Justin G. Roy

Jon Bishop, from JohnBishop.com, had a great post in early July (yes, I am finally catching up with my Google Reader).  Bishop talks about the importance of monitoring and measuring your social media influence along with providing links to free tools that can/will help you.

If you’re thinking about social media, a beginner, or even experienced, I recommend checking these out.  Additionally, for those in the architecture, consulting engineering, and construction and real estate industry, this is a must; especially checking out your brand name, vanity URL, etc.  As social media and online marketing picks up, it’s important to make sure somebody else has not “squatted” your name!!

Click here to access the post, AND links to free measurement tools!

Jason Snell from Macworld.com had a very interesting and informative article on tips for using twitter, as a business.  The tips he discusses, include:

1. Don’t automate it
2. Be conversational
3. Follow people who are relevant
4. Make sure your people are on Twitter, and refer to them
5. Answer your mentions
6. Search for your name
7. Consider creating sub-accounts for sections of your business or customer base
8. Use Twitter to ask your customers questions…and get good answers
9. Be a good Twitter citizen

Click here to read the full article and descriptions!

Tim Sanders had a great post the other day on his blog, Sanders Says, in regards to how people can waste their networking time, along with a suggestion on howyou can fully utilize your network.

I suggest that we dedicate 10% of our network building time to giving it away. You can blog or Tweet to help worthy causes raise money. You can use your email data base, combined with your profile, to help great people find new jobs. You can use your network reach to distribute good influences that improve the world we live in.

As the A/E/C industry looks at their marketing, sales, and business development strategic plan, I think this article comes at a good time.  Invest in helping others in your network will come back 100 fold!

Click here to view the entire article.

Anne Scarlett, President of Scarlett Consulting, announced the launch of their new website and blog. 

“With this change, we bring you the same clean aesthetic, but with far more functionality”

Scarlett Consulting provides marketing advisory services – including training and coaching – to architects, engineers, and construction professionals to help them grow their businesses.

Check out their new site here!

Some great advice in a post on The 42nd Estate on what to do after you create your blog through wordpress.  Adam discusses the following:

• Delete admin account
• Pick www or no-www
• Change the permalink structure
• Change the uploads folder to something simpler.
• Show less posts per page

Great advice for anybody in the design and construction industry.  I have been hearing/seeing more blogs dedicated to the A/E/C industry in the past few months!  If you are launching a blog, let us know….

Click here to read the full article and advice.

Unfortunatly, I was not the person to coin the term, but I came across a great article by Beth Kanter on Beth’s Blog.  She refrences a post by Howard Rheingold titled Twitter Literacy (I refuse to Make Up a Twittery Name for It).

Both articles talk about the value of Twitter, discuss the ongoing relationship benefit it provides, and how/why it will become one of the must-knows in the [very] near future. 

One of my favorite quotes in Kantor’s article”

I avoid over tweeting about myself.  I tend to ask questions, share links both what I discover from my RSS Reader or retweeting links shared by others in my network, and a few personality items (funny, witty, or something that shows I’m a human.) 

It’s great advice, and one everybody should take.  If you are simply on Twitter to sell, boost your ego, market, or talk about yourself only – people notice and it’s a quick way to see your number-of-followers go to the tank. 

If you don’t add value, why would somebody follow you?  Compare it to face-to0face networking and it is not much different.  If you show up to an event and not add value to the people you meet, eventually nobody will want to talk to you. 

Case and point:  I asked around the office here (to the Twitter users) about the value of their followers.  I was surprised at how many others perform similar “network maintenance” to mine.  If I notice the only tweets I see from an individual are too self-serving, I simply unfollow. 

Click here to read the full article.

Mel Lester wrote a post on his blog, E-Quip Blog, titled Getting Your Phone Calls Returned.  Lester suggests the following (with reasons and suggestions included):

1. Give the client a good reason to call you back
2. Never call completely cold
3. Be as specific as possible
4. Make it easy to return your call
5. If you were referred, state up front why the referral was made
6. Always try to schedule the next meeting or communication

As an architecture, engineering, and construction recruiter my day is completely filled with calls.  Cold, warm, hot, and a few call backs thrown in.  Is it difficult to reach me during certain hours in the day?  Absolutely.  Here are some of my “additional” tips:

In addition to offering the best time to reach you, add to your voicemail asking the caller to leave some good times to reach them.  We all want to return a call as soon as possible, but have you considered this person is going down his/her message list and quite possibly is calling somebody else?  Then what happens is phone tag.  Most of my messages now say to call in the morning, the 30 minutes before lunch, etc and I have a much better chance of connecting.

If you play phone-tag, stop after you leave the second message, and mention you will follow up with an email to set up a good time for them.  This cuts down on the other sides frustration of having to return messages only to receive your voicemail.

Click here to read the full article.

Click here to read the full article.