Why Should You Care About Social Media?
I had a great time in Orlando recently for the 2009 PMI North America Global Congress. The PMI New Media Council did a presentation titled “Why Should You Care About Social Media?”.
Bas De Baar (ProjectShrink), Cornelius Fitchner (PMPodcast), and I (pmStudent) collaborated for our segment of the presentation, focused on demonstrating the use of new tools to manage virtual teams and allow them to collaborate.
We practiced what we preached….I’ve been using some of these tools for a long time myself and we used them to collaborate on our presentation with Bas in Holland, Cornelius in California (and Switzerland) and me in South Dakota. (Kudos to Loyal Mealer who first introduced me to vyew.com, a tool I’ve used extensively since then on several projects.)
It’s a goofy theme and we are certainly not acclaimed actors, but take about 15 minutes to check this out, especially if you are concerned with working remotely with people. Keep in mind we only demonstrated a few free tools….this isn’t an endorsement of the specific tools we used and there are many, many options available out there.
Bas put the video together as a part of his video podcast at ProjectShrink. If you don’t see the video window below, click here to go directly to it.
(Bas is the one who can’t pronounce Gouda, I’m the goofy-looking one in the red shirt, and Cornelius is on Skype with us after a bit.)
Do you have any questions on this topic? Leave a comment below and ask away! I’ve used a lot of different tools in different organizational environments, and I know we have other experienced people here who can lend their own expertise.
Oct 19th, 2009 at 6:05 am
Hi Josh, Never liked the term “social media” which, in my mind, denotes the Facebook and Twitters of the world. What you refer to as Social Media are the collaboration capabilities that enable people share, communicate and exchange information utilizing today’s web based collaboration tools. The example you provide of vyew.com is an excellent example as it is these sort of capabilities and functionality that underpins the very reasons to your claim that we should care about Social Media.
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Josh Nankivel Reply:
October 19th, 2009 at 10:21 am
True. I like the term “new media” better, but what will that mean 10 years from now?
Our part of the presentation focuses on collaboration, but there was a lot more by others on tools like Yammer, Wrike, professional branding via social media/new media, etc.
I think Bas might have the rest of the presentation, I’ll check with him.
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Oct 19th, 2009 at 10:49 pm
I started a research project with Josh recently and we used Google Docs. You know, I am truly impressed. Most of us are very busy and work various schedules, but this tool proved to be very useful in our initiative. Josh set something up, I progressively elaborated the requirements and we concluded our brainstorm session in record time that ended with a preliminary design. Had we used the conventional, let’s meet at the local coffee shop, this project would have taken much longer.
Thanks Josh for exposing me to these neat tools. Plus they are at my favorite price “Free”.
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Josh Nankivel Reply:
October 20th, 2009 at 7:33 am
Thanks Travis. I agree that many of these new tools can be very useful for remote collaboration like we are doing.
One thing I didn’t mention is that Google Docs also supports version history automatically. You just go to [ File >> See revision history ] and you can browse through versions with edits highlighted and indicating who made the edit.
This has been very handy for me in the past, especially when it’s open to a large number of people who can edit the document. If someone added something or removed something and I’m not sure why, I just look through the revision history and I can see who made the change and when. Recovering errors is easy too if necessary.
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Oct 27th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
Great stuff guys! Thanks for sharing the video, Josh. Although I use the audio portion of Skype to record virtual interviews, I have not used Skype’s video conferencing… I was truly impressed how low the latency was on the connection between you/Bas and Cornelius although you were across the world from each other. Technology has certainly improved since the 1990’s when expensive videoconferencing systems would often have a 1-2 second delay and every meeting seemed to have the awkward period of trying to allow the other side to speak.
I was aware that Google Docs allowed for sharing, but I did not realize that multiple people could type/control the document at the same time. Pretty cool stuff and I have been searching for some collaborative means of sharing documents in real time. This appears to be a good solutions.
Thanks again!
Ron
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Oct 27th, 2009 at 11:49 pm
Hello Josh, Can you please check to embedded video since I see a white space only. I’ve tried IE, FireFox, Chrome on several machines but the movie not loaded
Thanks, Laszlo
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Josh Nankivel Reply:
October 28th, 2009 at 8:04 am
I added a link above the video window in red, give that a shot. Please let me know if that still doesn’t work for you!
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