During last Friday’s #PMChat, one of the questions asked by the hosts was “How can social media integration elevate project management & product development?”
Having developed our own social media monitoring tool for the purpose of elevating project/product management, we thought we’d elaborate more on this.
In the chat, we stated that “Social media allows project/product teams to capture feedback and ideas continuously, throughout the project and capture ideas and insight that they were not even aware of. For example, a customer Tweets out major issues related to a recent product release.”
To which were challenged with this Tweet:
@OneDeskApp Same could happen with a phone call or email. SM isn’t ‘elevating’ in that case. #pmchat
Our simple, 140 character-friendly reply was:
The feedback is elevated by linking them directly to requirements, issues and tasks and communicated to PMs.
Let’s take this into more detail.
How Social Media Integration Elevates Product/Project Management
Social media is an ever-increasing phenomenon that has invaded the corporate world. Billions of people are using social networking tools on a daily basis. There are more people on Facebook (901M) than in Europe, Russia & Middle East combined (780M), and if Twitter were a country, it would be the 12th largest in the world.
As a result more and more businesses are starting to use social channels to interact, listen and engage with colleagues and customers. Consider the following stats:
- 80 percent of social media users prefer to connect with brands through Facebook. (Business2Community)
- 13% of customers post social media updates about brands they like (Mashable).
- 56% of consumers are more likely to recommend a brand after becoming a fan on Facebook.
The notion of leveraging social media into project or project management is still relatively new. If done correctly, businesses may be able to find that innovative idea that will bring them to new heights.
How do you leverage social media “correctly?”
As brought up by our fellow PMChat-er, simply monitoring social media does not help with elevation. It is, in fact, as he states, “the same as a phone call or email.”
Leveraging social media is only effective if actions can be taken on the social media comments. The easiest way for me to explain this relatively new concept is to use OneDesk’s social media monitoring tool as an example.
Built into OneDesk’s project/product management suite of interconnected applications, the social media monitoring tool set itself apart from others because it has the ability to pipe social media comments into the development process.
But, why would anyone want to capture social media comments?
With the increasingly high number of social networkers, customers and future customers may be talking to each other about your brands, products, services, industry and competitors. While these conversations may not be directed to your company, “listening in” to them may help your company understand what the market wants, make new customers, or even come up with that breakthrough innovative idea.
How OneDesk’s Social Media Monitoring Tool Works:
– Search for anything related to your brands.
– Results are pulled from public updates posted on Facebook, Twitter and Blogs. Choose to search all three channels, or filter them by the ones you wish to search.
– Go through the results and tag social media comments as ideas, feedback, problems, questions, compliments and leads. The tagged comment will then appear as a feedback item in the feedback application. Comments tagged as problems and questions will appear in the help desk application, and those tagged as ideas will appear in the ideas application.
– From there, turn them into actionable items. Assign them to team members to be worked on, link them to or turn them into requirements, issues or tasks.
– Engage with the whole team and collaborate with them on implementing the items, and produce products/services that win in the marketplace.
As you can see, the beauty of OneDesk’s social media monitoring tool is that it allows companies to capture feedback and other input effortlessly – there is no need for them to reach out to customers. Social media comments are also more honest and informative than survey answers.