It’s safe to say that up to about two years ago, what we call social media was exclusively the domain of artists, teens, and the technorati. The idea of Facebook as a mainstream communication platform was just gaining momentum, and services such as Twitter still required a lengthy explanation in cocktail party conversation. Things have changed in the last few years, however. Now, The New York Times is discussing these services regularly, and Nielsen Online has been tracking explosive growth in the space; from February 2008 to February 2009, Twitter grew 1,382% — from 475,000 unique visitors per month in ‘08 to over 7 million unique visitors in ‘09. Facebook had 20 million unique visitors in February 2008, today boasting more than 65 million — a 240% leap. And 65 million is a fraction of the reported 150 million registered users of Facebook.

Project management is, of course, making it’s way to the social media universe. Tim Kendall, Facebook’s director of monetization, tells me that Paramount Pictures asked all employees to communicate with one another on Facebook exclusively for one week as a way of getting teams to understand the importance of online social interaction on the tool.

But all of these are just tools. While they might change the landscape of social interaction naturally, they will only change the landscape of your project communication if they make sense, if your people understand and embrace them, and if your project is a good fit. Here are a few tools aligned for project work worth giving a second glance.

Status

The greatest gravity in the social orbit is around the Twitter service right now — a microblogging service that offers space to answer the question “What are you doing?” in just 140 characters. If there ever was a service to serve project management, it’s Twitter. In just a few seconds, team members can post quick updates to project tasks, links to daily reports, questions for the team, and more. For teams, I recommend you “protect” and thereby render private all your status updates, as the tool doesn’t naturally lend itself to discrete team communication by default.

The recently-announced Lists feature in Twitter is a boon to teams, too. Just set up a private project team list and get real-time status updates from team members wherever you are.

Discussion

Facebook has made great effort to make the discussion feature on the site more clear and efficient for groups. Still, the idea of a project team on Facebook is typically anathema to IT security specialists. If your organization doesn’t offer support for team based wikis or SharePoint for team discussions, consider a service such as Ning. Ning offers you the opportunity to create a private social network all your own with rich discussion and file hosting support, all free. Ning keeps the lights on by offering ads on your pages, but for a small monthly fee, you can buy out the ads and clean up the site. It takes all of 15 minutes to get your own Ning site up and running — and only a few hours to move beyond the basic templates and create a project environment all your own.

File Sharing

It may seem simple, but just sharing version copies of your project schedule and plan can be a nightmare over email — an environment which still challenges many of us, fighting inbox overflow. While most corporate intranets offer a perfect sharing solution for internal teams, if you are working with any team members who are contractors or vendors, how do you keep them up to speed on the latest working project files?

Enter DropBox. This simple tool installs as a system preference, and puts a new folder in your documents called “Dropbox”. In it, you can share folders between computers and teams and watch as all your project documents are seamlessly duplicated across all users on your team. Dropbox is free for two gigabytes of storage which is likely enough for most projects. For heavy users, pay up $99 a year for 50 gigabytes of storage, and $198 for 100 gigs.

Most of these tools satisfy a single need for project teams. As an alternative to a piecemeal approach, 37Signals’ Basecamp offers a similar status feature to Twitter, and provides a full project environment, file sharing interface, and messaging platform for team communication. It is the only service in the batch that addresses the complete project environment and was designed specifically for project managers.

I don’t play hockey, but I hear there’s a rule players internalize early: skate to where the puck will be. The rule holds in the burgeoning social media space, too. The next generation of project managers currently graduating from school, working toward their PMP certification, these people have a radically different expectation for project communication than exists in the space right now. The sooner we move ourselves — and our teams — in a direction of communicating, interacting, and collaborating online, the better prepared we will be as the rules of the business continue to change around us.

Mint.com’s chief marketing officer, stunned a room full of digital marketing pros by noting that she really didn’t have much of a marketing budget. Mint.com has gone from zero to 1.5 million users in two years with no ad campaign, save a mid-five-figures sum spent on search engine terms. Rather than purchase traffic, it has pursued the same type of strategy that food trucks and online magazines do: Using free social media and piggybacking on popular new communications technology. Mint.com has more than 36,000 Facebook fans and 19,000 Twitter followers, a well-traffickedblog, and a popular iPhone application.

Great article. Worth checking out in more detail.

As outlined in today’s press release and my blog post, after the acquisition closes, the Mint.com team will contribute to improving the financial lives of tens of millions of consumers and small businesses. I’ll personally be taking on the role of GM of Intuit’s Personal Finance group responsible for online, desktop and mobile consumer personal finance offerings. Joining Intuit enables us to bring our vision of helping consumers understand and do more with their money to millions of Intuit customers. This is a compelling combination of our innovative product, technology, and industry leading user interface design with one of the most trusted brands in software.

This is good news for Intuit — not sure they can get any more disorganized than they are now. It’s probably good news for Mint, though they’re hitching their wagon to a brand that needs desperate help, putting themselves in the position of floating quality for both brands.

I left Quicken this year after being a user for over a decade. The software is less stable than it was when I joined the Intuit bandwagon and there is little evidence of evolution or rigorous development over time. In fact, several of the features I used regularly in those early versions have been taken out of the software today. I’ve moved to MoneyWell and have been able to make a remarkably easy transition to the package.