Social Media and Construction Marketing

I am doing the opening talk at a social media and construction marketing pre-conference training day in London on 3 February 2010, organised by Emap Networks, the events arm of the publisher of Construction News, Architects’ Journal and other publications, and run in collaboration with CIMCIG.

The event will re-unite me with former Emap marketing director now marketing consultant Ross Sturley, who will be chairing the event, and with UK architecture’s arch-Twitter Su Butcher and blogging expert Gemma Went of Red Cube Marketing. The post-lunch sessions will be delivered by Edward Charvet of Trovus – talking about LinkedIn – and by Danielle Sheerin and Ross Breadmore of Nixon McInnes – talking about using Facebook (agenda here). It will not be a day for sitting back and listening either, as delegates will be challenged to undertake various tasks between the sessions.

Perhaps showing just how powerful social media can be as a business networking aid, I met up with Su and Gemma two weeks ago to discuss the event – our meeting set up by an exchange of Tweets, including the URL of a shared Google Map. I then met Ross later the same day, fulfilling a promise made via LinkedIn. And the following week travelled back from the excellent Dell B2B Social Media Huddle in Bracknell (an event I learned about through a blog post by Neville Hobson) with Nixon McInnes founder Will McInnes.  I like to think that it’s no longer “it’s a small world” – instead “it’s just an increasingly connected world”.

Let’s do that Australian thing

The friendly response of the new UK chief construction adviser Paul Morrell to my recent posts generated a few comments, several encouraging him to embrace Web 2.0 to build a conversation with people in the rest of the industry. It seems there is an international trend towards adoption of such techniques.

Reading the Daily Telegraph technology RSS feed, I came across a report: Australian civil servants urged to tweet, blog and use Facebook. It immediately struck a chord with me, resurrecting past issues I’ve had with research suggesting that social networking tools are time-wasters (see Going to the toilet puts UK economy down the toilet and More cynical sniping at Twitter costs).

In Australia, a government-commissioned draft report on new media apparently calls for blogs to be used to allow the public to comment on policy proposals. I suggested that Paul Morrell might start a blog for exactly this purpose, and he is planning to do so.  Will he take the next step, as our Antipodean friends are recommending: to engage “more energetically” with popular websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and YouTube?

“Online engagement by public servants should be enabled and encouraged. … Robust professional discussion benefits their agencies, their professional development, and the Australian public. … Access to work tools like web-based email, collaborative work spaces and instant messaging create powerful new possibilities for collaboration particularly where collaborators are physically apart. … Likewise Twitter, Facebook and blogs provide access to professional information and conversation.”

And if he does, perhaps more importantly, will other industry figures and their respective organisations also engage with these conversation tools and techniques?

A public PS: Paul

Looking back at my open letter to Paul Morrell, I realised that it would probably need to be printed out and posted to him, or at the very least emailed, so perhaps we need a post-script….

A public PS: Paul

I would be delighted to be proved wrong, but I suspect you probably don’t read many blogs, use Twitter or engage in m(any) social networks. Your communications probably revolve around email, but think what a powerful message it would send to the industry if you, the new Chief Construction Adviser, actually started to engage in online conversations with construction industry people?

Think about blogging, for example. Instead of relying on the traditional media to relay your ideas to the industry, you could speak direct to industry professionals, and read their reactions yourself. Having your own online ‘voice’ would also do wonders for your personal reputation.

Why not deploy online forums and polls to learn what people at the work-face think are important, to gauge reactions to your policies and plans, or ‘crowd-source’ innovative ideas to seemingly intractable problems?

And if you are serious about the future of the construction industry, you will also need to look at how we recruit and retain the industry professionals of tomorrow – many of this Gen Y (and Gen Z) cohort are highly conversant with networking platforms like Facebook, and will be making career choices influenced by such media.

You could even use Twitter. “Oh, I won’t have time for that,” I hear you say. Well, numerous MPs and even Government ministers such as Lord Drayson (post) are online regulars, often finding that Twitter and Web 2.0 tools such as RSS and Google Alerts saves time over other channels, so that ‘lack of time’ excuse carries little weight. You would also be in good company with another government adviser, director of digital engagement Andrew Stott, who both  blogs and Tweets, and has nearly 3000 followers as a result.

[Update (04 December) - Much to my surprise and delight, Paul Morrell actually responded - see the comments to this post.]

Open letter to the new Chief Construction Adviser

First mooted in July 2008, the appointment of the UK government’s first Chief Construction Advisor was finally announced this week. Former Davis Langdon quantity surveyor Paul Morrell has taken up the three-days-a-week job at a critical time for the construction industry, and his new role has been extensively covered in the main construction weeklies. I have been taking a look back at some posts I wrote last year about this role, and felt moved to compose an open letter to our new construction czar….

Dear Mr Morrell

First, congratulations on your new appointment which is long overdue, particularly as it was more than 16 months ago that the House of Commons Business and Enterprise Committee recommended – in Constructing Matters (PDF) – the “creation of a post of Chief Construction Officer”.

As I wrote at the time, Constructing Matters was, however, something of a disappointment to me. Like another document published shortly before – the Strategy for Sustainable Construction (see post) – it failed to pay attention to better use of ICT tools within the UK construction industry.

I read in this week’s Building magazine that you plan to focus on two aims: to co-ordinate low carbon policy and to improve the government’s return on its investment. I submit that in both these areas ICT can play a crucial role.

The Commons Committee received evidence of the potential benefits of ICT tools to address such problems (see Vol II, PDF). Indeed, Constructing Excellence (of which I am a member) said:

Common processes and tools bond the team together and release major efficiencies. For example, good inter-operability of ICT systems in the supply chain using Constructing Excellence’s Avanti protocol, project extranets and single building information models, and common logistics for moving materials to and from site. ICT is seriously under-exploited in the sector despite many initiatives and much evidence of the business case. However, something as simple as co-location of a project team in the same office is a good place to start.

Sadly, Constructing Matters had just one mention of ICT (relating to training new entrants to the industry). Perhaps when you chair the Construction Innovation and Growth team, you will encourage industry professionals to look at the huge potential of information and communications technologies to support the delivery of a better, more sustainable built environment.

There is a growing body of support and advice on this topic. For example:

• Sir John Egan, in Accelerating Change (2002), highlighted the role of ICT, and wanted 50% of projects to be delivered by integrated teams by 2007 – a target the industry failed to meet.
• I helped produced a study on ICT and Automation (PDF) in late 2007, which was published by the National Platform for the Built Environment and formed the basis of a new Strategic Research Agenda (PDF) just four months ago.
• The SCRI Research Report, Future Generation of IT (PDF) published in June 2009 helped “identify possible futures that the construction industry might face and to start developing a construction IT vision for the year 2030“.
• In 2008, the Cabinet Office’s 28-page report Greening Government ICT (PDF – see post) also talked explicitly and positively about ‘Thin client’ technologies and other potential ICT contributions.
• The Construction Commitments, among other things, says “IT-based collaborative tools and communication technologies will be exploited“.

Internally, UK Government (the construction industry’s biggest single client) has also been looking at improving efficiency through the Gershon Efficiency Programme, and one strand of the 2008 Operational Efficiency Programme (PDF) was the cross-cutting area of ‘Back office and IT’.

Looking at the tasks outlined in your job description last year, I think  ICT has a vital role – for example:

• “promote best practice in construction procurement” – think about the efficiency savings that come from automating aspects of tendering, making information available online and reducing paperwork.
• “implementation of Government policy” – from Gershon to Greening Government IT, ICT is now a cross-cutting strand within government and the Strategy for Sustainable Construction, albeit modestly, gives scope for government to encourage better ICT use across the industry at large and support its low carbon policy.
• “Championing the industry’s image” – Too often described (sometimes unfairly) as ‘technophobic’, the industry could at least partly transform construction’s low-tech image by incorporating ICT more effectively into its day-to-day operations. This could range from high-end BIM collaboration to the ways in which industry manages its conversations with clients, supply chains, local communities, regulators, new recruits to the industry, and others (see post).
• “Promoting innovation” – ditto.

I hope you and your support team will take on board much of this growing clamour to take this great industry of our’s well and truly into the digital age.

Yours sincerely

Paul Wilkinson

How far are AEC firms lagging behind? A long way.

ReadWriteWeb is a must-read blog for many people interested in social media, and its coverage of corporate adoption of Web 2.o is excellent for those looking at its use in business (so-called Enterprise 2.0). Today, I read a post, Enterprise 2.0: Study Shows Adoption is Real, by Alex Williams that reported survey data from the 2.0 Adoption Council revealing social media adoption in some of the world’s largest organisations.

It shows, unsurprisingly, that high tech companies are leading the way in uses of Enterprise 2.0 technologies, although most are still at the ‘early adopter’ stage, with manufacturing businesses also bringing social computing into the work of their employees (post). But adoption by engineering/construction organisations apparently lags a long way behind.

It looks depressing, but I figure this probably has a lot to do with the small size of the Council’s sample – probably only one AEC firm figured in the survey, so the snapshot is little more than anecdotal as far as construction organisations are concerned. But even if the sample was extended to encompass more AEC businesses, I expect the industry would still be seen as lagging behind, not least because many firms actively block social networking by their employees (a recurring topic in this blog – see Why social media bans won’t work, for example), and have people, systems and processes that are often almost anti-collaborative (Not Invented Here).

Now BSD ceases publication too

Rumours began to circulate on Twitter yesterday that another UK construction industry magazine was set to close, and today I read Andy Pearson’s “And Finally…” conclusion to his December 2009 online editorial in UBM’s Building Sustainable Design (BSD):

This is the last issue of Building Sustainable Design. After almost a year of trying to succeed in a difficult commercial climate, BSD is to cease publication.

A sustainable built environment is as important now as when BSD was launched 11 issues ago, and its publisher UBM will continue to serve forward-thinking designers through our sister magazine Building. Its website, www.building.co.uk, will include an archive of the editorial content of BSD.

All that remains is for me to say a big thank-you to all who contributed to this magazine in its short life: in particular, everyone on the editorial panel and the next generation panel who gave their time so generously; the advertisers for their support; and most of all you, the readers, for your feedback and encouragement. I hope BSD has kept you informed and entertained….

This news comes in the same week as Contract Journal publishes its final edition after 130 years and also shuts its website and other online channels (see post), with the loss of six journalist jobs. This closure further reduces the number of print publications serving the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry.

BSD superceded UBM’s Building Services Journal, which was discontinued last year when the Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers decided it wanted to publish its own magazine, CIBSE Journal. As Tim Dwyer’s initial comment on Andy’s editorial suggests, there was obviously no room for two publications targeting essentially the same readers and the same advertisers:

The competition between BSD and CIBSE Journal was undoubtedly healthy (in quality terms) but no doubt contributed to the demise in these incredibly harsh economic terms.

Like Building, BSD has tried to embrace social media, and as one of the people engaged in its conversations, I will miss it. I followed its Twitter and RSS feeds, wrote an early contribution to its blog (reposted here), and also welcomed its wiki experiment: the BSD Project Wiki (I also monitored publication and website for one of my clients in the building services sector).

Hopefully, as Andy’s editorial says, some of BSD’s content will still be accessible through the Building website. In the meantime, there is no news of whether this closure will mean job losses at UBM – perhaps staff will be redeployed to cover building services news and features in Building, on www.building.co.uk and other online channels?

It’s a blog, not a free press release service

[This is an updated and expanded version of a post from my ExtranetEvolution.com blog.]

I don’t republish companies’ press releases on my ExtranetEvolution blog, which is focused on a particular niche area of construction collaboration and related technologies. As an expert in that field, I try to be discriminating in what I write about, but some marketing people naively assume I will automatically publish anything. Last week I received an email asking:

“We are interested to publish our company news in Extranet Evolution; I could not navigate the place to find the details of how to submit the article. Please send us the details.”

I responded, patiently explaining:

“ExtranetEvolution is a blog, and so doesn’t have a news-posting service. However, if you have something that you think I should write about it, please email me a copy or send me a link to the relevant page on your website.”

Nonetheless, I still received a news release attached to an email asking me to “publish this article in your website”. It had some relevance to project collaboration, but not enough to excite me to write about it (and the writer’s apparent ignorance of blogging didn’t help).

(By the way, if you want sites that will automatically publish your company news, there are quite a few free press release sites around – typing “free press release” into Google gives over a million results – but you will get better results from some paid-for services – PRnewswire is one I have used in the past, PRWeb also gets good reviews).

I find myself in a curious kind of role reversal. As a PR practitioner I have spent 2o years creating and distributing news releases, understanding that journalists select stories that they regard as relevant and newsworthy to their readership. Now, as a blogger, I am in the same position, fielding approaches from companies seeking coverage. While there are undoubtedly blogs – more correctly, splogs or flogs – which shamelessly reproduce everything they receive or which are created to promote particular companies, most bloggers will, I hope, have a more discerning policy. So if you don’t want to end up shunned like the unnamed company above, it can pay to do some research into the blogger’s attitude to news releases. This is my own view….

10 ways for PR or marketing people to engage with me, the blogger

1. By all means, send me your news releases, but make sure they are relevant to the blog. I often link to news releases and reproduce extracts from them, but – just like mainstream media outlets – I am selective about what I write about and how I present it.
2. Actually reading the blog would be a good start.
3. Better still, show me that you have read it – it can help sometimes if you identify a previous post on a related topic and perhaps drop me an email or a Tweet to explain why your release is relevant.
4. You can also use my blog’s comment facilities; I monitor all comments, so can pick up on interesting information added through that route.
5. Also, as I’m not a full-time blogger, I pick the topics I judge most important in the time I’ve got available to write about them. So save me some time by making relevant photos, logos, screengrabs, quotes, videos, etc readily available, along with links to relevant websites and – yes – blogs.
6. Use your company blog (you do have one, don’t you?) to build conversations with me and other bloggers….
7. Invite comments on your blog posts.
8. Provide RSS feeds from your blog and your news pages
9. Tweet your news and blog posts – I usually check Twitter before I look at my email these days.
10. Invite bloggers and other opinion-formers to write guest posts.

Remember and do these things and I’m sure we’ll soon be getting along famously….

Next from UBM: the Building Network

Having seen UBM sister publication Property Week establish an online community in September, Building magazine has followed suit, with The Building Network, also hosted on the Ning platform.

I discovered this after noticing some familiar-sounding links on Twitter. What used to be a flow of news headlines and job vacancies from @BuildingSite now appears to include a stream of re-Tweeted activity updates from Building’s new network (I know the Ning-based AECnetwork, founded by John Cave, employs the same technique – Be2camp has so far resisted this temptation).

The Building Network doesn’t yet have the array of groups or features of the Property Week site (just one group – Building Sustainability – and yet the events listing which makes up most of the current home page omits UBM’s December online event Sustainability Now!), but this may be due to its relative youth. By 1pm today, it had accumulated 43 members (Property Week’s community, by the way, has now grown to 203).

I now belong to at least six Ning-based AEC-oriented communities, and know of others who subscribe to more than that. I generally find it a good platform, but I wish I could share my profile details across multiple sites so that I don’t have to repeatedly enter separate profiles or publish separate status updates. As the number of such networks grows and as more and more industry professionals begin to join, I am sure I won’t be the only one frustrated by this.

Goodbye, CJ

Earlier today, the Twitter grapevine tweeted the news that UK construction industry weekly magazine Contract Journal (CJ) and its website, contractjournal.com, is to be shut down from the end of this month. The announcement by parent company Reed Business Information was made in an email (a tweet from Kirstie Colledge of Simply Marcomms prompted me to look in my old BIW inbox – bingo!), and – having written more than once about CJ’s online presence in my blog at ExtranetEvolution.com – I quickly cut and pasted the relevant paragraph into a blog post about the closure.

Contract Journal has been a fixture of the UK construction market for 130 years, but faced a double whammy. First, like many newspapers and magazines it suffered from dwindling circulation in the face of the digital onslaught (Laura Oliver’s Journalism.co.uk story points out that other RBI titles have also been forced into redundancies, in addition to the six at CJ; yesterday saw news of 100 redundancies at the Guardian media group). Second, CJ was also focused on an industry that has borne the brunt of the current recession. With too many firms chasing too few contracts at too tight margins, construction firms going bust daily, recruitment almost at a stand-still, and hard-pressed survivors cutting their marketing expenditure, it was perhaps inevitable that CJ – so dependent on advertising – would be at risk.

Not just the magazine

The closure also has repercussions for other CJ products. Brian Green’s almost unremittingly gloomy Brickonomics blog should, I think, survive, but other CJ efforts to embrace web 2.0 and build relationships with readers will probably disappear. (Update – 4 December 2009 – Brickonomics has been resurrected courtesy of UBM’s Building magazine – credit also to Reed’s Adam Tinworth who helped deliver the transfer.)

CJ’s two major awards programmes will also vanish from the calendar. Construction PR and marketing people will no longer spend hours each spring polishing entries for CJ’s Construction Industry Awards, or working out seating plans for the awards dinner each autumn (apparently the engraved trophies from this year’s event have just been despatched to the winners). And CJ’s Best Places to Work in Construction (which probably no longer include RBI) won’t be challenging AEC firms’ HR departments either.

The gut reaction from many industry PR and marketing people will almost certainly be one of sadness. We have lost a venerable title, six journalists (some of them long-standing friends and experienced industry-watchers and opinion-formers) stand to lose their jobs, and there will be one fewer weekly to which we can pitch our news stories and feature ideas, buy advertising space, or look for sponsorship and publicity spin-offs from events.

So where next?

Emap’s weekly Construction News clearly stands to pick up some of the advertisers but it is by no means clear how that publication is going to cope with the changing media environment. It is about to enter uncharted waters by imposing a subscription model on its online content, and UBM’s Building magazine’s recent reintroduction of reader registration hints that it may also bring down a paywall on some of its website content. Both publications are also investing in social media and in online and offline events and awards programmes.

But maybe, in the current media environment, now is a good time for us PR people and marketeers to rethink our focus on publishers and to augment some of the tools we have tended to rely upon (literature, events, hospitality, direct marketing, email, corporate websites, etc).

I would argue the recession makes this a good time to look at cost-effective ways of communicating our messages direct to customers, employees, influencers, investors, regulators and other publics. Instead of regarding the digital onslaught as a threat, perhaps we should see it as an opportunity to invest in social media tools and techniques, start conversations and take a more active role in helping people formulate their own opinions about us, our companies, products and services.

Not invented here

Large parts of the UK architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) sector have proved resistant to ideas of partnering, knowledge-sharing and integrated collaborative working (despite the efforts of Latham and Egan, while only time will tell if Wolstenholme’s Never Waste a Good Crisis fares any better). The IT departments of many AEC organisations similarly adopt a closed approach when it comes to some collaborative technologies. I learned this when marketing web-based project collaboration software at BIW, and I’ve heard the same view expressed about social media tools. Fellow blogger Julian Dobson quotes responses from people working for an environmental quango and a major civil engineering firm:

‘I’m afraid my government laptop is so locked down that I’m unable to install any software at all.’

‘I have to let you know that I can’t/won’t download the dropbox application onto [our] heavily firewalled and controlled network.’

But I have found it can also be an attitude of mind held by the AEC professionals within firms. Call it inertia, arrogance, a “not invented here” syndrome, or maybe ’silo’ mentality, but resistance to consulting outside the organisation is certainly prevalent in some businesses. I spoke to an architect from a leading design firm at the RIBA recently, and he was adamant that a large multi-disciplinary consultancy had no need to interact with co-professionals from other firms through social networks – “our in-house resources are more than adequate,” he insisted.

This may be a common view within that firm. Soong M Kang, a university researcher at UCL, told me about a frustrating recent meeting with someone from the same company:

He brought two more guys to the meeting: one who deals with their web strategy and another who deals with their “community” efforts.  In essence, it seemed to me that they have their own internal system and are not willing to think outside of it. Especially the guy from web strategy was extremely hostile to my project, which is understandable if one sees his vested interests.

So in some AEC organisations there is almost an insular, anti-collaborative culture that pervades both the IT department and fee-earning professionals.

Social approaches to innovation

In other engineering design sectors, though, there appears to be more willingness to consider social computing solutions. I first wrote about social product development in this blog in July, and have just been reading an article by Tom Kevan in Desktop Engineering along similar lines. He argues that new economic realities (globalisation, increased competition, ‘mechatronic’ design approaches, and changing demographics) are forcing a rethink of how designers can achieve innovation.

No longer is it the product of one engineer’s genius or the skill of a company’s engineering team. Increasingly, the ideas of customers, suppliers, and outside experts are being tapped to create broader development networks. To enable the communication and collaboration needed by these networks, companies and technology providers are adapting social networking paradigms to the product design arena.

Kevan goes on to describe three pioneering technologies, including the crowd-sourced problem-solving InnoCentive.com (similar to ideabounty.com – post). Here:

“It is the diversity of the community that looks at these problems that matters most in ensuring that they get solved,” says InnoCentive’s Ritter, explaining that it is the social aspect of product development that makes it possible to find the one person in the world uniquely qualified to answer the specific question.

Having a closed mentality to problem-solving may satisfy the egos of old-school AEC design professionals (and will probably be supported by their IT departments), but I wonder if it could mean their firms inadvertently fail clients by not extending their search for innovation beyond the organisation’s firewalls?

Web 2.0 and construction collaboration

Incidentally, if anyone is interested in helping Soong with his research, please have a look at his outline (reproduced here) and get in touch with him. He is particularly looking for companies who want to test out the use of Web 2.0-type tools to improve their collaborative design efforts.