Social media - a tool for competitive advantage in projects deploying virtual teams

Abstract

Social media has struck popularity chord among the internet savvy generation. The statistics indicates the usage of social media with a projection of estimated 2.13 billion social network users worldwide in 2016 as compared to in 2012. Such strength has been recently recognised by business firms and lot of activities in marketing and human resource management are conducted through social media platform. Globalisation, project-based activities and need of specific talent pool have created an extremely profitable market for software development outsourcing business in India. The management of onshore and offshore teams lead to the formation of virtual teams in the projects. The very nature of the project being dynamic was further complicated by the low face-to-face interaction among the members in the virtual teams. The media such as emails, shared drives, etc. were not sufficient to overcome the complexities to tackle the tasks at times. A platform is required to substitute the face-to-face interaction and since social media is being considered as a new option for intra-organisational communication medium, and the benefits could be reaped maximum by the virtual team management. Apart from the social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. present for the public arena, there are enterprise wide social media based collaborative tools viz., Huddle, Yammer, Teambox, etc. for . Lot of software development companies have started using them for the better results and this has changed the face of the software project business. In this paper, the authors discuss the dynamic change brought by the use of social media tools in the virtual teams and empirically establish that the use of social media within the team for communication enhances productivity of the team.