Last week I was honoured to speak to an audience of construction product marketers at the Building Centre in Store Street in London, about the role of the Architect in the specification process.

I’m grateful to Ross Sturley and the folks at CIMCIG for giving me the opportunity, and for making an ideal forum for me to announce that from the end of October I shall officially be a freelance marketing consultant.

More about that later, though I am already taking bookings, so if you’d like to discuss an opportunity, just get in touch.

Here is the slide deck for the talk, and below you can download my White Paper on Talking to Architects where I expand on the themes presented in the talk.

Talking to Architects: A White Paper

If you’d like to read my white paper about architects as specifiers, please download it by clicking the pdf button below or the link next to it.

Download the White Paper Here

The paper has been produced under a Creative Commons license, by which you are free to share (please do) adapt and make commercial use of the work, provided you attribute it to me. The illustrations in the paper are provided by me or others where stated under the same terms, which are outlined here in full detail.

If you have any comments on the paper, or the slides, please do contribute them below.

Many thanks to all the people who contributed their views, ideas and images to this presentation, including David Sharpe, Andy Matthews, Rob Easson, Wesley Farren , Dan, Mark Schumann, Plaice Design and Joe Martoccia.

How do we measure our success in business development? It might be the knowledge that we are the go-to firm for our area of expertise. It might be publication in a national press. It might be invitations to speak to key client audiences. It might even be an increase in new enquiries from outside our existing client base.

How do we measure our success in social media? It might be the share our organisation has of the conversations about topics for which we want to be considered thought leaders. It might be downloads of our whitepapers on key topics. It might be invitations to speak to key client audiences. It might even be an increase in new enquiries from outside our existing physical network. All these things are achievable with social tools. But if we want to get the most from them, we need to be in a social business.

A social business:

1. Listens – because no-one likes a bore
2. Has a Customer Focus – because they pay your bills
3. Is Ready for Dialogue – you want people to reply
4. Is in the Real World – not some other non-existent world
5. Doesn’t go it Alone – because we are stronger collaborating
6. Forms a Strategy – to focus on its objectives

A Social Business Listens

Social is about people having conversations online, and we all know how boring one sided conversations are. If you are to be successful using social tools you must first listen, to your clients, your consultant colleagues, to your employees, to your market, to the thought leaders in your industry. What is happening?

Listening. This can be done with simple tools like google alerts, RSS feeds and free tools like Social Mention, or more broad ranging platforms like Radian6. Search for mentions of your brand, but also how your brand is mentioned, and your competitors. What is your share of the conversation?

I recommend that you invest in Social Listening before anything else. It will tell you whether there is a conversation going on, of which you should be a part.

A Social Business has a Customer Focus

Social media helps us understand the customer better, helps them understand us, and helps uskeep in touch.

We can find out where our customers are and what they are doing, what they are talking about. We can use traditional word of mouth or we can search for them online by name. When we find out where they are, we need to go there. What platforms are they using? What places do they go to network? Be it the golf course or a Linkedin group, it doesn’t matter, we must be where they are, listening and engaging.

A social business isn’t just about selling. A social business seeks to enable learning in our clients. By creating and encouraging dialogue we can support their development, make them better clients for us, help them do what they want more effectively. We can learn from them and innovate with them.

A Social Business is Ready for Dialogue

Social tools are interactive, and we want people to reply. Get the business ready for a two-way conversation before you start creating content.

What happens when there is a crisis now? Are we ready? Don’t want to wait for a crisis to occur online where it can be more damaging.

What sort of business structure do you have? A very hierarchical structure can mean top-down control, and it can be difficult to implement social tools because there is a need to control all communications. Passing tweets through the legal team doesn’t work. Better to set ground rules and delegate. Groups can then evolve the right techniques for the right communication on a lower level within these ground rules. This approach also leads to greater authenticity and personality to communications. A human face to our business.

Set up social media procedures and policies, and empower employees to act responsibly within their own sphere. Don’t be afraid to give staff responsibility to be sensible.

Take an holistic approach to communications, look for tools that help us assign tasks and set priorities. Prepare for dialogue in all its forms.

A Social Business Lives in the Real World

Don’t make the distinction between the conversations you hear going online and those you hear in meetings with people elsewhere, ‘In Real Life’. They are all conversations. The ones online have different characteristics; they can be more powerful, or more dangerous. Remember always that these are people making decisions.

Make continual connections between your ‘Real Life’ activity and ‘Social Media’ activity. Talk about what we’re doing. Share our blogposts via email to people who ask questions. Meet the key decision makers online and do things with them in real life. Introduce the real to the virtual and vice versa.

The virtual/real world concept is outdated – don’t discriminate.

A Social Business Doesn’t go it Alone

Social doesn’t mean isolated, quite the opposite. It is about extending our network, not replacing it.

Create an advocacy programme – a way in which our genuine advocates can come together to advocate us online. Find credible people who already know and love our work. People who work with us will be our best advocates. Give them the tools to be your advocates online and reward them with early access or other intangibles, but don’t pay them and don’t manipulate their message. Look for genuine advocacy freely given.

Enable Social Engagement in these collaborators. Help them learn how to use social tools with us as we learn. Set up a private Linkedin group for clients or consultants. Organise joint workshops on Web 2.0. Host or participate in our advocates’ social campaigns, in their consultations. Do things together.

A Social Business has a Strategy

To make this happen we must plan ahead. Where do you want to go? What are your wideranging goals and your key objectives? How will you measure success?

Plan out your next year as a social business. What do we need to change?

Remember this conversation?

Brick Manufacturer: We could build a Code for Sustainable Homes level 4 house with bricks!

Architect: Yes, but timber is still cheaper.

Architects might want to specify your trendy lamp, or your supercool composite windows, or even your boring old bricks, but if they cost more, they need to be able to justify it.

If they love your products that’s great, but you’re only half way there.

They will fight your battles for you, but you must give them the ammunition.

When I say “give”, I mean:

• Free, no strings attached, everywhere.
• Searchable, shareable, tweetable.
• Can be printed, emailed, pdf’d.
• The text can be searched and clicked through and connected.
• The ammunition must be factual, visual, interesting and brief.

Just think if the ammunition were freely available, who would your contact want to share it with? His boss? Her colleague in the next practice? Her followers on twitter? Make it easy.

Want to know what formats to use, what ways your architects need their ammunition?

Ask them.

Which is why Engagement is Queen.

Image: Brick Wall by Michael Spencer

Recently I’ve been reminded again and again that when I find something good I should share it. Usually it is something good that someone has shared with me, after all. So here is something to share with those of you who are wondering what I’m on about when I talk about using social media properly.

I was looking out a link to David Meerman Scott’s book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR. I’m suggesting it as a good book for a sales and marketing director for a construction products company I met last week. But whilst I was finding the link, I came across a video of a keynote David had given to a B2B audience back in 2009.

Just because this keynote was given in 2009 doesn’t make it relevant today. Here are some of the great things he says:

• Who are your buyer personas – what type of clients do you really want to buy your services? What are they like? What do you want your buyer personas to believe about you? You need to communicate with them in their own language. (Thanks Harry Rich, you’re exactly right).
• We all want attention – how do you get it? Do you buy it with advertising, beg for it with PR, bug people with cold calling and doorstepping, or do you want to earn their attention? Earn attention by publishing great content on the web.David reminds us that you cannot buy, beg or bug for attention on the internet, you have to earn it.
• On the web, you are what you publish. If you publish great stuff, or rubbish, that’s what you are. So start publishing good stuff, and don’t cheat.
• Encourage Sharing (here I am doing it now – please share this on)
• Nobody cares about your products (or services) except for you. People care about themselves, and their problems. So don’t talk about yourself, talk with them, about them.
• You must lose control of your marketing. If you require an email address to give out valuable content, then you are generating fear of spam in your readers and it doesn’t work. Don’t abuse your readers.

David also talks about the fear of publishing things online. The best tweet of his I have seen yet is the one that illustrates this post.

Don’t worry about sharing your best info online. 1) Your competition already knows what you’re doing 2) People like leaders not followers.

David’s keynote is punctuated by brilliant (and funny) examples of B2B companies who have succeeded in using the techniques he suppies. You’ll like the last one best.

So watch the video, which I have embedded below, and if you like these ideas you can read his book The New Rules of Marketing and PR, and read his blog.

David Meerman Scott keynote at BMA 2009 national conference from David Meerman Scott on Vimeo.

The New Rules of Marketing and PR keynote presentation and Q&A session delivered by David Meerman Scott at the Business Marketing Association 2009 national “Unlearn” conference. Scott spoke June 10, 2009 at the sold-out conference held in Chicago’s Drake Hotel. Since the BMA is a business-to-business organization, Scott’s keynote is tailored to a B-to-B audience. Scott argues that when others spread your ideas and tell your stories online, buyers are eager to do business with you and all kinds of doors begin to open.

Email marketing campaigns and follow up telephone calls are the staple diet of the construction industry marketer.

They work. Companies do get business out of emails – why else would they continue to use them? But email marketing won’t be enough for much longer.

The reason why construction sells through email is that much of the construction industry still communicates primarily through email. Email has taken over from the fax almost completely. It has muscled in on much of the postal service. But email isn’t the only show in town any more.

The traditional holy trinity of email, phone calls and face-to-face meetings is to be disrupted by new social tools that enable relationships to emerge, form and develop online.

Unsolicited marketing emails continually evade spam filters and make it into your inbox, but social tools have better filters; other users. Sales messages are ignored, flagged and blocked by professional, focused users, and social tools encourage this ‘crowd filtering’ of unsolicited spam.

If a professional only communicates with the outside world by email, then they may choose a product on the strength of email marketing messages. But when those same professionals take their heads out of the inboxes, will your company still be stuck in their inbox?

Perhaps it is time to see how else you might meet construction professionals, other than by evading their spam filters and sidestepping their gatekeepers. Perhaps it is time to look to meet them in a more equal world.

Photo: Spam Shrine by Arnold (creative commons)

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