At the Pink Elephant ITSM Conference in Las Vegas last month, Eve Mayer Orsburn, CEO of Social Media Delivered, and Sashe Dimitroff, Partner at law firm Haynes Boone, talked about whether it’s a good idea for your company to be on social media networks. For ‘company’ you can also read ‘you’ especially if you are a project management contractor.

Eve listed some pros and cons of putting yourself out there on social media sites:

Pros of social media sites

Pros and Cons


  • Increased exposure – great if you want to win new project business
  • Traffic to your website
  • Enhanced ‘popularity’ – I don’t think she meant you will personally be more popular; she was talking about your company’s website being more popular with search engines
  • Create and leverage a powerful marketing and PR machine – you can position yourself as an expert
  • Greater awareness of the public’s perception of your products and services – this is a key point if you work in a consultancy capacity. Happy customers will talk about you online to their friends and colleagues

I would also add that you can use that profile to interact with other companies. For example, many project-based firms have social network profiles. If you use Seavus Project Viewer, you can use social media networks to connect with the company or other customers to share feedback.

Cons of social media sites


  • There is the potential to issue public statements that it then becomes impossible to retract – Oops.
  • Publicity headaches may occur that could undermine your brand.
  • An employer can be held liable for the actions of an employee – so you may find that if you are a project-based organisation, your project teams could use social media unprofessionally and you find yourself liable. Not good.

Use your existing policies

Policies

Eve and Sashe recommended that you implement social media policies in your organisation. They said that you can use existing corporate policies and adapt them to cover the use of social media. If creating a corporate-wide policy is too difficult, try at least to get the PMO to issue guidelines about the use of social media on projects or in project teams.

“People don’t read long policies,” Eve said. “They will always click ‘I agree’.” Her advice about this was to firstly keep your social media policy short – great for the busy project team. Second, she recommended training people on the policy. The higher up in the organisation the person, the more training they need, she said. This is because the senior team need to know how to deal with policy infringement and what happens when things go wrong.

Eve advised that the social media policy must be connected to all other organisational policies (including, one assumes, the project communications guidelines issued by the PMO, if you have them). She said that compliance with the policy should be expected and enforced, and that it should clearly distinguish between talking about you and talking for you.

Train your project team

Project Team

Whether or not your company takes this advice and implements a social media policy training plan, you can definitely do this on your project. If you are using a wiki, instant messaging, a project blog or any other type of social network to manage your project, make sure everyone knows how to use it. Make sure they are clear about whether they are talking about you (“my employer does this” or “at my company we manage project risks like this”) and talking for you (“as a spokesperson for my company I assure you that this project will deliver in April 2012”).

They should also be clear that social media is not the right channel to use if they have a complaint to make. Any concerns about the project, the project team or the way the PMO runs things should be directed to the appropriate manager, not aired on social media sites.

And make sure that you know what you would do if someone doesn’t use the tool professionally. Do you speak to their manager? Should you involve HR? Work it out now so that you can both explain the consequences of unprofessional use to your project team and also to save you time should it happen.

Eve summed up by saying that it is important to have your own house in order. If you have personal social media profiles, make sure they are professional. Be respectful, use good judgement and prioritise work when you are at work.