Dennis McDonald's Web Site

By Dennis D. McDonald (written 2/20/2008)

While interviewing project managers for my blogging and project management survey I encountered several people who didn’t use blogs but did use wikis. This made it clear to me that it’s important to specify what we mean by “social media” in connection with project management. Below I suggest a couple of definitions I think might be relevant to our discussion.

Here are definitions of “social media” and social networking” I used here:

Social Media are collections of data and information that are developed collaboratively and/or shared interactively among individuals and groups. Examples of social media are blogs, wikis, shared bookmarks, and group rating systems.

Social Networking is the use of special processes and technologies to support the discovery, formation, and maintenance of personal and professional relationships. Examples of commercial social networks are Facebook, MySpace, and Linkedin.

I’ve also become somewhat partial to the more general concept of “technology enabled collaboration,” which I defined here as follows:

I include in “technology enabled collaboration” the  variety of communication or information management technologies that make it possible for people to (a) discover common interests, (b) exchange information about those common interests, and (c) build and maintain personal and professional relationships over time that reflect those interests. These categories include both traditional technologies (e.g., phone, email, teleconferencing) as well as newer collaboration and social media and social networking technologies such as blogs, wikis, group messaging, social networking, and social bookmarking.