PlannovationPlanning Data Tips + Social Media Trends + Occasional Cubit Stuff

A recent FHWA study reports that Web 2.0 apps actually increase efficiency.

“Web 2.0” applications are online sites and applications that are user-driven, and emphasize collaboration and interaction like wikis, social media, podcasts and blogs.  When Cubit has spoken with planners and engineers in the past about Web 2.0 applications, we heard things like “we have to hire extra staff  to do social media” or fears of an inevitable deluge of negative comments in online forums.  However, research is showing that as many as 81% of state DOTs are using Twitter to reach the public. And a recent study by the Federal Highway Administration aims to dispel doubts by shedding some light on how 2.0 applications are being used by state DOTs to meet their objectives—and how the benefits outweigh the costs.

The FHWA analyzed the use of 2.0 tools by 7 DOTs, focusing on the use of 2.0 tools for four distinct functions: information provision, planning and administration, social networking, and analysis/evaluation.  They found that providing information directly to the public was the most common use for 2.0 applications, particularly through blogs and social media sites.

TxDOT workers planting trees, from the agency's Facebook page

Sound surprising?  The DOTs in this study report that 2.0 tools offer several benefits.  These tools are allowing them to:

• Reach more people and new audiences — RIDOT produced a podcast series, complete with a Spanish version, detailing their unprecedented Iway project. (As a result, they have reached a younger audience.)
• Communicate more directly and customize information to a target audience –Mississippi uses six route-specific Twitter sites to disseminate its Hurricane Evacuation Guide in different regions in the state
• Engage the public in new ways — TxDOT is using Twiter, Facebook, YouTube and podcasts to inform the public and address concerns
• Provide in-depth information to stakeholders — NCDOT maintains a variety of 2.0 applications to disseminate info to media and the public, including public meeting videos
• Make their agency more accessible by giving them a recognizable “face” — MassDOT posts videos of their Secretary of Transportation’s speeches on YouTube
• Invent creative solutions using a collaborative approach — MassDOT used Twitter during a developers’ conference on data management, to provide real-time information to those who could not attend
• Communicate more easily within the agency, with the public, and with other agencies — MoDOT turned its Engineering Policy Guide into a wiki, allowing multiple users to easily review and track changes made to the document

Rhode Island DOT's Iway podcasts

Surprisingly, negative comments from the public in online forums have proven not to be a problem (Rhode Island and Texas, for two, report very positive experiences).  And far from straining staff and resources, the study suggests that agencies can simply re-purpose existing materials (such as press releases and maps) that they would already need to produce in an environmental assessment.

Of course, with any new technology there are challenges.  FHWA finds that agencies may in fact need extra staff or technical and fiscal resources, though they claim that the resulting long-term efficiencies are worth the investment.  Extra staff time is often required up-front, with at least some continued effort to keep information current or respond to public comments.  Also, the nature of social media means that agencies have less control over how information is presented (users can more easily make quotes and comments in other venues).  And as mentioned above, there is still a lack of adequate performance measures to assess the value of these tools, particularly qualitative data.  But this study is a good start.

FHWA makes the following recommendations for agencies considering using 2.0 tools:

• Have a plan for how 2.0 initiatives will support the agency’s core business mission
• Consider the full range of 2.0 tools—and consider existing tools rather than creating your own
• Use 2.0 tools to complement (not replace) traditional media
• Develop policies and guidelines for how people should access and use 2.0 applications—such as mashup map sites that drivers may want to use while on the road.
• Take critical comments as constructive comments
• Review the effectiveness of the applications

Traffic lights are fun again, on MoDOT's Facebook page

FHWA believes that the use of 2.0 tools “will continue and increase in the future,” and anticipates their use for a wider range of objectives, from real-time project updates to live-streaming public meetings and even virtual meetings with online chat features.  How might these technologies change how we shape the built environment?  Do you have any interesting examples of agencies or companies that are using Web 2.0 tools? Leave me a comment below!

Last week, I gave a presentation to the Texas Association of Environmental Professionals Austin Chapter on 7 different environmental impact statement (EISs) projects that are using social media platforms for public involvement. The presentation also covers:

• Should Environmental Professionals/Planners Care about Social Media
• What are blogs, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter & Facebook?
• Common questions from AEC Industry professionals & planners

A big thank you to the Austin TAEP for letting me ramble about social media!

Here’s the presentation on YouTube.

Link to Part 2 of the presentation on YouTube

Link to Part 3 of the presentation on YouTube

If your organization blocks YouTube at work, here is the presentation via SlideShare.

Promised Resources

Social Media Revolution 2 video

I played a short clip from the Social Media Revolution 2 video in the presentation. The video is filled with facts and statistics about how fast social media is spreading and how it’s changing our interactions.

Environmental Impact Statement on YouTube

Here’s the video guide to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (Draft EIS) document for Honolulu’s proposed rail transit system. There are 3 parts to the video guide on YouTube. The video guide contains key facts from the Draft EIS. The Draft EIS explores potential environmental, community and economic impacts of the rail transit line.

Social Media Demographics

I got a great question about which demographic groups are using which social media platforms. This graphic from Flowtown does a great job communicating the demographic breakdowns of different social media sites. The data for this graphic comes from Google Ad Planner.

Newbie Guide to Getting Started on Social Media Sites

I’ll post this information very soon. This blog post is pretty long as is.

Your Comments

Did I overstate the potential of social media in the presentation? Are there any other great example projects that I should have included? Do you really, really need a copy of the Newbie guide? Leave me a comment below with your thoughts.

Yesterday, @Ryan_Link tweeted: #AEC industry is 2-3 years behind other fields in the use of #socialmedia. Referenced from statement made at last SMPS National Conference. I don’t understand why the AEC industry is behind others in adopting social media tools. Some of the smartest folks I know work in this industry. The very people who could grasp the game-changing power of social media platforms are choosing to ignore them or dismissing them as a fad.

Anthony and I have been volunteering to help folks use social media tools at AEC conferences and events over the past year. Some conferences have embraced and supported social media use–like the APA National Conference and the TAEP Conference. Still, we get told “No–you may not volunteer to teach people how to use social media tools at our conference/event” more times than we get told yes.

There are 5 reasons that I hear over and over when we get told no to volunteering at AEC events. I’ll attempt to address why these reasons are based on misinformation or misconceptions about social media.

1. Social media is distracting from the presentation material.
2. It takes too long to get everyone set up and to teach them how to use social media.
3. There is not a high enough adoption rate.
4. Social media is too complicated.
5. Social media is not applicable to our projects or our careers.

Reason 1. Social media is distracting from the presentation topic.
A. Studies show that note-taking and summarization actually increase retention. Twitter, a common social media platform used during presentations, requires both. For more information on how Twitter is actually positive for presentations, check out How to Use Twitter to Supercharge Presentations.

B. Audience participation via social media actually increases audience engagement. Below are some perspectives from Audience Tweeters.

“Twitter allows me to add my perspective to what is being presented and that keeps me more engaged than just sitting and listening – even if no one reads it.”

“And what struck me was the dynamic of this meeting. It was participatory. No one was talking out loud except the guy presenting the ppt. But the conversation was roaring through the room via twitter. It was exploding. People were asking questions. Pointing out problems. Replying to each other all while the ppt was progressing along it’s unwaveringly linear path.”

For more perspectives, check out the Benefits of the Back Channel to the Audience section of How to Present While People are Twittering.

Reason 2. It takes too long to get everyone set up and to teach them how to use social media.
The goal isn’t for evey single audience member to engage in social media during the event. By displaying social media use during the presentation, the minority of attendees who are already using social media demonstrate the positives (AND the negatives) of the platform to the majority who aren’t there yet.

Reason 3. There’s not a high enough adoption rate yet.
Maybe so, but unless the AEC industry wants to stay 2 to 3 years behind, someone has to go first.

One way to increase the adoption rate is to show people engaging in social media in public settings. When people see others using social media and engaging each other in conversions, adoption rates will increase. That’s the perfect opportunity for a volunteer social media table to be there to help the handful of folks who after seeing live tweets/social media engagement say “Wow, that’s amazing. Will you help me get started?”

As for Reasons 4 and 5, I’m currently working on a presentation titled “Say It To My Facebook: How EISs are using Social Media for Public Involvement” for the Texas Association of Environmental Professionals Austin Chapter that will address these two points. On July 14th, I’ll give the presentation at Carmelo’s and will post the presentation materials as a blog post then. I love to have some friendly faces in the audience. Please join me if you’re in or near Austin that day.

Will you leave comments with your experience with social media in this industry? What’s the REAL reason why the AEC industry is hesitant to adopt social media? Also, do you have any ideas for how we can help our community catch up and begin to use social media tools for our projects, our careers and our companies? I’d love to do a follow up post featuring your ideas for how to attack this problem.

You might want to export tweets from Twitter to Excel if:

1. you wanted to include tweets as part of your administrative record for a project or
2. if you wanted to track what folks were saying in general about a roadway or an area on Twitter (i.e. Twitter search for I-35, an interstate in Texas).

Quick & Dirty Method for Exporting Tweets from Twitter to Excel

Here’s how I extracted the tweets sent during the American Planning Association’s 2010 conference, which you can read here http://www.cubitplanning.com/blog/2010/04/tweets-from-apa-2010-conference/. I used a free program called the Archivist. The Archivist is a Windows application that “allows you to archive tweets for later data-mining and analysis for a given search. The Archivist allows you to start a search and will get as many results as it can on the initial search.  If you leave The Archivist open, it will update with the latest results every 10 minutes.  You can also close The Archivist and open it later. The Archivist will save the tweets and get all the tweets it can since that search. The Archivist will display a chart that shows the number of tweets per day for a given search, so that you can quickly assess traffic for a given search. For more comprehensive data analysis, The Archivist lets you export Tweets to Excel.”

1. Download the Archivist here:  http://www.flotzam.com/archivist/
2. Open the Archivist. In the search for box, enter your search term (I used #apa2010, the hashtag for the APA2010 conference). Click Get Latest.
3. Bonus Points: While you’re here, click on View and check out your Tweets as a Pie Chart and as a Line Chart. An example of a Line Chart of the #apa2010 tweets is below.
4. Click on Export to Excel. Your tweets will be saved as a .txt file.
5. Open the .txt file in Excel. Handy tip: if the data doesn’t display nicely in columns in Excel, use the Text to Column feature in Excel to split the data out into columns.

Planners Tweeting at the APA 2010 Conference

But The Above Method Won’t Work for an Administrative Record

Yes, you are correct! The above method worked perfectly for me when extracting tweets from the APA’s 2010 conference; because I ran the search three days after the conference was over, and the conference only lasted a few days. I wasn’t worried about capturing tweets over a long period of time like the months or years it could take an EIS to be completed. Currently, Twitter stores your tweets for less than a month. The Twitter folks say that timeframe will be shrinking as the number of tweets per day continues to grow. If you want to include tweets about your project as part of the administrative record, you’ll need to back them up.

How to Back Up Tweets to Include as Part of the Administrative Record

If you want to back up and save tweets to include as part of the Administrative Record, check out ReadWriteWeb’s 10 Ways to Archive Your Tweets.

• If you don’t consider yourself to be tech savy, I’d suggest going with option #8. Twitterback up tools. I’ve got a BackupMyTweets account.
• If you do consider yourself to be tech savy, I’d suggest #7. RSS Feeds and setting up a separate Google reader.

Let me know if you’ve got any questions about this process or if you’ve used any of these tools to successfully include tweets as part of your administrative record.

Acronyms: NEPA = National Environmental Policy Act while NAEP = National Association of Environmental Professionals

This week, I’m at the NAEP conference in Atlanta, volunteering to teach environmental professionals about using Twitter. Unlike the APA conference where there was chatter on Twitter before the conference, Twitter was completely silent before the NAEP conference. So we’re going to try a different focus at the NAEP conference. Rather than talk to folks about using Twitter for their projects like we did at the APA conference, we’re going to focus on 4 specific NEPA projects (all environmental impact statements) that are using social media sites, like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

Below are 4 environmental impact statements (EISs) that all use different combinations of social media tools and have different administrative record policies. For example, one EIS only uses Twitter; another EIS is using 4 different social media sites. The EISs also range in administrative record policy–some EISs DON’T include comments via social media sites in the administrative record, and other EISs DO include comments via social media sites in the administrative record. Ideally, these 4 EISs demonstrate that there are a variety of social media tools being used and administrative record policies being implemented.

4 NEPA Projects (EISs) using Social Media Sites

Public Involvement Meeting for Loop 1604 EIS

Loop 1604 Project

FHWA, TxDOT, Alamo RMA
Description: improvements to Loop 1604 (37 miles) in Bexar County, Texas

Facebook: 360 people liked it
Flickr: 125 photos
Twitter: 69 followers
YouTube: 418 videos watched

Administrative Record Policy: “Comments made on these sites (Twitter, Facebook, Socializer, blogs), herein called ‘social media sites” will be not be included or evaluated as part of the ongoing Environmental Impact Statement decision-making process… These social media sites are available for and intended to encourage public dialogue about the project and are, as such, provided for outreach and informational purposes only.”

Rosemont Copper EIS

Rosemont Mining Project

US Forest Service
Description: mining and processing of copper, molybdenum, and silver ore in the Nogales Ranger District in Arizona

Twitter: 14 followers

Administrative Record Policy: “Forest Service would use Twitter™ for notification only – one-way communication, not dialogue”

I-95

Driving I-95

FHWA, NCDOT
Description: Improve I-95 in North Carolina

Facebook: 32 people liked it
Twitter: 26 followers
YouTube: 60 channel views (no project videos uploaded yet)

Administrative Record Policy: “All comments or posts made to Driving 95 accounts, walls, forums or pages are public, not private. This means that both the posts of the employee administrator and any feedback by other employees or non-employees, including citizens, will become part of the public record.”

Metro’s Westside Subway Extension

Metro’s Westside Subway Extension

Los Angeles Metro
Description: alternative analysis for subway extension

Facebook: 2,361 members

Administrative Record Policy: “Comments, questions and posts on our wall will become part of the official public comment record for the Draft Environmental Impact Statement/Environmental Impact Report (Draft EIS/EIR) currently in progress.”

Note: All participation counts are from April 21, 2010.

Handout for Easy Printing

In case it’s helpful, here’s a handout that Anthony designed that summarizes the 4 EISs, their social media participation counts and their administrative records policies:

NEPAProjects(EISs)UsingSocialMediaSitesHandout

You can provide this handout to the people in your organization that might have implemented Facebook or Twitter blocking policies. If you have been or are successful in reversing those policies, please share below how you did this.

Also, there are other environmental assessments and environmental impact statements out there using social media tools other than the 4 EISs listed above. If you know of any other EAs and EISs that should be included in this list, please leave a comment below.