Chris Blythe: Here’s to the power of social media

I never cease to be amazed at how social media is constantly changing the established order.

The changes that took place as part of the Arab spring are a good example of where its use not only gave a running commentary on political and social change, it steered the direction of the change too.

More recently, the events in Ukraine illustrate how people power is a far more formidable weapon than guns and tanks when mobilised with social media. The ability to organise and execute a referendum within a week is in large part down to social media.

It is important what you put out in these networks because what seems like a smart in-joke to some can become a career-threatening highly offensive statement when retweeted to 20,000 others. If there was ever a simple truth about the use of social media it is don’t publish anything that you would not like to see in a newspaper.

As a way of getting ideas out, it’s hard to beat and its power for doing good outweighs the potential for doing bad. Take the case of Stephen Sutton, the young man who lost his life to cancer but raised more than £3m for charity, purely through the power to connect in social media.

It is this capacity to go between networks where the real power lies. I have nearly doubled my followers by having my own tweets retweeted.

As I write this I am also giving a running commentary on the CIOB president’s visit to North America. A few words and an image in real time seems so much more interesting than a three-page report a couple of weeks later.

I was a bit sceptical being briefed by my team before flying out – they armed me with a special hashtag for the trip. When I asked whether it was really necessary I was patiently led through how important it was.

So what is the point of all this? It is the capacity to link things together I find most useful. A review of yesterday’s tweets, for example, has linked a construction summit in New York with workers’ conditions in Qatar and the challenges of getting the right talent into our industry.

In all the sessions at the conference the highest placed factor to ensure success in the global construction industry was communication. As we get more tools to make communication easier technically, it still needs capable people to make it work. Twenty years ago communication might have been more about how hard you could shout, today it’s about how well you are heard.