As I’ve mentioned previously, we kicked off a company-wide social media project at NCI about six weeks ago. The goal was to get everyone in the company the chance to get fluent in social media, learn the skills to build their social footprint and implement a social media marketing program across our brands.
The program has been a lot of fun and we’ve had some great successes. Shortly after we kicked off, an editor from the trade magazine Audience Development reached out to me. He’d been following my Twitter posts and was curious about what was going on. Here’s a link to the article; some excerpts are posted below. He did a good job of asking insightful questions and making my answers appear to make sense.
- 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.
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.
