4
ON THE MOVE TERRACON ANNOUNCES KEY ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGES Terracon , a nationally known and respected consulting engineering firm, announces several strategic organizational changes designed to guide the company as it continues its pattern of growth. Bob Cords, P.E., is now national director overseeing the leadership of the company’s transportation and infrastructure, oil and gas, and logistics business sectors. Based in Terracon’s Jacksonville, Fla., office, Cords has more than 35 years of engineering industry experience in operations management, client development, and project management. Recently, he served as a senior national account manager focused primarily on Terracon’s logistics clients, and has been a business sector lead and division manager. David Lipka, P.E., is now national director for transportation and infrastructure. Lipka
has more than 35 years of experience in geotechnical and materials engineering services with much of that experience focused on transportation and infrastructure projects. He has been serving as the national program manager for transportation and infrastructure focused predominantly in the eastern operating group, and has led pursuits for projects nationwide. Lipka is based in Terracon’s Charlotte, North Carolina, office. Mohammad Nasim, Ph.D., P.E., is now national director for geodesign services. A principal engineer with extensive experience working with federal, state, and local agencies, Nasim has led projects throughout the U.S., as well as internationally. His design and construction experience includes deep foundations, support of excavations, underpinning, ground improvement, numerical modeling, and seismic analyses. He is based in Terracon’s DC Metro North office in Germantown, Md.
R. Sean Williams is now national manager of laboratory services. Based in Terracon’s Chattanooga, Tenn., office, Williams is leading the company’s plans for the growth of its laboratory services and providing technical support to operations. Williams brings more than 28 years of experience in laboratory and quality management experience to this role, including laboratory accreditation, and operation, development, and implementation of quality management systems. Terracon is an employee-owned engineering consulting firm with more than 5,000 employees providing environmental, facilities, geotechnical, and materials services from more than 150 offices with services available in all 50 states. Terracon currently ranks 24th on Engineering News-Record’s list of Top 500 Design Firms.
MARK ZWEIG, from page 3
and found it less successful. You need to be running your own experiments. Getting lots of followers and the right ones is crucial to your success with social media marketing. The more you have, the greater the odds that someone who could hire you sees your stuff and thinks you have insight and other skills that could benefit them. Not to mention, you may grab the attention of other media the more followers you have which could help spread your message even further. “Don’t sell. Provide information. Post your employee writing on your own website – have a blog section where you warehouse it ... Do original research. Then repost links to that material through your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages.” 4)Avoid the temptation to do more with it. I have said it before but this bears repeating. Too many blatant ads for your services, too many charitable causes, too many birthdays, too many reposts or sharing of other firm’s posts (unless they are clients!), and you will turn off your audience and lose your likes and followers. And never ever stray into politics. We live in a divided country and you run a 50/50 chance of alienating someone you don’t want to alienate by posting anything remotely political. 5)If this all seems unmanageable, get some qualified outside help to assist you with the entire process. Don’t just delegate your social media marketing to an inexperienced intern who doesn’t understand what you want to accomplish with it – easy to do, but too risky! I’m sure I could go on but have used all my time here. No doubt, the subject of social media marketing will come up again soon, so there will be more to come from me on this subject at some point in the future! MARK ZWEIG is Zweig Group’s chairman and founder. Contact him at mzweig@zweiggroup.com.
It is also a good news source, although you have to be careful with that, too. I am “over-informed” on some popular news subjects, and the danger in that is it, too, can affect your mood! So if you do want to use social media for business, here are some of my suggestions: 1)Create and distribute lots of unique content. You need ALL of your discipline and market sector experts writing something regularly (weekly – is that too much to expect?) about what they are doing, what they know, and what is happening with their (your) clients and projects. Get them to focus on providing information and opinions that will help your clients or promote their interests. Don’t sell. Provide information. Post your employee writing on your own website – have a blog section where you warehouse it. Also have some white papers that you can provide for free to anyone who gives you their contact information. Do original research. Then repost links to that material through your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages. And finally, ask the rest of your employees to help distribute that information through their own social media accounts. 2)Be focused and consistent. Keep everyone on track. Monitor your firm’s and your employees’ social media posts yourself. Be sure that you aren’t straying from the original content distribution strategy and degenerating to employee birthday parties, travel meals, and blatant attempts to sell something. And create a schedule that you stick to for content creation and posting, and hold people accountable to that. It won’t be easy, as most people slack off and use project workload as an excuse. But consistently posting quality information will have a big impact on how useful social media is for your marketing. 3)Try some paid promotion. Every one of the social media platforms has options for you to pay to promote your content. I can’t claim experience with LinkedIn on paid promotion. I can tell you we have had a lot of success getting new “likes” and “followers” from paid Facebook advertising. I recently experimented myself with paid Twitter promotion
© Copyright 2019. Zweig Group. All rights reserved.
THE ZWEIG LETTER December 9, 2019, ISSUE 1323
Made with FlippingBook Annual report