How Social Media is Simplifying Workplace Collaboration

Workplace communication used to fall into two categories: email, which is clumsy, asynchronous, and gets messy if it involves more than two people, and face-to-face or phone meetings, which are often overly structured, time consuming, and hard to coordinate.  Social web applications are making workplace collaboration a much more fluid and easy prospect.  Using collaborative web apps in the workplace makes communicating and cooperating with colleagues much easier, whether they are in the same room, down the hall, or on the other side of the world.  The benefit of collaborative and social web apps in the workplace is increased productivity and enhanced communication.

The apps and web sites here are just a sample of the broad range of web-based, social media applications that are available to business users.

Communicating in Real-Time
If you're working in an office, probably the best way to communicate with one of your colleagues is to walk to their desk and have a chat.  But what if you work remotely?  Or what if you want to talk with more than one person, or send a message to the entire company?  Organizing a meeting is time consuming, and conference calls can be costly and kill productivity. Social media offers a number of tools that make collaborating and communicating with colleagues in real-time much easier.

IM applications like Meebo, for example, help business users stay constantly connected to colleagues so that collaboration is just a ping away.  Skype, meanwhile, provides business users with a way to quickly and easily set up voice, video, or text chats, and even share screens.  For more group-centric communication, Twitter-inspired applications like Yammer and Present.ly allow users to keep everyone in their department or company up-to-date on project status by posting short, micro-messages that anyone on the private network can see.  The technology is ideal for keeping everyone in sync and allowing instant communication that doesn't disrupt work the way a meeting might.

Getting Work Done Together
Web apps with built-in social collaboration features are also making it easier for people to get real work done together.  In the past, collaborating on a document or presentation meant sending it back and forth via email attachments.  The process was messy and confusing and often led to miscommunicated ideas, overwritten copy, and poor results.  Apps like Google Docs, Zoho, and SlideRocket now allow anyone to collaborate, in real-time, on things like documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. The applications keep track of who is editing what and make sure ideas are being communicated properly and no one accidentally overwrites a colleague's work.

Collaborative tools are beginning to crop up for all sort of industries, from Woobius for architects to Sqad for computer programmers.  These applications are making workplace collaboration possible across distances and among distributed teams, and are even creating better collaborative environments for employees that work across from each other at the same desk.  In the future, advanced collaboration platforms, such as Google Wave, could set the stage for even more real-time communication and collaboration applications.

Collaboratively Managing Projects
Managing team projects requires a certain level or organization, especially when team members are working from different parts of the world or in different time zones.  Web-based project management tools like class leader Basecamp, or the very popular Huddle, offer businesses a central hub to manage scheduling, discuss ideas, share files and resources, and generally stay looped together on project status and goals.  

Other tools to help manage collaborative projects include Google Calendar, which allows groups of people to share schedules, Box.net and Dropbox, which help business users to share and manage files, and Fluxiom, an online asset management tool aimed at group collaboration.  

With these tools you'll be able to better collaborate with your peers as more businesses adopt web apps to improve workflow.
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