Clippings.com – the architecture/design equivalent of Pinterest

Posted on 20 February 2012 by Paul Wilkinson

It’s perhaps no coincidence that an AEC-oriented social scrapbook service has been launched hot on the heels of a surge of interest in Pinterest.

Earlier this month, I got my invitation to join Pinterest. It was, apparently, the hottest things since, er, the last hot thing in social media, and I was quite looking forward to seeing this social scrap-booking service. It:

“lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.”

From an architecture, engineering and construction perspective, I had read about how Pinterest could be used as part of a company’s online marketing to showcase building products. For example, friends at Pauley Creative had blogged about its potential (see: Case study: How a UK flooring company is using Pinterest, plus video); and The SEO benefits of using Pinterest).

A few days later, I got an invitation from the developers of OpenBuildings.com (ExtranetEvolution post; pwcom post), telling me about their new service, Clippings.com. As a PR person, clippings can mean news coverage, but this is different. Clippings is very similar to Pinterest, only oriented towards architects and interior designers and their customers. For clients, the service:

“features curated design inspiration for your home or commercial projects and matches you with architects & designers nearby.”

Similarly, and like Openbuildings.com, it can be a marketing platform for designers:

“Clippings is a new marketing channel that uses your portfolio & your inspiration to connect you with potential clients. … Use it on a daily basis to organise your design ideas and to share your style.”

In the same way that Pinterest allows you to ‘pin’ content to your own pin-board, Clippings lets you ‘clip’ images you like within two broad categories: home design and commercial design. According to a follow-up email, the developers are also offering early adopter customers in London a free “concierge service” to help you start your design project (“suggest some design ideas, research professionals who would be able to make your project happen and help you start talking to them”).

The timing is convenient: Clippings can ride the Pinterest wave, and explain what it does by reference to the latter, but differentiate itself by being focused on a narrower range of interests (no weddings, no recipes), just architecture and interior design (some of it apparently already shared via OpenBuildings.com). While it faces direct competition from Pinterest (launched in 2010), which has also already achieved considerable online buzz and critical mass, perhaps it will carve out a dedicated niche.

 

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Off the cuff QR code

Posted on 15 February 2012 by Paul Wilkinson

I have written several times before about QR (quick response) codes. I first used them on my business cards in 2010, and I “walk the talk” by including my contact details as a QR code on the final slide of my conference presentations – which sometimes means that people don’t even need my business card: they scan my slide and my V-card is automatically saved in their mobile phone.

Inspired by a blog post from social media-savvy friend and fellow Wikipedian and QR code fan Andy Mabbett, I recently acquired cuff-links with a unique QR code pointing people to my website. They were made for me by Midlands-based Vanessa Pearce, who I contacted via Twitter (indeed, almost every part of the process was managed via Twitter, just one email).

The cuff-links proved a conversation-starter at a conference black-tie dinner I attended in Birmingham last week, and were also noticed during a business lunch in London two days later. OK, it’s not the most obvious way to promote your business, but I suppose it’s a new angle on wearing your heart on your sleeve.

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RIP Reorb. Meanwhile, welcome NegNet – another network

Posted on 5 February 2012 by Paul Wilkinson

Two years ago, I met software developer Tom Inglis to talk about Reorb, an online social network he had founded in August 2009 for professionals in the commercial real estate business. In the face of strong competition from magazine-backed rivals such as Property Week‘s Property Network (post) – which now has 5,603 members – and Estates Gazette‘s community – 473 members – as well as generic business network platforms such as LinkedIn, Reorb struggled to prove commercially viable. It was put up for sale by its board last summer, but I don’t think any buyers came forward, the site closed, and the Reorb.com domain name now just takes visitors to Tom’s company website, Feusd. (Meanwhile, I also encountered another would-be property community, Enska (@Enska), but its website was down when I checked it today.)

Now there’s another venture targeting a similar market: NegNet, “the social and professional network for Estate Agents“. This was launched quietly only last week – I learned about it after being followed by @NegNetUK on Twitter – with a website platform based on WordPress and its Buddypress plug-in. The site aims to be: ”THE online hub for Estate Agents where you can network, discuss industry news, socialise, search for and advertise jobs.”

The site is light on details about its founders (I always like to know who’s behind anything I join), but some quick online research revealed the domain is registered to Brentford-based Joe Shrimpton, a former Barnard Marcus branch manager who now runs Red Residential, a lettings agency focused on studio flats in west and central London.

Despite the apparent willingness of estate agents and other professionals to join online networks, Reorb’s experience shows it is difficult to translate this into online success. Time will tell if NegNet can do better.

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Social & Mobile Business conference could have been more, er, social

Posted on 3 February 2012 by Paul Wilkinson

On Tuesday, I attended an Information Age conference on Social and Mobile Business, held at the swanky Jumeirah Carlton Tower hotel in Cadogan Place, Knightsbridge, London. [Update (17 February 2012): Peter Swaby's review of the event, and links to presentations.]

Business-like…

It featured some excellent speakers – I particularly enjoyed Jonathan Brayshaw‘s talk on creating and building a B2B community for Psion, Shomila Malik‘s case study on using Yammer within 02, and SkyDox‘s Robert Fillmore had some interesting things to say about the impact on ICT of Generation Y, mobile devices and collaboration.

I also learned a surprising amount from Paul Johnson who talked about “making pharmaceutical data fun” (yes, really!), and showed how delivering an iPad solution (created by Roambi) had boosted IMS Health (this was topical for me, too, as only last week I looked at some business intelligence tools in the construction sector – post). And Salesforce.com‘s Xabier Ormazabal described how its internal social channel Chatter helped organisations (30% less email, 34% more productivity, 27% fewer meetings, 52% faster information-finding). Some powerful stuff.

… But no buzz

As someone who has attended many social media events (I’ve also organised a fair few too), I went with the not unreasonable – at least to me – expectation that there would be an open and reliable wi-fi connection, an event Twitter hashtag to help track the online buzz about the event, and maybe a few people blogging about the event. But no….

There was a powerful wifi signal (I got four bars on my phone and laptop), but it wasn’t available to either conference delegates or, as I later discovered, to the event organisers, Vitesse Media (the hotel excludes meetings and events from its “complimentary wifi”). And the conference room was situated well back from the front of the hotel, and the deeper into the hotel you ventured, the worse the 3G signal became. I resorted to a T-Mobile 3G dongle, but it registered, at best, one bar, and each tweet took about a minute to upload (and I gave up trying to share photos).

Shomila finished her presentation, which highlighted how hashtags could be used to emphasise internal achievements due to Yammer, by saying she was surprised there was no conference hashtag, and we spoke about it in the lunch interval. Maybe the conference’s target audience – “Senior IT professionals including CIO’s, CTO’s & IT Directors from larger medium and enterprise businesses” (and there were a lot of “suits”, most of them on LinkedIn too) – just weren’t into Twitter? Or maybe the no wifi and poor 3G signal discouraged them? Which was a shame, as I know I struck up some (slow) Twitter conversations with Shomila, Jonathan and Xabier – so at least some attendees took advantage of the network.

Some of my Tweets from the event got replies and retweets, so there was clearly online interest in the event from outside the room. But there was no organised effort to create a “buzz” about the conference – something that could also have helped in marketing future Information Age conferences.

Social Media Week is coming soon (11-15 February), and London will host scores of events with free – and sometimes over-contended – wifi. Most will also show how organisers can engage with online audiences through not just Twitter (I expect a few #hashtag Twitterfalls) but also live blogs (I use CoverItLive often), video-streaming (eg Ustream), photo-sharing, and by encouraging bloggers to write about the event both during and afterwards, maybe with linked content such as videos (YouTube, Vimeo), photos, podcasts, etc. This is the new reality of events in an increasingly social and mobile world, and business conferences should be adapting too.

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A lost bag, Twitter help and East Midlands Trains customer service

Posted on 18 January 2012 by Paul Wilkinson

Last Wednesday morning I travelled from London to Loughborough for a client meeting and inadvertently left an overnight bag on the overhead rack when I got off the train. I didn’t realise my loss until late afternoon, by which time my East Midlands train would have completed its northwards trip to Sheffield and probably headed south again. But my efforts to relocate the bag and to buy replacement items give some useful insights into the mobile power of Twitter and how customer service can make – or break – a company’s reputation.

Twitter help

By the time I realised I had lost my luggage, I was on a train heading across the Peak District towards Widnes, but I could get online and I asked Twitter. In fact, I started by looking for the wrong train company, but @LondonMidland were brilliant, quickly pointing me to the right company and to their customer service Twitter account, @EMTrains.

This was just as well, as East Midlands’ website homepage only displayed a less than helpful @EMT_offers Twitter account, and I couldn’t find any other Twitter links on the website. However, @EMTrains had clearly finished for the day, as I didn’t receive a response until late the following morning. Meanwhile, I sent an email via the web-form on the website.

I then started to wonder about replacing my belongings; I needed some basic toiletries and a change of clothes before another client meeting the following day. I wasn’t sure what shops, if any, would be open when I got to Widnes after 7pm. Again, Twitter provided the answer. Stoke-based Twitter friend Ben Mitchell (@Ben__Mitchell, technical manager for Thrislington Cubicles) knew some people in or near Widnes, including @adamhewitt79; after a couple of Twitter exchanges before my train pulled into the town’s station, I knew to head for Marks & Spencer in Widnes retail park (open ’til 8pm). Phew!

Customer service frustration

Once I had finished my morning meeting the following day, I got online again and resumed my bag quest. At 11.33am, a tweet finally arrived from @EMTrains suggesting I complete the web-form on the website. “Done that”, I told them, and also provided details of the train, coach, seat number, etc. Then I waited (allowing the minimum 24 hours suggested on East Midlands’ lost property page)  … and I waited (Friday came and went) … and I waited….

On Saturday @LondonMidland asked “Did you ever get your bag back from @EMTrains?” (this is another company’s customer service team showing more concern than the one I was dealing with), and wished me luck! No wonder their Twitter use is award-winning!

Back to work on Monday, I tried calling East Midlands customer service (“press one for…, etc”) and eventually got unhelpfully switched to National Rail Enquiries. I tried calling East Midlands’ lost property office at Nottingham (got number from the website) only to be thwarted by a telephone message saying “there’s nobody here to take your call, and you can’t leave a message, so please try again later”. How much later was anyone’s guess as East Midlands’ website didn’t give any office opening hours.

I tweeted my frustration late Monday afternoon, and @EMTrains finally got in touch again the following morning (as did a fellow disgruntled customer, @EMTsuck, who suggested I email East Midlands’ managing director David Horne). I sent a second web form to the customer service, and blasted off a quick complaint to the MD, though not expecting a response.

East Midlands responds

Suddenly, things started to happen. I got a standard email from Oonagh in EMT customer service about lost property (wrongly asserting that I could leave an answerphone message – which I quickly corrected), and – more surprising – an email from David Horne promising to look into things and to respond more fully later. I then got a further email from Oonagh:

I have just been over to my manager to pass on your feedback to her as we are told that there should be an answer phone. She is going to take this up with Nottingham Station and she has informed me that due to staffing issues at the Station that in the very near future we are going to take over the management of lost property.

I’m sorry it doesn’t help you now and hopefully you won’t have any lost property in the future, … Once it is set up… we will amend the website so our customers know to call us.

Thank you for your feedback it is appreciated and I am sorry that you lost your bag.

I was just digesting this when my mobile phone rang, and MD David Horne introduced himself! He said he had asked the customer service team to look at the issues I’d faced, particularly in respect of Twitter, and make appropriate changes; he also apologised for the problems, and sympathised over the lost luggage. He has subsequently also started to follow me on Twitter (@DavidH0rne).

Still no sign of my bag, but at least my loss may result in some positive changes in how East Midlands manages its lost property and how it uses Twitter to support customer service. I have written before about how responsive Twitter use can help maintain customer loyalty (post), and it would be good to think my temporary difficulties might lead to East Midlands using Twitter like the exemplary @LondonMidland. My opinion of East Midlands Trains has also been dramatically improved by, first, Oonagh’s explanatory and apologetic email, and second, the personal intervention of the managing director, who didn’t delegate but took the trouble to contact me direct (I suspect few companies have MDs that hands-on).

OK, it was one personal experience, but the negative view I had of the company on Monday evening has been transformed into something more positive, and David Horne’s talk of improvements to customer service might, in due course, rescue the company’s reputation with other customers too.

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Wikipedia, PR and CSR

Posted on 10 January 2012 by Paul Wilkinson

The thorny issue of whether public relations professionals should edit Wikipedia is being keenly debated again, making me think hard about my position – both as a PR professional and as a long-standing Wikipedian.

December’s revelations that London-based Bell Pottinger staff had been “massaging” the content of Wikipedia articles about the consultancy’s clients (BBC news), and a controversy about Stella Artois (Independent) have rekindled a debate that has continued sporadically for some years, and the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (of which I am a member) is entering a dialogue with Wikimedia UK to formulate some clearer guidance on how PR people should engage with the Wikipedia community.

A proud Wikipedian

To disclose my interests further, I have been a Wikipedia editor since October 2003 (completing some 12,000 edits to date). Like most editors, I contribute to articles about people, places and things like football and cycling that interest me and about which, to varying degrees, I am knowledgeable – and where my work as a PR person is irrelevant, apart from helping me hone my writing skills. Often I will find an article that stimulates me to do some desk research to help improve existing content, but I have largely (99%) refrained from editing articles about my employers – when working in-house – or my clients (I’m now a consultant).

I say ‘largely’ because the current Wikipedia guidance to PR people does allow us to do the following (all of which I have done, though only very occasionally):

  • revert obvious vandalism
  • fix minor errors in spelling, grammar, usage, or fact
  • add or update facts, such as a person’s date or place of birth; a company’s location or number of employees; or details of a recent event
  • provide accurate references for information that’s already in the article

However, the guidance goes on to stress that PR people should not (and I have not):

  • try to use Wikipedia to promote or advertise our client(s)
  • remove negative material
  • copy-and-paste content from another site, even if we manage the other site
  • add information that cannot be independently verified, or that isn’t significant for an encyclopedia article
  • work on material that’s particularly controversial or has disputed facts

To me as a Wikipedia user and as a PR professional these guidelines pretty much hit the mark; it is clearly ludicrous to stop experienced writers from correcting typos and factual errors about subjects they know about – so long as they remain neutral in tone, don’t involve any conflict of interest, and can be verified from other reliable sources (these points were all stressed by Wikimedia representatives at a CIPR Social Summer event 16 months ago - post). And last year, the CIPR’s social media best practice guide also adopted a common-sense approach, urging members to know the rules and, if there was a perceived potential for a conflict of interest, to seek the help of an independent editor.

New debate

Reading the latest PR blog posts – from, among others, Stuart Bruce, Phil Gomes, Julio Romo and Stephen Waddington - there appears to be a belief that the existing Wikipedia guidance needs to be updated. The debate is, appropriately enough, also using social media to air the discussion – there is a Facebook page for CREWE: Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement (an easy acronym to remember for a Crewe Alexandra supporter like me!), and Phil Sheldrake has set up a wiki page on the CIPR Social Media Wiki.

Reviewing the blog comments and discussion threads, there is understandably considerable focus on articles about sensitive or controversial subjects likely to be the target of activists or of vested interests, but such items are just the tip of a 3.8 million article iceberg. The vast majority of Wikipedia articles are relatively uncontentious, and they cover a huge range of subjects – most of which will only stimulate regular input from hardcore subject matter experts. And despite the scale of the Wikipedia undertaking, there are still significant gaps and areas in need of attention, partly due to the scarcity of regular inputs from volunteer independent editors.

In my view, Wikipedia, the CIPR and others should be doing more to encourage wider, more active and more timely involvement in editing (not restricting people from contributing), and in extending engagement with the resource. It is, according to Wikipedia, “the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet, ranking sixth globally … and having an estimated 365 million readers worldwide.” Contributing to and improving its content should be valued and encouraged.

By helping build a strong core community of disinterested Wikipedia enthusiasts, the CIPR and numerous other organisations could harness the ‘wisdom of their crowd’ – many of whom have years of experience in their sector – and use their collective expertise to expand and improve their sector’s coverage in Wikipedia, while ensuring the necessary NPOV.

There are some interesting suggestions on the CIPR Wiki regarding use of notifications indicating an article’s out-of-date or derelict status “or even that a communications representative has had a hand in updating”. This would flag the article as needing updating and/or attention from a disinterested editor – perhaps co-ordinated through some kind of “clearing house” or WikiProject (an organised drive to improve particular areas of content)* – and responsible participation might be something that individuals could highlight as part of their online profile. Of course, many editors prefer to stay anonymous, but others might be happy to highlight their inputs to Wikipedia – and, for good Wikipedians who work within companies, might such NPOV editing even be regarded as voluntary work demonstrating the corporate social responsibility, and therefore enhancing the reputation, of their employer?

Meanwhile, it looks like this debate will run and run, and I will be watching developments with interest, wearing both my PR and my Wikipedia hats – and my Crewe Alex bobble hat!

* The CREWE discussions mention a newly-formed project for paid contributors seeking to overcome conflicts of interest.

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Construction Enquirer readership growing

Posted on 10 November 2011 by Paul Wilkinson

Avatar for Construction EnquirerThe Construction Enquirer seems to growing in popularity judging from an email that dropped into my inbox today.

As I’ve previously described, this online-only free news publication was established in April 2010 by former print journalists Aaron Morby and Grant Prior. A year later, this advertising-funded venture was enjoying 300,000 page views per month from 50,000 unique users, with over 6,000 people receiving the Enquirer’s daily newsletter, and 150 new subscribers signing-up every week.

According to the email:

  • The Enquirer has hit a new readership record with 500,000 page views in the last month.
  • Our number of absolute unique visitors for the month was more than 83,000.
  • The number of subscribers to our daily newsletter has now topped 10,000 with 200+ new readers signing-up every week.

It still lags behind rival online-only news site The Construction Index (which, incidentally, recently launched a new pay-per-click TCI Ads advertising initiative), but the increases will make sobering reading for print/web title Construction News whose online readership (September 2010) was also hovering around the half million page views mark before it put its content behind a pay-wall. However, this pay-wall can occasionally be relaxed it seems….


Yesterday, a news item about the head of the Federation of Master Builders was available free, but when – as a registered user – I checked this morning almost all of the other news content was still ‘subscriber only’. So I read about Balfour’s falling orders on Construction Enquirer instead….

Update (14 November 2011) – I received an email from Will Mann at The Construction Index:

“I know you wrote a post about The Construction Index’s traffic back in April; I thought I’d provide you with an update.

Last month (October 2011) we achieved 2,322,224 page views, and 314,384 visitors.

We ran a Hitwise report… comparing our performance for the month vs Construction News. This indicated our traffic is almost four times greater than theirs’.

On another note, since launching our contextual advertising service, TCI Ads, on 25 October, we have served up 595,216 advertiser messages, so we are likely to do around 1m for a full month.”

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Most ‘authoritative’ Tweeters on sustainability

Posted on 9 November 2011 by Paul Wilkinson

Earlier this year I wrote several blog posts about PeerIndex groups and their value in identifying individuals and organisations as ‘influential’ on Twitter in areas such as architecture and construction. Today saw the publication of a new PeerIndex of people or organisations who are seen as ‘authoritative’ on Twitter about sustainability. The launch was hosted, appropriately, in the tCn-sponsored ‘social media lounge’ at UBM’s online event Sustainability Now.

This is an interesting development. Previously, ‘authority‘ was just one of three dimensions, with ‘activity’ and ‘audience’ combined to create a Tweeter’s PeerIndex score, and the profusion of PeerIndex league tables were largely calculated on this combined score (Building Design slightly bucked the trend, by manually sorting its list to produce its own assessment of influencers in the sphere of architecture; blog post). This listing is based on a Tweeter’s authority. According to PeerIndex’s Amanda Jones:

“this list is a sneak peek into functionality that we’ve only made available to tCn. This allows the group to be sorted by influence with the topic of Sustainabilty rather than by overall social media influence.”

This list also fulfils an undertaking made earlier this year by PeerIndex founder Azeem Azhar (post), that PeerIndex would offer “the ability to look at a group ordered by PeerIndex score within a topic” – in this case, sustainability. As I commented at the time, this development will allow more accurate assessment of influence within a profession, help people find others who share their key interests in particular topics, and takes us a few steps closer to being able to use Twitter to help gauge opinion leadership – useful if in PR and marketing we are to identify people or groups whose amplification is valued.

Not surprisingly, the upper reaches of the new sustainability authority listing are dominated by publications. Guardian newspaper Twitter accounts (@guardiansustbiz and @guardianeco) occupy the first two spaces, with BusinessGreen editor James Murray 3rd,  Architects’ Journal 5th, The Construction Index 7th, Cleaning Hygiene Today 8th and Builders Merchants News 9th (highest rank UBM resource was its sustainability account, 15th). But individuals also figure prominently: Mel Starrs, a long-standing blogger on sustainability issues and now at PRP Architects, is 13th, for example, while Transition Towns’ Rob Hopkins is 16th.

This underlines a point I make in social media presentations: social media means we are all publishers now (and also all potential broadcasters). Authority is no longer the preserve of traditional print and broadcast media. New online publications are already leaping into the fray, while individuals with knowledge, expertise and a passion for their chosen subjects can also become powerful voices, both in their own right and on behalf of their employers.

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RIBA Insight Days

Posted on 26 October 2011 by Paul Wilkinson

On Tuesday last week and yesterday I spoke at the RIBA Insight consultancy days, held in Manchester and London respectively. These events are aimed at manufacturers and suppliers and are intended to help them deliver effective continuous professional development (CPD) information to practising architects. As well as providing information about CPD, the days also provided presentations on technologies that are – or will be – changing how manufacturers, etc, liaise with designers and specifiers.

Not surprisingly (there seems to be an event on the topic every week!), the first part of the morning was devoted to building information modelling (BIM) – well delivered by NBS‘s Stephen Hamil and BIM Academy/Ryder Architecture‘s Peter Barker – while the early afternoon was focused on social media (me!) and website search engine optimisation (Pritesh Patel of Pauley Creative).

Getting Social: adding Web 2.0 to your construction communications mix

We had some good questions yesterday, and while it was clear many businesses “get” it, there were still some sceptics in the room. For example, one man yesterday felt the word ‘Twitter’ lacked business gravitas, and wondered if it was really possible to have thousands of ‘friends’.

I pointed out that Twitter now has an estimated seven million UK users and, like it or not, it is an increasingly widely used communication channel that businesses should at least be familiar with – even if not regularly using it. The ‘friends’ notion was easier to handle, particularly as some networks use less ‘cuddly’ or more business-like terms such as connections (LinkedIn), followers (Twitter, SlideShare) or contacts (Flickr) or allow people to be subscribers to your content (YouTube). We also discussed the use of Facebook pages that allow people to separate their personal/family profile from their business one.

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A new approach to virtual exhibitions

Posted on 4 October 2011 by Paul Wilkinson

StickyWorld opens up further potential channels for construction products people to engage with specifiers, and could be attractive to exhibition organisers wanting to offer additional services to exhibitors, and extend their event’s reach and value online.

I have done occasional consultancy work over the past couple of years for east London-based Slider Studio, some of it relating to its StickyWorld platform – a collaborative ‘virtual room’ platform that allows richer levels of interaction through use of 360-degree panoramic photography, video and other tools (see ExtranetEvolution blog post, March 2011).

INSITE11

This technology, delivered on a Software-as-a-Service basis and accessible to users through a standard web browser, is this week being used to help extend the reach of exhibitors at BRE’s INSITE11 event in Watford. This two-day event (4-5 October) is showcasing products and services relating to refurbishment and retrofitting, but – as with any event – only a relatively small number of people will be able to spare the time to travel to Hertfordshire to actually see the exhibition. Therefore StickyWorld is being used to capture key information from each exhibitor and make it available online – and not just for the duration of INSITE11, but for weeks and months after the event too.

As a practising architect, Slider Studio’s Michael Kohn has long experience of dealing with product manufacturers and suppliers, and believes StickyWorld can readily be used to carry out conversations in the context of product sales brochures, or project specifications. Dialogue can take place in dedicated ‘Sticky Rooms’, and these can now be embedded in the supplier’s own website, as a professionally focused social media channel. “Using secure private rooms and marking up the documents under discussion with familiar redlining tools, technical sales staff can help the decision-making customer understand their products more fully,” Michael says.

I had a wander around INSITE11/StickyWorld.com this afternoon – without leaving my desk in southeast London. So far 19 different rooms have been populated, ranging from virtual tours of some of the permanent BRE exhibits such as the newly completed Prince’s House and the Victorian Terrace, to product showcases for – so far – 11 firms in the Innovation Zone (Slider Studio people are taking photographs and collating further information for other exhibitors throughout the show), with some of this work funded by the Technology Strategy Board’s Modern Built Environment Knowledge Transfer Network.

Visitors can learn about the technical specification of the buildings from the comfort of their own computers, leave comments or questions using virtual ‘sticky notes’, and review technical information about products featured in the buildings. StickyWorld will create a permanent online archive of information and provide a platform for those unable to attend the live event, either in person or virtually, to follow-up after the event.

Michael said:

“The theme of this year’s INSITE11 is ‘rethinking refurbishment’. This fits nicely with what we do at Slider Studio. We’ve been rethinking ways to communicate and engage people in a more sustainable and energy-efficient built environment.

“From virtual tours of retrofit housing, to our ongoing collaboration with Arup exploring occupant engagement and energy-efficient facilities management, we are extending the flexibility of StickyWorld to support the broadest possible dialogue across the industry, engaging design and construction professionals, clients and end users alike. And we’re now very much looking forward to the dialogue at INSITE11.”

Marketing products to specifiers

It’s a shame this opportunity hasn’t been more widely discussed among marketing people in the construction sector (it would have made a great topic for the recent CIMCIG event on architects and product specification – see Su Butcher’s blog – but I understand, timing-wise, this was just too close for StickyWorld to squeeze in before INSITE11). Nonetheless, I think this use of StickyWorld opens up further potential channels for construction products people to engage with specifiers. For example:

  • Manufacturers and suppliers can use this social application to augment their existing website functionality, and engage with potential customers remotely and in a richer, more visual way than through, say, telephone cold-calling.
  • The investment in an exhibition stand that might only be in place for a couple of days can be extended almost indefinitely by capturing images and content, making it available post-exhibition, and servicing the content with online communication channels.
  • Just as some conferences are now hybrid events – combining face-to-face and virtual meetings and discussion - StickyWorld makes exhibitions into hybrid events – extending the reach to would-be attendees unable to attend in real-life. This might make StickyWorld attractive to exhibition organisers who might want to offer additional services to exhibitors, and help expand the event’s reach and value online, both simultaneously and after the event venue has closed.

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