How Do You Leverage Social Media For Project Success?

 

I'm a big advocate of leveraging the social media metaphor as well as social media tools to make teams more effective and engaged. Over the last few months I've written a lot about how the social media metaphor is a great way to encourage collaboration among the team, but there are other ways we can leverage social media within the project management process.

A Network of Subject Matter Experts

When I first started following the project management world online I was literally blown away by how many brilliant project managers willingly shared their smarts with the rest of us via Twitter updates, blogs and even podcasts. If you have a question there's an incredibly active community of really smart project managers on the #pmot hashtag and most recently the #pmchat hashtag to name just two.

Some of the smartest project managers I know are very active bloggers. It doesn't matter if you want to read about Agile methods or more traditional approaches, there are guys like Derek Huether and the Agile Scout as well as more traditional project managers like Robert Kelly, Josh Nankivel and Todd Williams (and there are dozens of other like Liz Harrin, Deanne Earl, Mike Meikel...the list goes on).

Podcasts have become very popular over the last year or so with anything from the fifteen minute PMChat podcasts Robert Kelly is doing to podcasts like Raechel and I do with TalkingWork that are about an hour. Anyone wanting to learn more about how to be a better project manager has lots of opportunities to do so.

I'm also a big fan of the online project management communities like Gantthead, ITToolbox, Projects@Work and PMHut. These are great places to keep up to date on news, articles and current project management thought.

Capturing and Leveraging Best Practice

Wikis have a lot of potential for capturing, cataloging and sharing best practices. There are also tools like Dropbox, Evernote and other cloud based filing systems that have great potential for sharing lessons learned—many of which are free or very little cost. What are some of the ways you are using these tools to facilitate effective project learning?

Online Survey Tools, Facebook and Forums

I've successfully used Survey Monkey and Facebook to get feedback from colleagues, but Forums are another very powerful way to participate in the project management conversation as well as learn and meet new people. What are the forums you turn to when you need answers?

We've only scratched the surface—how are you leveraging social media?