Be2Awards news Archive

In addition to the dozen blog posts highlighted yesterday, Here are a few more reactions to last week's Be2Awards / @ConstrucTALKs event:

• Demolition News, from Mark Anthony
• The tCn blog, from Ryan Briggs
• Extranet Evolution and the pwcom blog, both from Paul Wilkinson

The latter post also features various photographs from last Wednesday's event, including several provided by Graeme Hutchison of HutchisonHaines.co.uk. And as we are talking about blogs, why not show a photo of Joe Peach (winner of two blog Be2Awards)!

It's been great to read some of the post-event reaction to last week's Be2Awards / ConstrucTALKs event on various blogs, including....

• Just Practising, from Su Butcher
• This Big City, from Joe Peach
• Fotofacade, from Andy Marshall
• The Playrite blog, from Lorna Duncanson
• The Reed Harris Tiles blog, from Karen B
• The SMPR blog, from Katie Brown / Kirstie Colledge
• Urban Tick blog, from Fabian Neuhaus
• NearMap blog, from Simon Crowther
• The Hutchison Haines blog, from Graeme Hutchison
• Construction Marketing UK blog, from Peter Masters
• iSite, from Martin Brown
• Thirlwall Associates blog, from Clare Thirlwall

(If we've missed your blog post off the list, let us know and we'll add you.)

• The real life event attracted over 70 people
• It lasted 240 minutes, started only 10 minutes late (a record for Be2camp!) and actually finished on time
• There were six ConstrucTALKs speakers (a seventh sadly had to withdraw at 8pm the night before)
• There were almost 900 visits to the Be2Awards website on the day the Awards were presented.
• Online, the Ustream.tv live video stream was viewed by 178 unique visitors, who made 302 visits, totalling 146 hours.
• On Twitter, the hashtag #be2awards was cited 731 times; over the last seven days, 974 Tweets, by 210 contributors, used the hashtag (and there were many, many more tweets about the event that didn't use the #hashtag, of course)
• Four people were "volunteered" to open the award envelopes, including representatives of lead sponsors HP and British Gas.
• 16 awards were announced; 12 were immediately presented to winners (or hastily nominated stand-ins); one was presented during the evening after the winner used Twitter to find the after-party.
• We had delegates from at least four different countries, including Holland, Belgium and Ireland, while there were website visitors from 35 different countries/territories, including Australia (where one of the winners - NearMap - is based).
• The 16 awards weighed 5.2kg (or 325g each).
• There was one cake.
• There are now over 25,000 search results for "Be2awards" on Google.

The 2011 Be2Awards - Winners

The online polls for the 2011 Be2Awards closed at midnight GMT last night (it was encouraging to see people still tweeting about the programme right up to the last couple of hours!).

The final 24 hours saw 1980 unique visitors to the Be2Awards website, hosted for us by Cambridge Open Systems.

In total, the latest reports from the website (up to 12pm last night) show the site has received almost 10,000 unique visitors since it opened last month, and according to Google Analytics, has provided over 40,000 page views - delivering some great visibility for our event sponsors.

To date, the site has been visited by people from 85 countries/territories.

The winners will be announced at the Be2Awards / ConstrucTALKs event at the Building Centre in London tomorrow afternoon (Wednesday 9 February), so if you want to be among the first to know the results, please register to attend (if you haven't already).

Addressing some very topical themes from a social media angle, Tony Carroll will be talking about "Big Society" at ConstrucTALKs tomorrow Wednesday 9 February in London, in a talk entitled Doing 'good things' with social media.

As a consultant, developer, deal-maker and strategist, Tony has over 20 years' experience of commercial, residential and institutional projects. He is currently involved with several regeneration, sustainable development, renewable energy and not-for-profit projects that involve and engage communities and business. Tony occasionally speaks and writes on regeneration, policy and sustainability.

To hear Tony talk, register here (if you haven't already, of course!).

The final dash to get the votes in for shortlisted candidates in the 2011 Be2Awards has stimulated a lot of online interest. Just under 4000 unique visitors - 3985 up to midnight last night - had accessed the Be2Awards website in February alone.

The final 24 hours - up to the voting deadline at 12 midnight GMT tonight - should see the month's unique visitor total top 5,000 and the two-month total over 10,000 ahead of Wednesday's Be2Awards announcements and the accompanying ConstrucTALKs.

We hope shortlisted candidates will make the effort to attend (there will be journalists in attendance - and more than a few industry bloggers looking for interesting stories, of course!). Register here if you haven't done so already.

One of Britain's leading authorities on corporate real estate, Paul Carder, will be taking part in ConstrucTALKs at London's Building Centre on Wednesday afternoon 9 February.

Paul is Director of the Workplace Performance Innovation Network ('PIN') and Research Director at  Advanced Workplace Associates Ltd. He has over 17 years experience in property, corporate workplaces and facilities management. Paul has held management positions 'in-house' at Barclays, with a global FM supplier, and in consulting/advisory roles. His experience spans client research, benchmarking, strategy, performance management and supplier/contract management. Paul started using social media around two years ago, and now owns or manages several groups on Linkedin, with a combined membership of over 10,000 workplace/FM people globally. He blogs on the Occupiers Journal and Tweets: @occupiers.

We are delighted Paul has stepped into the breach (our planned speaker on corporate sustainability had to withdraw on Friday).

It is clear that the big guns of construction collaboration have been encouraging their supporters to vote for them.  We have noticed email and Twitter campaigns from contenders for the AEC collaboration application category, and these have contributed to a surge of fresh visits to the Be2Awards website - over 2700 yesterday alone.

By contrast, other categories may potentially be decided by a few dozen votes, so now is really the time to be rallying your fans. As we have said before, Don't be shy - encourage your Be2Awards supporters.

Remember: Voting closes on Monday, 7 February, at midnight GMT.

Thanks to Be2camp regular Claire Thirlwall, of chartered landscape architect Thirlwall Associates, there will be cake at the Be2Awards / ConstrucTALKs event next Wednesday afternoon, 9 February.

Claire very generously commissioned a Wordle cake for the Be2Camp "unconference" in Birmingham last August, and has done the same for this event.

For those wondering about catering, lunch-wise there are numerous sandwich shops near to the Building Centre, as well as Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury's stores, etc, along nearby Tottenham Court Road.

Tea and coffee will be available upon arrival and, for those that stay the whole afternoon, we will be breaking out the wine and beers later on. The 'after-party' will, more than likely, see people moving across Store Street to the College Arms.

British Gas is the latest organisation to sign up as a sponsor for the 2011 Be2Awards and the ConstrucTALKs event, being held on Wednesday 9 February in London.

Joining HP as a headline and dual award sponsor, British Gas is backing the Best Sustainability Blog award and the Best 'Internet of things' category, saying:

"We recognise the important role bloggers play in helping inform people who want to know more about sustainable energy and have worked with them in the past to inform our customers about all forms of sustainable living."

Shortlisted in the Best Sustainability blog category (vote here) are:

• Martin Brown for "Fairsnape"
• Joe Peach for "This Big City"
• Roger Hunt for "HuntWriter"
• Mel Starrs for "Elemental"
• Michael Townsend and Ramon Arratia for the "Global Sustainable Business blog"
• Richard Hawkes for "Crossway PasssivHaus"
• Lesli Speers and Michael Kitching for "SK transport planning"

Shortlisted in the 'Internet of things' application category (vote here) are:

• Pachube: www.pachube.com 
• Bubblino: www.mcqn.com/bubblino 
• Sen.se: www.sen.se 
• Tales of Things: www.talesofthings.com

Since online nomination and online voting for the Be2Awards started last month, there have been over six thousand unique visitors to the Be2Awards website.

To put this into context, the four Be2camp founders originally expected to attract the interest of a few dozen enthusiasts within the architecture, engineering and construction sectors. However, since June 2008, the online community has grown to almost 600, and online involvement in Be2camp events, through Twitter, etc, typically runs into tens of thousands.

We anticipate the same kind of attention next Wednesday, when, alongside the Be2Awards, is an industry conference, ConstrucTALKs, where six leading industry figures will be talking about construction, collaboration, marketing, technology, design, FM and social media.

Don Ward, chief executive of Constructing Excellence, will be speaking about how CE has incorporated some social media tools into its communications both nationally and locally. John Lorimer of Manchester City Council will be talking about building information modelling, while HP's Phil Oakley will describe how printer hardware can now be used to share design information "in the cloud". Other speakers include the former chair of BIFM, a venture capitalist talking about boardroom communication, and the head of digital marketing at a major UK utility looking at communicating sustainability (announcement imminent - we like last minute surprises!).

If you are in or near London, why not register to attend?

Whether you have been shortlisted for an award, or you are an award sponsor, involvement with the Be2Awards is great for raising the profile of you, your organisation or the work you do.

An email from a business shortlisted for an award says it all:

"Just to let you know I received a sales lead who had found us from the Be2awards webpage!"

Another sponsor has just signed up, and after getting Don Ward from Constructing Excellence on board today, we are just finalising the details of the final ConstrucTALKs speaker (representing a major UK utility, with a powerful story to tell about its adoption of Web 2.0 tools and techniques). Watch for the announcements tomorrow.

The e-marketing campaign promoting registration at our London event on Wednesday 9 February is under way, and we are looking forward to a bumper attendance. If you haven't registered yet, please do so as soon as possible.

Don Ward, chief executive of Constructing Excellence (CE), is the latest speaker to confirm for ConstrucTALKs on Wednesday 9 February at the Building Centre in London.  Don will be talking about collaborative working and how communication technologies such as social media can promote collaboration.

Don joined CE from independent industry body BE in 2007, and became CEO a year later. He has specialised in industry change, supply chain integration and collaborative working, and has 25 years experience of best practice and change programmes in the construction industry. Previously, he served as chief executive of two bodies: the Construction Industry Board, set up to implement the 1994 Latham Report, and the Design Build Foundation. CE has been deploying social media both nationally and through its local and regional clubs and working groups, recognising the power of conversation to support collaboration.

To hear Don and the rest of the ConstrucTALKs, register now.

The Be2Awards website will be down for approximately 10 minutes at some point during today (Wednesday 2 February) for some routine maintenance and a server upgrade to prevent a recurrence of last week's downtime.

Apologies for any inconvenience this might cause.

Votes across the 16 Be2Awards categories have been flooding in, and it is clear that some candidates have successfully mobilised their supporters, followers and fans. Others, frankly, could do better.

Shortlisted people, organisations and applications which have blogged about the awards or have encouraged their Twitter followers to support them are generally doing better than those who have, perhaps due to modesty, not rallied their supporters.

Maybe the well-supported people have peaked too soon? Maybe their rivals will overcome their reluctance to ask for votes and pip them at the polls? Voting closes next Monday, 7 February, at midnight GMT.

If you've been shortlisted, with just under a week to go, now is the time to get those voters online and voting for you. There is a lot at stake. Across many of the categories, leaders are literally just a handful of votes ahead of their nearest challengers.

And for those wondering, yes, we will be making the voting figures public after the winners have been announced next week at the combined Be2Awards/ConstrucTALKs event (register now!).