Avoiding the ‘Glass Box’

Following my CIMCIG talk earlier this month (post), I have exchanged a couple of emails with fellow AEC social media enthusiast, Oona Webster, who works for Leicestershire-based Geosynthetics. She made the following point (reproduced with her permission):
‘The Glass Box’
If social media has the potential to extend a business’s marketing force to include every employee with [...]

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At Be2camp2008 in London, The Guardian’s Charles Arthur spoke passionately about Free Our Data, talking about the Ordnance Survey approach to mapping and its crowdsourced alternative, OpenStreetMap. My enthusiasm for OSM has since been heightened further by talks by John McKerrell at Be2camp North and by Brian Prangle at last month’s Be2camp Brum, and I [...]

Resistance is futile!

The ripples from my talk at last week’s CIMCIG event have yet to stop. To date, the Ustream recording has had 76 views, the SlideShare deck has had 345 views, and I’ve had some interesting emails. In one missive, the writer wonders about the relevance of social media to us construction folk:
One of my concerns [...]

Top 10 Web 2.0 adoption issues for AEC organisations

In a fascinating post yesterday, Ten top issues in adopting enterprise social computing, ZDNet’s Enterprise Web 2.0 blogger Dion Hinchcliffe has been reviewing some of the reasons why businesses have yet to fully embrace social media. This followed a recent report that showed a positive correlation between social media engagement and corporate financial performance, but [...]

Blogs, Twitter, social networking: your new business tools

The latest issue of Construction Manager magazine, the journal of the Chartered Institute of Building, CIOB, has a feature by Stephen Cousins and Elaine Knutt on using social media in the UK construction industry (read the article online here).
The feature is well worth reading as it is full of insights from some of the sector’s [...]

Ten things to manage in a recession: 8 – (e)mail

This is the eighth in a series inspired by my friend Ross Sturley’s Ten Things to Cut in a Recession Before You Cut Your Marketing (presented in recent Construction News marketing e-newsletters and on his Chart Lane website).
Number eight: “Cut mail”
In Going postal, Ross turns his attention on the monetary and environmental waste involved in [...]

HSS’s faltering embrace of Web 2.0

Being a blogger in the architecture, engineering and construction market means I get occasional emails from companies (or their PR/marketing agencies) wanting me to publicise their latest products and services. If I was simply in the business of regurgitating other people’s content, this wouldn’t be a problem, but I’m not, and it can be a [...]

Live from HOK – guest post

This is a guest post by John Gilmore (right), one of the HOK corporate communications team behind the Life at HOK blog that I wrote about recently. I asked John if he would like to explain more about how the site (and other HOK Web 2.0 activities) is managed and policed and what business benefits [...]

Life at HOK

International planning and design practice HOK has, as you might expect, an excellent corporate website (great if you like Flash-driven sites) but did you know that it also has a strong Web 2.0 presence?
Life at HOK is a blog to which numerous HOK people contribute – judging from the side-bar, 30 people have submitted around [...]

Ten things to manage in a recession: 3 – administration

This is the third in a series expandng on my friend Ross Sturleys’ Ten Things to Cut in a Recession Before You Cut Your Marketing (presented at last month’s CIMCIG conference and in recent Construction News marketing e-newsletters).
Number three: “Cut administration”
Ross argues that there are opportunities, if money is really tight, for administration tasks to [...]