Business on Twitter Because Twitter’s not just for twits ;)

A guest blog from Su Butcher

Everyone is talking about Twitter The Daily Mail, Jonathan Ross, Chris Moyles and Stephen Fry.… ok, ok, heard it before?

Hang on a minute, there must be a reason. Twitter is attracting people who want to use it for social reasons and that is why it is growing, but there is more to Twitter than headlines and celebrities. It’s a tool for communication, and any tool for communication has business uses.

I’m Su Butcher and I run a practice of UK Architects. I’ve been networking online for about 5 years and started using twitter about five months ago. Here’s my take on Twitter, why I use it and why I think it’s a great tool for construction professionals.

Raise Your Profile

The first, obvious use for Twitter is to get noticed. A huge range of journalists and PRs already use Twitter and some of these are in the construction industry.

If you can consistently demonstrate your area of expertise, then you will get noticed. Within a month of actively tweeting, one of our news items about GreenGauge Homes was online in a major construction journal, doubling traffic to our website.

Over the last five years the internet has developed into a cost effective tool to raise your profile. Posting new material online doesn’t have to be expensive – news items, blog entries, project details can be posted on a wide range of sites, and twitter joins up all your activity on the web so that people who are interested in you can find it, hot off the press, in one place.

The great thing about raising your profile with twitter is that everything you say is on a huge database of content which people who might be interested can search and find you.
Whenever you post new material, find new information of interest to your target audience, you can send it out via twitter. Write a blog and tweet about it. Twitter makes your work visible so people can come and see if they are interested.

Twitter thrives on the breaking news – it might be of interest to all (like the Hudson River plane crash)  or simply of interest to your followers. The people who follow you choose to follow based on your activity, so you are not spamming them, it’s entirely opt-in. You will soon find out what works by keeping an eye on who is following you and how they are responding.

It’s worth remembering all the usual guidance about PR. If you want to be published you have to respond to the media’s need for information and stories. The difference with Twitter is that you have a relationship with the people who follow, discuss issues with them and build credibility, rather than spamming them with an emailed press release. That brings me to the next reason Architects should use Twitter -

Connecting

Why does twitter work? Because it connects people.

Networking is something many architects find difficult to do. The profession has only been marketing for a generation– 30 years ago it was a closed shop with fixed fees and advertising was prohibited. As a result many more senior practitioners think networking is only about Chambers of Commerce and long unproductive lunches, and golf. And if they can’t bear to play golf they probably advertise with the RIBA and wait for the phone to ring.

Whilst we’ve all had plenty of work it has been fine to do this, but not any more.

Whether you are playing golf or tweeting, if you want to use networking for business you must build trust and understanding, and that means being reliable and consistent. Twitter helps because it allows you to maintain relationships with people which you can develop in more depth elsewhere, online or offline. Some of my twitter contacts are also in other online environments, some have come to twitter direct from face to face networking and some are (and might always remain) virtual only contacts. They are all valuable people with different things to offer.

I’m known for being a connector, and just as I connect people in the ‘real world’, so I also connect people online via Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, ning and Ecademy, all different networking-friendly environments.  Of all of these Twitter is the quickest and most effective connector; all you need to do is write 140 timely characters when someone expresses a need.

Architects are not alone in being scared and uninformed about networking, and online you will find many useful resources to help you learn how to do it properly. Some of the specialists are on Twitter – like @andylopata for example.

So that’s getting noticed and building trust, but twitter can also be about:

Collaboration

Ten years since the Egan Report berated the construction industry for poor service and outdated working practices, collaboration in the construction industry remains limited.

Today an umbrella body, Constructing Excellence is seeking to make the business case for collaborative working in construction, and where better to seek out collaborators than online where sharing information is a natural activity? Realising the power of the internet, Constructing Excellence is about to set up a blog to get its message across, and has already got a twitter account its people are learning to harness.

An enthusiastic band of people at the forefront of the collaboration agenda (academics, campaigners and business people) are using the internet to demonstrate its benefits. Many of these people write blogs – online journals about their activities, and they have gravitated to twitter as a natural way to share their activities with a wider audience. Some of them have set up online networks like Be2camp and the AEC Network, which also feed into twitter.

These pioneers are online, collaborating now. By interacting with them via twitter you can learn about the future of the industry and stay one step ahead of your competitors. I’m still learning about opportunities like this and working on how the expertise of others can help our business continue to grow and flourish. So far they have encouraged me to write my own blog and start demonstrating the expertise we have to offer. Their support has been immense though I have yet to meet most of them.

Twitter is a natural focus for Architects online activities. The fact there aren’t many about yet is not a bad thing, it’s an opportunity. Why not seize it?
About Su Butcher
Su is Practice Manager for the no-nonsense Essex Architects practice Barefoot & Gilles. Prior to managing architects firms she studied architecture and taught in Europe and the USA, running the design studio at the University of Liverpool for five years.
Su has a blog called Just Practising and you can follow her on twitter at http://twitter.com/subutcher

Tags: architects, expertise, su-butcher, twitter

This entry was posted on Friday, February 13th, 2009 at 10:55 am and is filed under Guest Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.