NBSLive, which I attended on Tuesday as live blogger and tweeter for RIBA Enterprises, was a whole day event for architects and other construction professionals designed to offer 16 hours of Continuing Professional Development from over 80 speakers in four themed rooms: BIM, Design, Technology and Business and Practice.
Speakers included the Government Construction Advisor Peter Hansford, several inspirational architects including Justin Bere and Phil Coffey, leaders in BIM in construction and FM, and Technical expertise from Passivhaus expert Elrond Burrell to housing specialist Brendan Kilpatrick. Client representatives included Derwent London and developer Cathedral Group. You can see the full list of speakers and download presentations from NBSLive 2013.
There were over 200 delegates at NBSLive, each able to select the topics which interested them most. I attended each room in turn, dipping into the conversations and sharing highlights, whilst curating other contributions onto a single live blog on Storify.
The Headline Statistics
To date (1 December)
- the Live Blog has been viewed 1483 times.
- 319 people have tweeted using the #NBSLive hashtag
- They created 1833 tweets (793 original tweets, 191 replies-just those with the hashtag, 849 Retweets)
- During the day the number of tweets peaked at 199 an hour.
- These tweets reached 420,911 twitter users 8,263,474 times.
- 144 different hashtags were used in the tweets, alongside the #NBSLive one.
- 168 links were shared in the tweets (see below for highlights)
These statistics compare very favourably with the results of the Government Construction Summit which we live blogged in July, where several influential government twitter accounts helped to increase reach enormously. Here the client, RIBA Enterprises, had organised a team of tweeters so were able to be present in each room, sharing useful highlights with those unable to attend and producing a rich flavour of what was going on for everyone.
Digging into the Data
The Storify curation of the event has been viewed 1483 times as I write – more than any live blog I’ve done to date. From the Storify Page you can also view an interactive visualisation of the tweets that used the hashtag, and a searchable archive of tweets.
If you’d like more detail on the statistics you can see a , including all the tweets sent on the day itself. Use it to identify key contributors to the event via twitter and see every one of the tweets, clicking through to identify conversations that they prompted on twitter itself.
Different tweets produce different results
You’ll note that the most shared (retweeted) tweets usually include an image or link, but they don’t necessarily engender the most conversations. Tweets which produce conversations are sometimes seen by far fewer people, but these conversations draw in many people from both within and outside our industry, which is one of the great advantages of twitter.
Here are a couple of conversations that spun out of tweets. Click the images to see the whole conversation on twitter. I’d be interested to know of those in which you participated, and will publish a link if you have one.
Click on the images above to see the full conversation.
We can’t possibly hope to find all the conversations (without a very high powered listening tool), but we can see the advantages of raising issues with an engaged audience on twitter, one who is at an event or listening in from elsewhere. The effects of an event like this reach out far beyond the participants and can produce effects that are impossible to measure.
Popular Links to resources
168 links were shared on twitter by people using the hashtag #NBSLive. Popular links during the event included:
The Industrial Strategy for Construction ‘Construction 2025’ published in July
‘Everyone’s read the Construction 2025 Strategy document but not enough have read PAS1192’
The Wolstenholme Report: Never Waste a Good Crisis (Slides)
The NBS National BIM Report 2013
Tony Bingham’s controversial article ‘We need to talk about BIM’
Retrofit for the Future programme
7 Learnings from Retrofit for the Future
Crowd Sourced building performance information on CarbonBuzz
Jones Lang LaSalle’s review of the China50 cities
The development of Kings Cross
I’ve picked out a few books and blogs by the speakers to start us off including
BIM Demystified (2nd edition) by Steve Race
Residential Retrofit: 20 Case Studies by Marion Baeli
Edward Murphy’s prezi on Post occupancy monitoring at St Pauls Place
Glenigan’s post in advance of the event
Case Studies of Client Relationship Surveys by Phillip Collard (aka @Win_Work)
Share with us More Reviews
Several people will be writing reviews of NBSLive – I hope to link to them here.
Stephen Hamil has written a review of the BIM Room here
Please let me have any links you come across, add them in the comments, or give us your views, I’d be interested to hear what we missed, which no doubt was a lot!
Actually Su , I meant to say as had been busy, that I thought this was your best ever storify yet……seemed to flow really well. This kind of information feed from major events (often in London) is invaluable for SMEs such as us for whom time out of the office and train fares to London prohibit our attendance from all but a select few. Thanks again.
Melanie Thompson of Get Sust! Sustainable Construction News has written a review of the Sustainability aspects of NBS Live – you can read it here:
Twelve faces of sustainability