Twitter is definitely a funny name for a social media Website. But I like the short format (a single post, or “tweet,” is limited to 140 characters), and I’m interested in how it can help ENR communicate with the industry.

ENR and its parent, McGraw-Hill Construction, have a number of Twitter pages. At twitter.com, you can sign up for a free account. Then you can “follow” any of these groups or individuals. For a news feed from ENR.com, you can follow ENRnews; our blogs are at ENRblog. For architecture, follow Archrecord, and for our whole media group, follow MHConstruction. ENR Equipment Editor Tudor Van Hampton uses the Twitter “handle” DoctorDiesel, and Technology Editor Tom Sawyer’s tweets can be found at
TomSawyerENR. News director Andrew Wright posts a mix of  fly-fishing and construction thoughts at dryfly24.

My personal Twitter name is jan3251—the number is my phone extension— and my first tweet was from World of Concrete in February. The concept is to deliver a message from one sender to many screens simultaneously. My tweets are a mix of what’s happening behind the scenes at ENR, news that grabs my attention and questions I’m pondering. I like to tweet from my handheld as events are happening, straight from the scene. At the New York Building Congress leadership awards luncheon, for example, I saw developer Larry Silverstein present the Jack and Lewis Rudin Award for Industry Service to John Tishman, chairman of Tishman Realty & Construction Co. I tweeted, “Larry to John: ‘Mazel Tov!’”

Some twittermaniacs stream posts like, say, “great ham sandwich for lunch” or vague comments no one can understand. Fortunately, it’s just as easy to stop following someone on Twitter as to add them.

ENR editors plan to use Twitter to stream news from shows and conventions. Do you have other ideas? ENR summer intern Melissa Traynor, a journalism major at Central Connecticut State University, is working on an ENR story about how social media—Twitter, Facebook and others—are being put to work in construction. 

blog post photo
 Traynor
 
E-mail her your thoughts at melissa.traynor@gmail.com. Or you can send me a tweet by creating your own Twitter account and typing @jan3251 on a post.
 
https://www.enr.com/blogs/13-critical-path/post/15219-enr-is-twittering-sign-up-and-take-a-look
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