Asite community revisited

Back in June, I wrote about construction collaboration vendor Asite‘s revamped website and its new social media features. Three months later, I had a quick look to see how the Asite community has been developing….

• Blog posts have been a bit slow in coming. Three in June, one in July, none in August and one more (so far) this month.
• After a June Tweet about the company’s Summer 09 release, there was no Twitter activity until earlier this month (just seven – so far – in September). Asite is following five people and its Twitter feed has 27 followers.
• There has been a little more recent action on the video front. A Fox Business Network news feature on Asite in the USA is available on YouTube, as is a short video about using Asite’s AppBuilder to select the winner of a prize draw from contributors to an online poll.
• That online poll – which collated 81 votes – was in the Asite forum or discussion board. To date, 20 topics have been opened in the forum, 80% of them in the Platform and Product Development section. Perhaps not surprisingly, with an iPod Nano at stake, the Asite survey was the most popular item generating almost as many replies as the rest of the topics put together, and stimulating some additional feedback on potential system improvements.
• The Asite Wiki (which appears mainly to be a glossary of IT-related terms) does not appear to be widely used. It has been updated just eight times since June, and onle one edit has been by somebody outside of Asite.

So there are some mixed messages coming from Asite’s social media efforts. The discussion forum is atttracting some traffic, with people contributing a few topics and viewing lots of the posts, and the recent YouTube action has resulted in more than 300 views of its two most recent videos. Early signs are that the blog, Twitter feed and Wiki could all do better, but it is still early days. As a PR, marketing and social media practitioner in the AEC sector (pwcom.co.uk), I tell clients that Web 2.0 is not about short-term wins; firms need to prepared for the long haul, and need to work proactively to establish and maintain conversations and relationships with individuals in their communities.

BuildLONDONlive 2009

On the more conventional marketing front, Asite is involved with BuildLONDONlive again. It was one of the organisers of BLL 2008 in June last year, and is helping run the event again this year, which is being run 6-8 October [Update: now postponed to 15-17 December 2009 (see BLL blog post) – Be2camp text below amended accordingly].

BLL is “a unique mix of virtual collaborative event, architectural competition and a BIM exhibition“, and this year is focused on a site in the Thames estuary, east of the capital.

Social media is again being employed. The BLL Twitter feed has been revived from its hibernation after the 2008 event, and is (so far) following six people and has amassed 61 followers; BLL forums (run on the Asite platform) are being used currently to match-make teams and participants; the BLL blog had four posts last week when the competition’s registration opened, but nothing since; and the BLL YouTube channel features two videos about last year’s event.

BLL meets Be2camp?

On its original dates, BLL 2009 was to have coincided with Be2camp@ WorkingBuildings2009, a two-day social media ‘unconference’ event that I am helping to organise at London Olympia on 7-8 October. As a result, I was talking to my friends at Asite about some kind of cross-promotion between the two events, and I am hopeful that we may be able to feature a speaker from BuildLONDONlive at one of the Be2camp sessions.

Certainly, I think there is a lot of potential synergy between the two events. Both are focused on using technology to enable sharing and collaboration upon information about the built environment, and I know some Be2camp participants may well be interested in participating in BLL or at least seeing how far any of the BLL teams go in their embrace of Web 2.0 to support their teamwork.