Pretty much sums up how I feel about meetings in general. Nice visual reminder, this.

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.

Things changed for me almost immediately when I went freelance, though, and there were suddenly real dollars associated with my time. Was it really useful having me in a client meeting, for example, when the client knew that it would cost them something just to have me sit there and look pretty? Sure, I would dress up and all, but was it important that I be there? Would I be a contributor?

Ninety-percent of the time, I wasn’t needed. Instead, I’d get an email or a Skype call from a contact with a list of things to think about, a list of things to respond to, and a list of things to actually do. Each of them easy to communicate in a quick call or an email, none of them specifically outcomes of the meeting itself.

I ran a test with a client recently testing this theory on project team meetings. These folks were meeting together twice weekly, two hours per meeting, for status updates. Four hours a week, by nine attendees, is 36 hours of meeting time in a week. My hypothesis was simply that a large part of that 36 hours per week could be put toward actual project work.

So I built a matrix of team members with their annualized hourly rate attached to it. At the end of each day, the meeting organizer — usually the project manager, but could have been anyone on the team — was asked to mark down on the matrix just how much they spent of company money having each attendee in the meeting.

At first, we didn’t tell the team members that their time was being measured this way. After the first week, the project manager had tallied over $1500 in meeting money that he’d spent on a week of status meetings.

The second week, we filled in the rest of the team.

OK, the results were pretty predictable. When team members are aware of their cost to the project, the cost of their time, they get creative with their activity. By the fifth week, status meetings were back to weekly, and down to a half hour each. Their Basecamp use went way up, email task assignment blossomed, and project work became the real work of the project — not just more meta-project meeting-filler.

Seth Godin has a quick rundown of meeting do’s and don’t's that is pretty clever. Check it out and see if you can make your meetings irrelevant.