Last Friday, I had the great good fortune to participate in a panel on social media at the 2010 SMPS Build Business Conference in Boston. I had been asked by SMPS to organize the panel, which would include Mike Plotnick (VP & Communications Manager) of HOK — the 'poster child' of social media in the AEC industry.

Mike Reilly (Reilly Communications) gave me some suggestions on additional speakers, and I contacted Rowland Hobbs (DMD Network), whom I had met via Twitter. With their help, I was able to identify and 'recruit' Allison Brooks (Director of Business Development for Winter Street Architects in Salem MA) and Gina R. Miller (Managing Partner of DMD Insight in NYC). 

Planning

Allison, Gina, Mike, and I started to work on the program as a 'virtual' team, which Mike dubbed Team Motley Crew. We started to 'pre-populate' the session using Twitter. We set up a separate microsite via Posterous.com and offered prizes for help in publicizing the session. We also starting asking people for their input, posing questions and answering them, too, via Posterous and Twitter.

We had decided that I would not just moderate but really introduce the subject of social media, setting the stage for each of the team's presentations. Mike, Allison, and Gina would each have 20 minutes to present their part of the story, focused on a specific element:

Mike Plotnick - Building a Strategy

Allison Brooks - Building Engagement

Gina Miller - Building Influence

Because we wanted to practice what we preached, we arranged for an extra projector and laptop to enable 'live-tweeting,' and we made sure that some people at the conference and outside (via Twitter) were ready to participate. SMPS had set up #smps2010 as the 'hashtag' for the conference, and we set #smps504 for our program.

Results

We haven't seen the evaluations yet, but we've received lots of positive feedback. I personally thought that Mike, Allison, and Gina were terrific. We had a lively audience, with great questions and comments, and we had lots of tweets during the session and after, too. We didn't just show the live-tweets; the panelists incorporated live-tweet questions into their presentations, and we did our best to provide as much relevant information as possible.

The 'Ask Team Motley Crew' post on our Posterous site had received 455 visits as of our session on July 16, and as of today (July 21), it's up to almost 1,000, so we still have momentum. We're continuing to add new posts (and encourage comments) via Posterous and Twitter. And we've made lots of new friends....

Moving Forward

Our Executive Summary is posted on the SMPS Build Business site, as well as our Posterous site. I will be posting my 'intro' slides for the session, and the other panelists will be doing something similar. We will also continue to post questions, respond to comments, and tweet about the process.

I've learned a lot — from the panelists and from the experience — and I hope that we'll all be able to help you, too.

For more information:

To visit our Posterous site

To see the #smps504 stream

PS -

Here's an article from ENR.com on SMPS2010, written by Judy Schriener (@judywriter) and Janice Tuchman (@JanTuchman)

PPS -

I tweeted during the terrific session on the Healthcare Marketing Sector. You can find those posts on the Twitter search site, using #smps101