Design and construction firms are waking up to the reality that one-way communication is losing ground to interactive websites and social media, such as LinkedIn and Facebook. Though these “meeting” sites are popular, a firm should neither put all its marketing eggs in one social-media basket nor dump traditional marketing tools; rather, experts say, social media should be considered as just another arrow in a firm’s quiver.
“The question is, how do you re-engage the things you already know how to do with these new tool sets?” social media expert Chris Brogan asked some 700 attendees of Build Business, the annual national conference of the Society for Marketing Professional Services (SMPS) in a keynote last week in Boston. Brogan is president of New Marketing Labs, Canton, Mass., and co-author of “Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust.”