Digital Media – Getting work through Social Media RIAI Conference 2014
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Su Butcher introduces the topic of Social Media as a marketing and lead generation tool for architects, explains how the way clients find architects is changing and set out the key elements and activities necessary to make it effective.
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Digital Media – Getting work through Social Media RIAI Conference 2014
- 1. Red Rush by San Diego Shooter Getting Work with Social Media Su Butcher Justpractising.com
- 2. jasonahowie
- 3. garykoelling
- 4. 44% of architects use Twitter for work. http://bit.ly/ArchitectsInternetResearch
- 8. 1. People 2. Publishing egorick
- 9. 1. People 2. Publishing 3. Conversations egorick
- 11. Your advocates speak well of you when you're not there. Nicole Bachmann Golf by Robert Scoble
- 12. tylerdurden
- 15. Your Public Home Online
- 16. RoI Members 1,285,159 Construction: 54,000 members *inc Real Estate
- 17. A Useful tool for your Real Life Network
- 22. 1 2 3
- 23. 1 2 3
- 24. 1 2 3
- 25. 1 2 3
- 26. 1 2 3 3 2 3 3
- 27. makes your network visible
- 28. ashi Be More Visible
- 29. Who? smi23le
- 30. Who? • Get the right people on LinkedIn • Make their profile –Visible –Informative –Easy to Contact smi23le
- 31. The Social Cycle
- 32. The Social Cycle
- 34. Aspirational Are you Aspirational?
- 35. Aspirational Are you Aspirational?
- 37. waybackmachine
- 38. netcraft Growth = Noise 50m websites in 10 years
- 39. Search
- 40. netcraft More Growth 50m Websites in 8months
- 42. www.granit.co.uk
- 47. What? • Make something useful – for your audience – publish and share it • Make your website – easy to update – interactive mattimattila
- 48. The Social Cycle
- 49. The Social Cycle
- 51. Status Updates
- 52. Status Updates
- 62. Talk to each other erix
- 63. Where? HiggySTFC
- 66. Where? • Look for your customers online –Listen • Have conversations with them –Be Useful HiggySTFC
- 70. ashi Be More Visible
- 71. ashi Be More Visible Be Remarkable
- 72. ashi Be More Visible Be Remarkable Talk to each other
- 73. @SuButcher Thank You. www.justpractising.com Images: Creative Commons
Editor's Notes
- Hello everyone, thanks for inviting me today. I’m going to talk about Getting Work with Social Media.
- Perhaps you one of those people who sees people looking at their phones when waiting for a meeting to start and thinks ‘I’ve no idea what they are doing’?
- Perhaps you’ve laughed at this venn diagram (produced in 2009 by the way) and thought that social media is a sign of a personality disorder.
- Last year the 2013 Construction Marketing Index survey of UK architects found that 44% of registered architects interviewed by telephone said they use Twitter to help them in their work.
- Why would they do that? And what is social media anyway? Today I’d like to demistify it for you a little, and set out a few simple, practical things you can do to use social media to get work for your practice. Lets start with a plain English definition.
- What is Social Media? Social Media is People having Public Conversations On the Internet. The Conversation makes it different from traditional media like newspapers, PR or TV advertising. Process of discussing and sharing is what amplifies your message. Social Media is a communications tool. Also it is a form of Digital Media = That is, Publishing We are not just talking about other peoples stuff, we have to make our own. Publishing is what makes good social media work Social and Digital Media have changed the way clients find you and how they choose to use you. “Social, be prepared to have the conversation; Media, make it something worth sharing.” I’m going to look separately at the three key ingredients for successful use of social media.
- The first is people,
- The second is publishing, and
- And then we will look at the conversations.
- One of the differences between social media and other forms of marketing is its dependence upon human relations. Whilst advertising and traditional websites are often free of human faces, social media is all about people and their conversations. This should come naturally to us in the construction industry, because most of our business comes from referrals. Lets see how it works in real life.
- How many of you play golf? There should be more. And this is why. Golf is one of those great social constructs where business people can have a no-strings, semi-social conversation and get to know each other. It’s a fantastic device through which we can come together and discuss business. Golfer A says to Golfer B, my development is ready for planning application, but it doesn’t stack up financially. Golfer B says - maybe you should get a second opinion on the design? My architect might be able to help, I’ll give you his phone number. His name is Peter Wells
- So then you pick up the phone and call Peter Wells.
- Well no, actually these days you do this. Why? Because we don’t like meeting people we don’t know. We like to check them out first. If Peter Wells the architect has a public profile on the website Linkedin, which has been optimised for a search like this, this is what happens next.
- Within a week of setting up Peter’s profile on Linkedin four years ago, he rose to the top of the search results – above the entry about him on the company website. This is because Linkedin is a social media platform, and it is really well indexed by Google. The stranger who sees these results has enough information to be satisfied that this is probably the right Peter Wells, so he clicks the top link.
- Which takes him to Peter’s public profile on Linkedin. Everyone can see this, you don’t have to be a member, you don’t have to even know what Linkedin is. This page includes a photograph (Oh I think I’ve met him!) details about his qualification and experience, and links to further information, maybe even an email address. Linkedin has become Peter’s public home online.
- Linkedin is a huge platform, with over 300 million members worldwide including 15m in the UK and one and a quarter million in the republic, around 25-30% of the population. Just 54,000 of these work in construction. The membership is professional people.
- Linkedin isn’t just a way to be found, it is also a really useful tool for your real life network. If you connect to people that you know in real life on Linkedin, you can be more useful to them, and they can be more useful to you. Here’s how it works.
- When you join Linkedin you are asked to enter your career history – what you do, where you have been and where you want to go. As we’ve seen, this profile helps people find you and know who you are.
- Linkedin then asks you who you know, it tells you who is using Linkedin You will be surprised.
- Connect to the people you know and then they can see each other. They find out they have you in common. They may not have know this before.
- And because they can see your contacts you can see their contacts too.
- In fact you can see their contacts contacts – three levels of separation. The important level here is this second level, because it isn’t in my address book.
- In fact you can see their contacts contacts – three levels of separation. The important level here is this second level, because these people are not in my address book. Now I know who I know, knows them.
- Also, because no. 2 is a trusted contact of my trusted contact no.1, I can check him out with confidence, and perhaps be introduced.
- If later I become a connection of his,
- He becomes my contact too, and I can see his contacts contacts. This is how we build a network online. It is important to remember that each of these nodes is a professional, known to those who know you. Why connect like this? Because linkedin makes connections VISIBLE
- Linkedin takes your real life network, where you only know say 231 people, and shows you that they know over 30,000. The second degree of separation – people your trusted connections know DIRECTLY.
- So our first message, is use social media to BE MORE VISIBLE online.
- So our first question is Who should be using Social Media in your practice? Many practices make the mistake of leaving social media activity to their office manager or junior staff, but are these the people you prospects are looking for online? Think about who the client-facing people in your business are. These people should be visible and active when your customers look for them.
- So step one – get the right people on Linkedin. Make their profile visible, informative, and make them easy to contact. This will ensure that when you are advocated on the golf course, strangers are more likely to get in touch.
- I hope I’ve shown that the traditional methods we use, the face to face meetings, phone calls and emails, still happen. But today the internet means that people will be looking for you, or your company, or a topic of interest online.
- When they do, they may find your website (which is what we want) but because social media platforms have millions of visitors and are so well indexed, they may find you there. Make sure they can contact you easily, and what they see is what you want.
- The second thing to get right is publishing. 20 years ago we used the term ‘media’ to talk about Broadcasting. TV, Radio, Newspapers, Magazines. They were externally controlled and intermittent. Remember when the TV was only available at some times, and how you had to wait to hear the news? Other people, people with the funds and influence, decided what we were going to hear and see, and when. If we wanted to be heard widely, we needed to get these people to take us on board, on their terms. That usually meant money too.
- When I was a student of architecture, publication in the AR or AJ was seen as the pinnacle of one’s career, something to aspire to. The Architectural Review has been published monthly since 1896. What do architects aspire to most – recognition from their peers. Most architecture students will never be published in the AR, but at least a subscription brings continued reinforcement of that aspiration that we had as students.
- I know many architects who proudly display decades of back copies of the AR in their offices – like this one from 1978, complete with post it note markers against their favourite projects and articles.
- Whilst that is still the case, today publishing has changed. Today, we are all publishers. Today architects can receive online the recognition that many of them will never achieve in print. But there is a problem with this type of publishing.
- Publishing your own content isn’t a new thing. The WorldWideWeb first appeared in the early 90s in academic institutions, first in the states. This is one of the first pages I made for my students at the University of Liverpool back in 1995. Websites were all about broadcasting - putting information online for others to see. There was no interaction possible. Basically we have a list of things and limited connection with the rest of the internet - all the connections we set up were our own - little nodes of connectedness. And we had a limited audience.
- The Commercial world got hold of the WWW and it grew exponentially until the dot com boom. One thing that made this growth possible was the search engine which enabled people to find websites for the first time. There were many search engines, many more than there are now, but the one that prevailed was google, which was set up in Stanford University.
- Google looked like this in 1997, and for websites of its time it was very clean. You can see that they were trying hard to be cool! These days everyone knows they are cool, they don’t need the exclamation mark any more. What search engines managed to do was make the internet accessible to ordinary people, people who are in a hurry and not clever. So what happened next?
- The internet grew even more - in just eight months in 2011 50m new websites were created. And this was all before social media took hold. If you look at the graphs now they are plotted on a logarithmic scale. All this growth means more noise, so to get noticed you have to cut through the noise somehow.
- How to we stand out above all this noise? We need to do more than be found by search. We need to be useful. But this shouldn’t be difficult because we are. This is my husbands 1980 DDR built radio which he uses to talk to people all over the world using Morse code. He took it apart to fix something and I had to photograph it – what IS THAT? But its ok, I don’t have to know how that works, because I know a man who does. In your practice you have a wealth of specific, niche expertise, whether it’s the way to detail a hidden gutter to the proclivities of the local planning department. You have your own expertise and your expertise is the thing your customers value.
- Here are a couple of examples of professional people publishing useful, targeted content for a specific audience. Crucial to the success of such documents is that they are social objects – useful, targeted, self contained, and easily shared by others.
- Here’s an example from one of my clients – a pdf guide to green roofs published on their blog. You’ll notice how interactive their website is. There are downloadable things, share buttons, search boxes, easy to find phone numbers. And in particular this website has a content management system and a blog which makes it easy to update.
- Here is Elrond Burrell, architect at Archetype, sharing the same downloadable guide on Twitter. This single message of his was shared on 16 times and the pdf has been downloaded over 250 times from the website. People share useful things, but you have to make them first and make them easy for people to share.
- So our second message, is use social media to BE REMARKABLE. Why would someone want you and not some other architect? Because you are doing something remarkable – literally. When you’re doing something amazing people remark upon it. They share it with others. Seth Godin wrote a book about this called ‘Purple Cow’. What do you do that is remarkable? How can you help people share it?
- So question two is – What can you make for your customers, prospects and other interested people? Many people who employ the services of an architect are novices, and will lack confidence about how to choose a practice. But if one of their friends gives them something useful you created, chances are their choice will be made. Look at the content on your website. Are you writing for your clients or your peers? Make sure you are accessible to lay people, and put what you create in a form that can be easily shared. This might be pdf ‘how to’ guides, visuals, opinion pieces, stories, beautiful images or even video.
- Make something USEFUL for your audience, Publish and share it. And make your website easy to update and interactive, so you and your audience will want to use it.
- Remember the first part of our social cycle, now we can add the second part. When people find you online, they find what you have created.
- If you have made useful, shareable things (we call them social objects), then they will visit your website to see them, download them print them out and put them on their husband’s or their bosses desk, talk about them in the pub or on the golf course, and so the cycle continues. But in order to drive the process there is another element, the most important element of all.
- Conversations. Without conversations, nothing happens on social media. You can sit there are share the pictures of your latest house extension, but you might as well be shouting in a bucket. We need conversations to get your message seen. Here’s how it works.
- Status updates are the starting point for conversations on social media. They are the process by which conversations happen. They exist on all the platforms – here they are on Linkedin, Twitter and Google Plus, for example. We need to understand what Status Updates are, and how they work, to make them work for us.
- What is a status update? A self contained, single piece of information which I publish on a social media platform. My updates are published on my profile, chronologically, with the latest one, at the top. When I do this, each status update I publish is also shared on the home pages of the people who follow me, or are connected to me. My update appears, interspersed between other updates from other people that they follow, again chronologically with the latest one at the top.
- Of course I have a home page too, and this is where I see the updates from the people I follow, again chronologically. Note that the people I follow are NOT THE SAME as those who follow me, and what they see is NOT THE SAME as what I see, which is why conversations are so important.
- I have my conversation by replying, liking, commenting on or sharing the update from someone. When I do this, their update, with them attached, appears on MY PROFILE, and because it appears on my profile, it also appears in the home pages of the people who follow me. By interacting with Paul’s update in this way, I am sharing it and subtly introducing him, to people in my network, people who do not know him. It is this process of conversation which produces sharing, and passes your messages on to a much bigger audience than the people in your immediate network. This is the process by which things ‘go viral’, but we don’t need to go viral, we just need people to have conversations with us in order to share us with their followers.
- You can see the effect on Linkedin using Linkedin’s ‘Who’s viewed your updates’ featureHere’s an example with an update I shared on Linkedin last November.
- I took some screenshots of the viewer outcomes within a week of my sharing the update. Views are people who visited their homepage when my update was on the page.
- If I hover over the centre circle I can see that 193 of the people who saw it were people I know, people directly connected to me.
- Of those people I know, 5 liked the update.
- When they liked it, they shared it with another 280 people whom I don’t know.
- And one of them liked it too
- And shared it with another four people whom I also don’t know. By liking the update, and by commenting or sharing it, these people are introducing me to their network in a much more efficient and time saving way than meeting or even email.
- So our third and final message, is use social media to TALK TO EACH OTHER. Broadcasting is not enough, we need to actually have conversations. Where do we have these conversations? This entirely depends upon who you need to talk to.
- Our last question then is ‘Where do we have these conversations?’ We need to find out where our customers are online, where they are congregating.
- One way of finding out where our audience is congregating is to look at survey data like this one from Ipsos MRBI from this year showing that the most popular platform in Ireland is Facebook, followed by twitter, Linkedin and Google Plus. But we need to not look at the top level data, we should look up our actual customers and make sure if they are online, and where they are online. This will tell us where the best place to invest our time is.
- Facebook is very popular, but it might not be the platform that would be most effective for your audience, and these days you may have to spend money on advertising to get any traction. If I was looking to talk to architects I didn’t know, I’d use twitter because it is such an open network, anyone can see and join in the conversations. Here’s an architect having a conversation on Twitter about detailing a low energy house. If my target audience was professional people, I’d look seriously at whether I could use Linkedin because it is held in such regard by professionals.
- The to answer the question Where should we be having our conversations, we must look for our customers online. Listen to what they are talking about – is it just family stuff or are they talking about things we can help them with? Learn how to join these conversations, and remember to use what you have published to be useful.
- I want to end with a story. Remember Peter Wells? He used to work for the practice I ran in East Anglia. Back in 2010 he left to set up his own practice, in the middle of the recession. Unable to use his contacts from the previous firm, he moved to a new town to set up business. We built him a simple website, and he began to publish a diary of the progress of the new projects he was working on, instead of a portfolio of completed work. The diary provides a useful insight to his interests and expertise.
- Around the same time he took to Twitter and joined conversations with all the people he knew and got to know in the local area. Twitter helped him be human online, and his website gave him credibility.
- Within six weeks of getting online a new client had contacted him for what turned out to be a £1.5m refurbishment project. These are the conversations between them which happened on twitter before they picked up the phone. The local businesswoman, a complete stranger was able to find Peter through he people she knew, find out about him and satisfy herself that he had the skills and experience she needed to make her enquiry.
- So our first message, is use social media to BE MORE VISIBLE online.
- Then make and share useful things, so you can BE REMARKABLE online.
- And lastly don’t forget you have to TALK TO EACH OTHER online.
- Thank You.