Capitol Communicator Thought Leadership Series: Leslie Bradshaw, Director of Engagement at New Media Strategies, discusses the breakthrough social networking program 3121, designed specifically for Capitol Hill staff, with Paul Vogelzang in a Capitol Communicator TV video sponsored by Vocus (www.vocus.com). The Capitol Communicator TV Thought Leadership Series podcast is up in iTunes now. The video is above and a transcript of that interview follows:
Paul: Welcome to Capitol Communicator TV. I'm Paul Vogelzang, host. With me today is Leslie Bradshaw from New Media Strategies. So Leslie, tell us a little bit about what's going on at New Media Strategies with social media.
Leslie: We’re actually celebrating our 10 year anniversary, so I think in Internet years, that’s pretty healthy. Started back in 1999 and we’re really excited about some of the projects we’ve got on the dock right now. Back in the spring, we signed with NBC and we’ll be doing a lot of their social media. We’re also doing a lot with Dominos, and some other kind of recent news, I think, is National Journal here in town, is really kind of breaking into the social media space.
Paul: I know Pete a little bit. I know he’s got lots of great things in store. A relationship with National Journal is huge. Tell us a little bit about how that came about.
Leslie: Well, with National Journal, in fact the current president is Suzanne Clarke, and when we were a privately-held company prior to our acquisition by Meredith, she was on our board. And when there was an opportunity coming out of one of the Washington information age studies that National Journal does, she kind of looked at the data and said, you know, “A lot of people are saying one, social media and social networking’s interesting to us, but it’s not necessarily in the rural committee bylines, things that we can partake in as individuals.” Secondarily, as they were kind of continuing their focus groups and their conversations with Capitol Hill, a lot of people were saying, “We have no dynamic directory.” You know, we have, at best, you know, these leadership directories that are printed, but as soon as they're printed, somebody switches offices or, you know, mid-term election happens. So they were kind of thinking, you know, “How can we better service the Hill?” You know, we do already with our editorial content. You know, we have other kind of key interviews that we put on, our people product, and this was something that they said, “Hey, you know, let’s give a swing at this social network, or professional network for Congress.”
Paul: That sounds fascinating. I would imagine that the Hill would need something like that. So what are you calling this?
Leslie: We’re calling it 3121, and for those of you who have ever called your Congressman or Congresswoman, you know that that’s the Capitol switchboard. You have 202, 224, 3121 or 225. We want it to be kind of line an onomatopoeia. We wanted it to kind of mean what it meant and when you see 3121 and once you know that it is for the directory and you're on Capitol Hill, you think, “Okay, so at minimum, I know I'm going to be able to find information out about people.” But it’s also-- it’s not for everyone. You know, it’s for Congress and their staff, so we also wanted to keep it a little inside baseball to the extent that those using it will, you know, kind of want to have their own network.
Paul: So just limited to Hill staff then?
Leslie: Just Hill staff. We’ve got about 95 records that we’ve pre-populated on the site and over time, I think there’s going to probably be a demand. I can see 1414 for the Administration and White House, and I could see potentially other groups and other industries being interested in the tool. But we wanted to test it out. As you know, working in social media, you want to kind of get a pilot program, you know, kind of proof of concept to make sure that this is something that’s viable, that the software works, that the community is developing, so I think we’re going to start small and go from there.
Paul: By starting small, are you going to, you know, build out profiles? Is it going to be kind of a LinkedIn for the Hill?
Leslie: A lot of people are actually calling it the LinkedIn for the Hill. Local bloggers, Frank Gruber over at Somewhat Frank, Nick O’Neill at Social Times, even Adam Ostrow at the Mashable blog, they were kind of all talking and saying, “you know, this is kind of like a LinkedIn.” But the thing about LinkedIn, you kind of populate with your CV or your resume information and I don’t know about you, but I don’t update it regularly. And I think that’s something that it’s going to be a hybrid between the concept of kind of a stagnant kind of two-dimensional with that three-dimensional social layer. So you're going to be able to friend up with people, you're going to find colleagues. It’ll be kind of like Amazon will recommend to you, “Hey Paul, you know, you're a Press Secretary in the House and you're a Democrat. Here are people that you might like to meet,” and so it’s going to very kind of inviting in the sense that if you're a young staffer trying to figure out who’s who and what's what, and then if you're a staffer that-- you know, you kind of have an established network, this is just going to be an extension of that Rolodex that you already have.
Paul: Sounds great. When will you launch this?
Leslie: We’re launching in mid-September and so far, we’ve actually been kind of in an alpha/beta stage where we’ve done a number of demos on the Hill. Close to 200 people signed up so far, and people are using it, giving us feedback, poking around, finding bugs and really enjoying, I think, some of the main features. The directory’s one of them. The other key feature is that it will pre-populate customized content, so if you have, say, your members from Nevada and, you know, you want to have all of the dropdown information just about Nevada from National Journal, they’ll pull from Hotline, Congress Daily, NationalJournal.com. We also recognize that National Journal isn’t the only news site, so you can pull in any RSS feed tat you’d like, whether that be from New York Times, Wall Street Journal, your local regional papers, and then you can move it around. So it’s kind of like iGoogle. So you might have, you know, your Nevada news here, your member news down here, you know, kind of feed-in information, and if you like to kind of switch them around, they're all kind of customizable, both in the content as well as the layout.
Paul: What about searchability by issue? You know, will you have, like, a health care component? Will you have an energy component? Will you have an economy component? Can we actually get in there and look by kind of subject matter by member?
Leslie: Absolutely. Two key features; the first one, on day one is not going to be an empty room. Like I said, there's going to be 9,500 records and all of that information will be searchable. So you can start typing in someone’s name and it’ll start auto-completing. “Oh, do you mean this individual? Do you mean this staffer?” When you start typing in concepts like budget, military, anyone who services on those sub-committees will have already been pre-tagged and pre-set in a group on the side. So you’ll end up being able to see both individuals as well as kind of macro populations. I've been running queries like, “How many people are, you know, Republicans who’ve been in the military and are women?” and you can kind of see how that filter narrows down, and then you can take away a filter and say, “Okay, just Republicans, just military,” and go on from there. So I think just on day one, that’s the feature you'll see. But as any social media, kind of any Wikipedia user knows, the longer the community’s around and the more people add to it, you can add to your own profile, you can also actually add tags. So if you're interested in health care or Medicaid or even something more finite like H-1B visas, you know, those are all things that you can tag within your content. And then you hope that other people are then also referencing and kind of tagging their profiles and what they’re doing.
Paul: Yeah. One of the fascinating things to me about kind of what's going on in D.C. right now is that, you know, all of these agencies really are looking for ways of holding information inside the group. You know, kind of having almost a closed network for fear of brain drain. You know, as people retire and move on, I would imagine that this, just as it has applicability to the White House, it probably has lots of application elsewhere, beyond just the White House. And are some of the offices already thinking in terms of, you know, taking over the world with it?
Leslie: Well, I think National Journal is really focused on serving Congress. If you look at their publication, their print publication as well as their online publications, they’ve had a great relationship with Capitol Hill and, you know, with the Administration and beyond. But really, they're known for that and I think what they're focused on is not necessarily being the next, you know, Facebook in town, but they're looking at an extended feature of NationalJournal.com and making sure that as they continue to pull their key constituents, and they’re saying, “These are things that we wish we had. You know, we don’t necessarily trust fully these other kind of social platforms that we don’t have relationships with; we would feel that your credibility that you bring to the table at National Journal and the relationship we’ve built over the last few decades is something that, yeah, you know we feel comfortable with you holding our data and having that network for us.” But as far as, you know, kind of visions of grandeur, I think again, the market will speak for the demand. And if that is other departments, other industries, again, I think National Journal is very dedicated to Capitol Hill at this time.
Paul: So if people want to know more about you and what's going on at New Media Strategies, where can they find you?
Leslie: Well, two key places on the web. I'm going to send you to newmediastrategies.net, which is our company website and that has our blog and our Twitter and everything kind of pulled in. And then as far as the National Journal 312 product, there's a great public site. We’ve got a blog, we have a Twitter feed, everything going on. So that’s going to be 3121launch.natioanljoiurnal.com.
Paul: Great. Thanks very much, Leslie, for being part of the show. This is Capitol Communicator, thanks.