The 100K Connection Challenge

Network Communications CEO launches company-wide social media initiative.

By Bill Mickey
Monday, June 1, 2009

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Network Communications Inc., a national publisher of local printed and online magazines for the real estate market, is jumping head-first into social media. Indeed, this Q&A was inspired from a series of tweets from Dan McCarthy (@danielrmccarthy), the company’s chairman and CEO. McCarthy was tweeting to his employees, updating them on the training sessions surrounding the company’s new social media initiatives—initiatives that McCarthy thinks will have a profound impact on how NCI can communicate with and distribute content to customers.

I noticed your tweets about training your staff on how to use social media. What’s behind that initiative?
We made a decision at the beginning of the year to open up and activate our organization to social media. And that’s what’s behind the training program. The idea is we are giving every person, regardless of what their function is, an opportunity to learn how to use social media platforms and tools.

It sounds like you’ve turned this into a fun process.
We kicked it off four weeks ago and it will end June first. The challenge to the organization is to build 100,000 connections within 45 days. I invited everyone to connect with me on various platforms and I’ll just add up the number of people they’re connected to.

How is this going to benefit your employees and, in turn, the company?
It’s an attempt to give people some basic skills. My feeling is that knowing how to use social media is going to be the same as knowing how to use a cell phone or email—they’re just core skills.

If you don’t have those, you’re going to miss a reconstitution of the audience. It’s reconstituting itself in a different way on a different Web. We want to reorganize our business processes around it, and the first thing to do is teach everybody.

This initiative at a basic level will be a success if all of the people in my company have got a grasp of social media and are able to have smart conversations with their customers and prospects. I just want to have my people confident enough to talk about it.

How is the audience reconstituting?
As media players, we’ve been living on the “Google” Web. It’s an incredibly vast place where everybody’s anonymous to each other. I can do a Google search and I’m not finding my path to people necessarily who I know and have credibility. I’m in a world that Google created. But now there’s the social Web out there and it is growing rapidly and it is a place where people know who they’re dealing with and why. And where each individual has an identity, dimensionality and credibility that we’re able to get in real life.

What is the opportunity for NCI, now that you’re diving into this as a company?
As a company, there are opportunities to do a couple things. We can think of our marketing in a different way. We can think about marketing our content in a way that’s not just about us. If we can connect with our customers, we can share content with them in a way that helps us set up a conversation about what’s going on in the marketplace.
For example, we have Apartmentfinder.com. It’s a blog that’s an engine for driving lots of content. It has a Twitter account that’s announcing that content and it has a Facebook fan page. All of our local markets, and we have more than 100, are setting up fan pages. We can distribute content through many identities.

What challenges do you see in this pursuit?
The big thing about playing in social marketing is you can’t go in half way. You either get wet or you don’t. The challenge is how do I create content and community and manage it across multiple channels without it becoming a tremendous sink in resources?

What’s been the investment so far?
This is an incredibly inexpensive initiative and all it takes is organization and energy and a clear sense of what you’re trying to accomplish. This is just asking people to do new and interesting things. All the technology and training costs that I’ve put into this is around $50,000.