We have 3 months from a standing start to make a difference in St Louis. We have our clients needing to know what we are doing in real time. When we are done, we need to be able to scale what we have done and share all our lessons with the larger public TV and Radio system.

To do all of this we have to work across the silos - the TV production people have to work with Outreach - who has to work with Marketing - who has to work with the Web guys - our CEO has to see it all but not get in the way - the client has to see it all but not make reporting our goal - other stations have to see what we are doing without us spending all our time talking to them. We all have to learn from our mistakes and we all have lessons to share.

How do we ourselves learn how to work in a more collaborative way? How do all of us learn the essence of Social Media?

How do we all do all of this when we have noooooooo time!!!!!

So how are we doing all of this and not going mad? We have discovered that Ning can be a brilliant social project management tool that allows us to do all of these things.

Here are some screen shots that I hope will illustrate how Ning can be so helpful as a Project Management tool in the Social Media Age:

Here is the top of the main page of our Team Site. The main Groups of activity have their forums displayed here. While we all have to see everything - each group of course has its specifics. Jack and the Project Managers and our clients and partners can all see everything and do.

You will see on the left a YouTube clip - all our TV Content is mounted on the site again so that all can see it and also so that Mike and I can repost it to the blog. You will see on the right the RSS feed from the Blog so that all can see what Mike and I are doing there in real time as well.

Here is the internal blog feature of the site. Here anyone can post updates and news. It is our bulletin board. Content issues, trip reports, other material that we have found, issues to be raised - all can and do go here. You can add pictures and all kinds of files and material to theses posts. Anyone can reply.

Everything on Ning is searchable so we don’t have to worry about a taxonomy that we could never keep up with. Later when we have to go back and discover why we did something, we only have to use a key word to find out.

We use the Forum section for group reports. Here the PM, Ross, calls in public for our weekly task and outcomes. It’s all public - you are late or ineffective - it’s brutally clear. So Ross will be less and less the herder of cats and we all have to take more responsibility to do our job. There is no hiding here!

There is also no hiding that Jack is always watching! A critical issue in moving fast but also safe is the paradox that in the end the CEO is responsible but if we make him the bottleneck for all decisions, then we fail.

The nature of the Site means that Jack can and does see everything. So CEO becomes the facilitator rather than the barrier for speed and safety.

Total transparency - we have not only all of us who have jobs on the project on the Team Site but we also have members from CPB, from PBS, from Stations, from our Measurement Team, from Social Media Advisers. We are doing all the work in full view of our peers and our client. They see not only the good work but our struggles too.

I think that this is surely the way of the future - especially because this work has to be replicated to be successful.

I wonder - are we alone in using Ning in this way?

Is this working? All the paradoxes and demands that I defined at the beginning of this post have been met by taking this route