I’ve always been one to be a more than a little skeptical of the use of social media in the world of project management.  Don’t get me wrong – I use Facebook and Twitter every day.  I use Facebook primarily for connecting with friends and Twitter for networking and other business purposes.  I’ve just always been very doubtful that there could be any real merit in using either on a project.

Never one to pass up a challenge – even if the challenge came from myself – I decided to try out using Facebook on a recent short-term project with my team and see if it was a help or a hindrance or somewhere in between.  Each team member created a ‘business’ Facebook account and we friended each other so that we had a small group and could each only see the others’ posts through that account.  I realize there a few ways to go about it, but this is the route we chose for this trial.

Social Media

I asked each team member to make sure they were logged into their ‘alternate’ Facebook account throughout the day whenever possible and required each one of them to post a morning and afternoon status update to their wall.  This served two purposes – it verified for me that they were online and available and also gave me a status update on what they were working on that day.

It would have been nice to have a document repository or the ability to post Word doc files to our accounts without the use of a third party application.  Since I didn’t see where that was possible, we still stuck with the old fashioned method of file distribution – email.  However, we were able to collaborate, discuss, and refine documents through the use of Facebook and the Facebook chat.  The negative on the chat versus other chat options was the lack of ability to tie multiple parties into one chat – which I understand will be an upcoming feature on Facebook chat … long overdue!

Summary

I think in order for Facebook to be truly full functioning collaborative tool for business purposes it needs some additional features.  Better document handling, more powerful chat capabilities, etc.  I don’t doubt that future changes will incorporate these and yes, my team did use Facebook productively.  However, it was an experiment this time around and we could have performed everything we did on Facebook through other means.