even 'official' Twitter sites that various
branches have set up that headquarters
doesn't know about," Ms. Wiefling says.
"My clients are frequently surprised
because their official policies have been,
'We don't participate in those sites.'"
There are ways to slowly introduce
stakeholders and team members to the
wonders of social media. One option is
to get them into interactive workshops
designed to provide "the experience of a
social media interaction" without fully
taking the plunge.
The trick is to show them that social media only seems to be cutting-edge.
"They've been doing this all along,
collaborating and working with different
sorts of people," Ms. Wiefling says.
"It's not hugely new—it's just enabled
with a new tool."
The relevance of social media to
project management is similar to You-
Tube's relation to broadcast television: It's
just another medium for delivering the
direction and communication that good
project managers have always excelled at.
look at the record of last year's project so
next time it's easier than the last time."
Some project practitioners have found
the tools to be downright addictive.
"After reading Wikinomics [Portfolio, 2006], I got obsessed with the power of collaboration and I started using wikis for everything, from the home repair list to just about everything else," Ms. Wiefling says.
That includes her projects. In one case, she was working with a team of about 15 in Japan, Europe and the United States, so she set up a wiki to keep them all up to date—except no one was checking it. Team members would send her e-mail after e-mail asking questions she'd already posted answers to online.
After six months, Ms. Wiefling was ready to give up the wiki but decided to find an ally. Approaching the project manager responsible for business process, Ms. Wiefling told her that social media is "a treasure chest of information, a recipe for how your business runs and what we
Don't dismiss social networks as just something for teens. It turns out only 20 percent of Facebook users and 10 percent of Twitter users are between the ages of 13 and 17, according to Quantcast, a digital marketing research company.
Wikis, for example, are simply a virtual version of lessons learned.
"A wiki makes team members' lives eas-
ier," Ms. Wiefling says. "It's an extended
memory base. You don't have to be picking
through your e-mail to figure out what to
do with last year's project that was lost on
some computer disc that crashed. You can
do. If I delete this [wiki], you're losing
hundreds or thousands of hours of knowl-
edge capture. But I'll delete it if no one
uses it because I can't collaborate if I use it
by myself."
Ms. Wiefling wanted to make a point
that organizations have to keep pace with
technology. "If you want to use Stone