Social media has long ceased to be a domain of private individuals keen on maintaining long distance relationship with friends and family by posting details about their whereabouts and latest happenings in life. In corporate world it has become a handy tool for managers to address team communication problems and broadcast information about changes in policies also interacting with clients. In current global business scenario wherein teams are spread across the globe and are working in different time zones, social media is the best tool to communicate with several people with one message instead of writing individual messages to each team member.
Using social media
For a project manager it is essential that they communicate everything to their subordinates in a clear manner to have effective collaboration on all tasks. Posting project details on Facebook and gathering feedback from individual members and then assigning them down into individual tasks via Twitter can help in managing work in an effective manner.
Using Twitter to deliver necessary news – Twitter is a great tool for project managers to broadcast information about need to know details to employees from a common platform. Though some people prefer sending information via email it sometimes gets missed out in the sea of chain mails that they receive during the day as part of official communication.
Building communities with Facebook
Once the projects are well underway and everyone is assigned tasks to compete project managers relegate themselves to observation and assistance tasks. During these times they can help raise communities for team members to work together and share ideas and push their individual abilities to manage the project successfully. Help platform can be managed by project managers to gauge weakness and build team effort.
Features like announcements, sharing special interests and uploading documents which can be shared with limited users help to manage project coordination and carry out work in a synchronized manner. Yammer and Google Plus also enable creation of a calendar of project milestones which can be updated by team members on a regular basis to keep in touch with project progress. As such, project management will become a combined effort of a group instead of just the duty of a project manager.
Project management problems generally stem from lack of communication between members and social media is an incredible medium which can improve team interaction and collaboration. As today most tech savvy people are comfortable with social media and its functions it will not difficult to build and common communication platform on social medial for project managers.
