Strategic Social Media for Design Firms

Last week I had the privilege and pleasure of moderating a panel -- "Why to Blog, Text & Tweet: Strategic Social Media for Design Firms" -- at an evening event at Haworth Showroom for the American Institute of Architects - New York (AIA-NY).

Finally! A subject I know well, one I know from the ground up, one I am intimately involved with and not just as an observer or journalist. Normally moderators are asked to herd the cats (panelists and audience), making sure that everything goes well, that the panelists keep their presentations and answers to questions brief and interesting, keeping the audience awake, and ending on time. I've moderated probably 100 panels in my 25 years as a journalist and I've gotten the drill pretty well down pat by now.

This time I was also asked to give a 20-minute talk to give the audience context, from my experience as a design and construction journalist and as a longtime Web and digital maven. It was fun and also somewhat painful to skip down memory lane as I recalled fax machines that took six minutes per page, modems that sped data through the lines at all of 2,400 baud, the dot-com boom and bust, and our (McGraw-Hill Construction's) first blog when we had to explain what a blog was and when I was the only contributor for a good year. Ah, the good old days. Then I moved on to talk about nowadays: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and who knows what's to come. The point was that everything in the past and present are merely tools to enable us to do the basics that make us successful: communicate, form relationships and collaborate.

Our panelists were excellent! Mike Plotnick, media relations manager for HOK, talked about HOK Life, their site that features blog posts from 30 HOK contributors worldwide. I'd met Mike in person the week before at the Construction Writers Association conference in Chicago, where he led a table in our roundtable discussions, and I knew he'd be good on the AIA-NY panel. I actually met Mike via Twitter when I was writing an article on social media from the Society for Marketing Professional Services conference in Las Vegas in July. I tweeted him and asked if he'd contact me and half an hour later we were on the phone. Impressive!

The other panelists I met for the first time a few minutes before the panel began, although I had spoken with each of them the week before for half an hour or so to get an idea of what they wanted to talk about. They were Adam Lutz, facilities manager for Google Inc.; Dorian Benkoil, founder of Teeming Media; and Jessica Sheridan, editor-in-chief of eOculus. Jessica is writing something about the event and maybe Jenna McKnight from Architectural Record. If/when they do, I'll post the links. You can also find the live (at the time) tweets on Twitter if you have an account by searching for #AIANYsocialmedia, thanks mostly to Laurie Meisel, who tweeted consistently and quietly throughout the session.

The evening went well. Feedback was positive from what the AIA-NY folks told us. People came up to us afterward, seemingly pumped and ready to go blog, tweet and make videos. The venue was classy. Best of all, the room was filled with New Yorkers, several of whom I have known for many years!