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Harrin (2010) and Jackson (2010) discuss the availability of various SM tools, stating that the

following are the most commonly used: blogs, wikis, social tagging, RSS, social networking, sematic web, mashups, collaboration tools, instant messaging, microblogs, podcasts, vodcasts and webinars. Harrin (2010) discussed the readiness of the project team to accept the use of SM tools, and the commitment required from the team to ensure the adoption of SM tools in project activities was effective. She further provided an explanation of how blogs could be used in projects, categorising them into four types: external-facing organisational blogs, internal-facing organisational blogs, personal blogs and educational blogs. Various other SM tools, such as instant messaging, microblogs, podcasts, RSS, vodcasts, webinars and wikis, were discussed. However, Harrin’s work did not further explore SM tools and their respective classifications.

Troukens (2012) presented a survey conducted by the PMI Belgium Chapter on the use of SM in project management. The survey identified knowledge areas that were better suited for SM using various categories of SM. On the other hand, Dolan (2013) classified SM tools based on

functionalities of collaborative projects, blogs, content communities and social networking. This was not an in-depth analysis and as such the classification used by Dolan was found to be lacking for the intended purpose of this research. The same argument is true for the classification proposed by Ngai, Moon, Lam, Chin and Tao (2015) in their review of the available literature on SM technologies. Their study provided only limited examples of SM tools related to media sharing sites, blogs and

microblogs, social bookmarking sites, virtual online communities and social networking sites. They did not provide an extensive list of SM tools associated with each category. Based on the researcher’s review of both classifications by Dolan (2013) and Ngai et al. (2015), it is clear they did not intend to provide a list of all available SM tools in the categories proposed.

39 Troukens (2012) classified SM tools into various categories as shown in Table 2.1.

Table 2.1: SM categories and related tools

No SM category SM tools

1 Microblogs Twitter, Tumblr, Plazes, Twitpic, Jaiku, PLURK

2 Publishing SharePoint, Joomla, Drupal, WordPress

3 Sharing YouTube, Dropbox , Slideshare, Flickr, CrowdStorm,

Instagram

4 Social Networks Facebook, LinkedIn, hi5, Ning, MySpace, Yammer

5 Discuss Skype, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, MSN

Messenger, MS Office Communicator

6 Planning Project Manager.com, ZOHO Projects, Basecamp,

Huddle, TeamBox

7 Event Organiser EventBrite, Eventful, Doodle, Meetup 8 Live Casting Yahoo Live!, qik , Justin.tv, Upstream.tv

9 Advice TrpAdvisor, Epinions, yelp!, Customer Lobby

10 Buzz Monitoring Nielsen Buzz Metrics, Alterian SM2, Sysomos

11 Career Monster, BCentral, Career Builder, Step Stone

12 Crowd Sourcing Crowd Spring, Innocentive, Test, Topcoder 13 Multiplayer Games Zynga, CrowdPark, Farmville, Second Life,

WarCraft, Lord of The Rings online.

(adopted from Troukens, K. (2012), https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/social-media-project manager-6409).

It seems only Troukens’ (2012) study is sufficiently comprehensive in identifying a list of tools for the 13 categories included in his work. Another reason for selecting Troukens’ classification is that his survey specifically targeted the project management community. Hence, the responses received

40 are a representative of what is believed to be true or which transpired in real project activities. This research expounds what was left untouched by Troukens’ investigation. It endeavours to draw a comparison as well as provide continuity of effort among researchers. Hence, this researcher decided to use eight of the original 13 categories described by Trouken. These categories are Microblogging, Publishing, Sharing, Social Networks, Discuss, Event Organiser, Advice and Career. Another category, Blogging, which includes wikis and subject-related blogs, became the ninth category. The other four categories (Livecasting, Buzz Monitoring, Crowdsourcing and Multiplayer Games) were found unsuitable for project management activities while the SM category of Planning was

incorporated as part of the Publishing category. The omission of the four categories mentioned above was due to the fact that they provide very little value to the core activities of project management. Buzz monitoring for example is a good tool to have for marketing and promotional activities, while Livecasting is more useful for the entertainment and media industry for streaming music, movie and the likes. The Crowdsourcing category is mainly used to generate ideas or fund raising initiatives from the online communities and therefore was not suitable for the purpose of this research. The last category excluded was Multiplayer Games as this category included the use of online gaming application, which by far is not relevant to this research.

This study utilises the SM categorisation identified by Troukens (2012), as it is perceived to provide the most comprehensive classification that is relevant to this research. However, four elements — Crowd Sourcing, Multiplayer Games, Buzz Monitoring and Live Casting — were deemed extraneous and eliminated. Crowdsourcing enables the collection of large datasets via internet-based

collaboration activities for the co-creation of an idea or innovation in new product or services development (Arolas, 2012). It may play a role in gathering feedback from stakeholders, especially when a project involves the broader community or large populations, but may not serve any useful purpose among small project teams. For this reason, the researcher omitted Crowd Sourcing. Similarly, there is limited scope for the inclusion of Multiplayer Games, Buzz Monitoring and Live Casting for project management activities.

The next section discusses the role of SM in the business environment.