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 [...]

Trends lend support to need for AEC Web 2.0 adoption

An excellent article in American journal Architectural Record, Future of the A/E/C Industry: 10 Trends, reports the remarks of US architect Raymond Kogan to a recent convention in San Francisco. Kogan outlines ten trends that he thinks will affect the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry, and while only the first one is headed ‘demographics’ [...]

Towards the ‘virtual charrette’

Last year, I wrote an ExtranetEvolution post about charrettes (collaborative planning workshops) and wondered if traditional charrettes, usually undertaken as face-to-face events, might be combined using technology to create virtual events. This idea has gathered pace over the past 12 months.

Andrew Carmichael B2 Camp Pres

It was the subject of some discussion at Be2camp 2008 in [...]

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: 7 – corporate entertainment

This is the seventh in a series expanding on my friend Ross Sturleys’ Ten Things to Cut in a Recession Before You Cut Your Marketing (as presented in recent Construction News marketing e-newsletters and in his Chart Lane website).
Number seven: “Cut corporate entertainment”
The latest target for Ross’s cost-cutting zeal is ‘golf days’ (see his Construction [...]

Should AEC businesses use Facebook?

Until the recent explosion of interest in Twitter, much of the popular interest in social media as a communication tool was focused on social networking sites such as Facebook (I was going to talk about other providers such as Bebo and MySpace too, but Facebook appears to be becoming increasingly dominant).
200+ million users
Facebook recently passed [...]

Blog motivations in large AEC companies

I looked recently at why companies should blog and followed this up with a guest post from the ‘chief blogger’ at AEC design firm HOK in which John Gilmore talked about using blogs to help change the external perception of the company and to appeal to future business partners and clients, among other things. These [...]

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 [...]