Ban social media, lose the marketing war, lose staff

Yesterday I came across a great post: Why multinationals are losing the marketing war, by Chris Rand who asserts:
the biggest barrier to engaging with customers and prospects online remains the corporate IT environment.
He says too many companies block access to tools like Facebook and Twitter just as they used to restrict access to the [...]

Let’s be positive on social media: issue guidelines not bans

According to a November Information Age story (linked in a recent e-newsletter), over half of UK organisations are restricting employee access to social media websites such as Facebook and YouTube due to the threat of litigation. Research among lawyers in the 2009 Litigation Trends survey conducted by US law firm Fulbright & Jaworski asked how [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

Schneider Electric builds climate change community

I have just been looking at the website of Schneider Electric, a Danish French manufacturer of electrical equipment, including building management systems and whole host of other products. It wasn’t the main corporate website, but a community website, ActiveBE.com.
I have looked at a couple of businesses in the architectural, engineering and construction (AEC) industry that [...]

Going to the toilet puts UK economy down the toilet

Watercooler conversations undermine UK plc
Crosswords and Sudoko waste UK businesses £2bn a year

These are just made-up headline, of course, but I expect if you commissioned a survey into the time individuals spend not working, but chatting with their mates, reading personal emails, etc, etc, you would soon come up with some tasty headlines [...]

Hey, we’re social! (not)

It seems a bit desperate when an IT company feels the need to issue a press release announcing that it now has a Facebook page and a Twitter account to augment its blog. I came across a release from US-based plant design software vendor COADE in my RSS feed from AECcafe.com, and my first reaction [...]

‘Over half of US workplaces block social networks’

Via a Webware.com article published last week, I learned that more than half of United States workplaces block social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. A survey of about 1,400 US chief information officers by consulting firm Robert Half Technology shows 54% block social networks “completely,” while 19% allow social networking “for business purposes”.
While Caroline [...]

Why social media bans won’t work

I have heard suggestions that more than half of all construction organisations prohibit employee access to social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter (a recent white paper from the US-based Society for Marketing Professional Services Foundation gives an even higher figure of 67% of AEC firms blocking employees from viwing social networking sites [...]