal communications in general, what if we concentrated our efforts to improve specific roles for social media to improving performance within organizations?

We need more best practices to support these organizational influencials :

Project Managers . . . Social media should be used as a tool for the project managers' influence to penetrate deeply into even the largest projects, to create a climate that propels performance.

Organizational Leaders . . . More effective leadership communications can be achieved using social media with an eye toward success of projects. For example, social media can be used to initially communicate the business justification and priority of projects. Later, it can support timely decision-making to resolve complex escalated issues.

Organizational Change Champions . . . These individuals can use social media to influence larger groups more effectively so that change is easier and faster.

Experts . . . Many organizations now have centers of excellence, project management offices and other groups that would be able to use social media to get their best practices to be used faster and more completely.

Project Discussion Moderators . . . If best practices are used for the above influencials, discussion managers (we'll probably need a new title for this role) will need to employ skills to keep discussions "moving".  They will have to organize and promote discussions for project workers so that workers want to contribute rather than just read or ignore.

You can probably think of other potential "influencials" that can help project and workforce performance. But do you have experience using social media in this way?