I share your and Glen's opinion on IM. It's very useful. We could discuss whether it's social tool but that's not the point.

I share your point that it becomes different situation when our teams go virtual and we're no longer in one place. Then anything which helps in communication and doesn't require big trade-offs is welcome. Twitter/Yammer included.

However although I haven't seen any research on subject I believe we still work most of the time in old-school teams which are in the same place in the same time. Then most of advantages or "tools which substitutes real world conversations" are gone but their trade-offs, namely time consumption, are still there. Then the question appears: whether using them is still to improve organization or just trying to be cool and trendy.

That's basically what my point was – there are situations when we need help with communication, mainly in distributed teams, and some of social media tools can help. They can be useful in taking the relationships within the team out of work too which I forgot about. Facebook can be surprisingly useful here.

However most of the time we sit with our team within a range of shout. We don't need Yammers, blogs, FriendFeeds, Facebooks or something. What we need is to talk with each other more openly. Social media tools won't substitute that.

As you says – it's all about communication.

I do focus on Twitter on purpose. This is the flagship of social media these days and probably the most overhyped tool at the same time.

I don't deny you can find ways to make Twitter a useful tool in project management. However it's still marginal. And still I believe in vast majority of cases there are better ways to solve communication issues.

If I'm going too general I'm ready to discuss every single social media tool in separate thread. E.g. I believe Yammer is a better version of Twitter from a perspective of using it in professional teams.

The problem is with definition. What is social media tool and what is not? Instant messaging? It's around for too long to qualify if you ask me. Applications sharing content online like Google Docs or Liquid Planner? They're all about collaboration not about being social.

We can go with Wikipedia definition of social media tools and I'd say the only high-value tool out there in terms of support for project management is wiki. The rest way less universal so you need to face specific situation to show high value of specific tool.

One more thing – I've never put equals sign between project management and social media and have not implied anyone did it either. All I write about is hype on using social media virtually everywhere, project management and software development included. And yes, you'll find a lot of these if you look for them – several links are in the post.

That's the argument I expected – there are loads of quality content going through blogs and Twitter. It doesn't however mean this content isn't available though other channels.

Actually if you looked for specific PM content, let's say on risk management, I wouldn't advise you to go look through Twitter or blogosphere in general. I'd probably point one of sites which aggregates information from many sources: gantthead.com, pmtoolbox.com, theicpm.com or pmhut.com.

On the other hand both blogs and Twitter can bring quality content on new subjects which you wouldn't consciously look for. However level of noise and average quality in both sources is significantly lower than in mentioned above.

That's why telling Twitter or blogs are enabled us to learn new things is flawed. It was possible and it is possible in more efficient (not necessarily more convenient) ways.

And yes, every tool which improves communication within distributed or virtual teams is welcomed. Twitter and blogs included. I've tried to stress this one in the post.

I guess I should have mentioned instant messaging. That's the perfect example where new tools helps in our work. Although in this case I believe the term "a new tool" isn't very accurate. I was using ICQ more than 10 years ago (not in project management though), way earlier than whole social media thing appeared.

Anyway, IM is a great example of a tool which when properly used and i proper situation can tremendously help. There are situations when IM trumps both phone call and email although it definitely doesn't substitute either of them in general.

We did our presentation as a group and although the video you reference is just one segment, there was a later segment where Chalyce Nollsch took the "devil's advocate" stand on social media and talked about the misuse and abuse potential.

Of course the segment Bas, Cornelius and I collaborated on was just about collaboration, so maybe that's "social media" and perhaps not.

I'll echo Glen's comments that IM has been a great boon on my projects even when co-located, and IM plus other collaboration tools have been life savers when dealing with dispersed teams. They are communication tools though, not project management.

The Twitter comment is a bit of a straw man. Hal Macomber discussed Yammer as a part of our presentation, and Bas even specifically states that Twitter is no good for use on projects in the intro to that video here.

I highly recommend you check out Hal's presentation on Yammer. Hal has used this tool in his projects and talks about taking the friction out of communication. In Hal's context it's about communication when someone is out on a job site or located remotely.

I love co-located teams. No cubes if possible, a shared space like a true team. Phone calls are also my second method next to the optimal, which is face-to-face. I wrote about that a bit here years ago if anyone is interested.

Josh Nankivel
pmStudent.com

Still, this works for remote teams in particular. Normally, there's nothing better than direct contact, especially F2F. But I believe we are aligned here.

Cheers, Mate! Thanks for the food for thought!

I think you focus too much on Twitter, there are a whole array of Social Media tools available to us, many of which are perfect for Project Management. Having said that, I can still see the value of Twitter within a Project environment, it gives those "people" you talk about, the platform to make their voice heard, if value is to come from their actions then they need to feel valued in the first place! This may vary according to the type of Project you are working on, but in general, to hear what often goes unsaid, is of huge value. I can see many other areas in which Twitter can be a positive thing within a Project environment, Management of Risk and Quality, Planning etc
It also gives us access to a wealth of information and contacts that we weren't always able to access so readily in the past.

All you really talk of is Social Networking, not Social Media Tools. The same defiance is exactly what Instant Messaging was met with years ago, and that has now almost taken over from email as a day to day tool for conversing with colleagues, subordinates etc.

Nobody is saying Social Media is Project Management, not sure where anyone is getting that idea from?

Just my view, of course….

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Following tweets with content provides education that can make us better managers, PMs and individual contributors. Writing a good blog requires organization of thoughts to cover a wider range of issues than how you might think about an immediate problem on a project.

Working a lot of remote projects with teams dispersed all over the world, I can see a benefit from creating a light community for the team, away from the pressure of the project. That would provide a direct benefit in a roundabout way.