Walter Communications — Walter Communications

I first learned about the Be2Awards awards last year while researching our book, so of course we are really excited to have “Social Media in Action” shortlisted for the 2012 Be2 Media Award. I’ll say it up front … the awards are crowdsourced, so please vote for our book! Plus, if you journey to their website and start clicking you’ll discover some fantastic examples of built environment (that’s the B.e.) professionals, companies and organizations who are using new media in innovative ways.

The quality of competition here is no joke. Mark Johnson’s social media PR campaign (which we recognized as one of our blog post favorites) and his competitor, #droptheban, make for a tough choice in the Best PR/Social Media Campaign category, as does ArchitectMap and Green Vision in the Best Community Category. The categories for the best social media and sustainability blog are ripe with great examples – and blogs to start reading religiously. I was thrilled to see Cesar Abeid’s Construction Industry Podcast, a series that I recently discovered and really enjoy. The list gets me thinking of other sites, campaigns and communities to nominate next year.

“Social Media in Action” is in the Best Old Media/New Media category and I am honored to be among these prestigious candidates which include the UK’s construction search engine, a UK construction publication that makes all its content free online, the UK’s construction trade association live database of contract awards and The Guardian’s own built environment “hub” for sustainable development.

The Be2Awards are in their third year and aligned with the London strand of the global Social Media Week event series that takes place in a handful of cities worldwide. Be2 is also hosting Be2Talk, a speaker series on the built environment and social media as a part of the London Social Media Week. I sincerely hope these talks will be posted after the event. I’m interested to see Carlton Reid’s ''Cycling, the built environment and social media'' presentation. This is hardly their first event – Be2 has hosted a slew of conferences, Twitter chats and more since the organization was established in 2008 by built-environment professionals Martin Brown and Paul Wilkinson, Jodie Miners and Pam Broviak. I just joined the Be2Camp community to stay better connected to all their happenings and hope you will consider joining too.

Are you like 88% of the A/E professionals we polled who are using social media to position their firms' experts? Perhaps you should consider Sweden’s approach.

In December Sweden democratized their Twitter account by giving control of @Sweden to a new Swede each week. (You may have seen the headlines about the when Sonja Abrahamsson stirred controversy with her less-than-politically-correct tweets). This approach is now being adopted by other countries with the Netherlands as the latest to try it out.

Granted, Sweden's objective, to entice tourists to visit, doesn’t directly relate to the field of landscape, architecture and engineering professional services. But the concept of associating a personality and their particular point of view with a brand, could be a great way to showcase the many facets of expertise within your organization.

If you have willing and qualified participants (and please be honest with yourself, not everyone is capable of being a thought leader – it takes knowledge, drive and communications skills), ask yourself if you trust your subject-matter experts to operate the account in a responsible way – professional but personal and gaffe free.

In addition to building your firm’s reputation for each of its areas of specialization, this approach could be a fun way to get more employees and leaders involved in your firm’s social media program. Offer your operators solid guidelines and tips so they are communicating effectively. Help them out by scheduling the first few tweets with them, so they can get a chance to learn from you and overcome any fear of tweeting. For those who are already using social media personally, encourage them to amplify what they are doing for the firm’s account by talking about it and retweeting through their personal accounts -- maybe the firm will pick up some new followers as well.

Clearly, this idea is not for every firm, but for the right organization it could be fun. What do you think?

If you decide to try this out, please let us know so we can stay tuned!