Interested in education or transportation? National Journal Group is hosting two events next week: a Transportation Policy Lunch and an Education Policy Breakfast. If you're interested, please RSVP by clicking on the event description below, and be sure to stop by the 3121 table at the event to login.

National Journal was presented with the Community Innovation Award this evening at JiveWorld 09. This award category went to a company that "clearly showed how they leveraged existing Jive functionality to enhance existing systems and applications to create a new breed of Social-Business-Software enabled solution."

This is exciting news for 3121 so soon after it's public launch. We look forward to growing and evolving 3121 in the days and months to come.

Chris Contakes is the Chief Technology Officer for National Journal Group.

As we gather feedback from Hill staffers, we're looking to add new features and widgets to streamline collaboration on the Hill. For those early adopters, let us know what you'd like to see in future releases of 3121. Email us to share ideas and feedback.

We look forward to customizing the 3121 platform even more to the needs of the Hill staffer community.

Michael Behr is a 3121 Community Manager.

3121 offers many powerful tools for collaborating with colleagues such as Groups. In groups you can share documents with your colleagues, pose questions, conduct discussions, and create polls. Following your group's activity can be via e-mail or RSS feeds so you will always know the latest and greatest happenings in your group.

Group creation is just a mouse click away. Simply click on the "Groups" icon in the Browse toolbar menu and then on "Create New Group" off to the right.

Give your group a name, description, some tags to help your colleagues discover the group and even a descriptive image. Finally, decide group permissions and you are on your way. From here it's just a matter of inviting colleagues to your group to begin collaborating.

Chris Contakes is the Chief Technology Officer for National Journal Group.

Earlier this summer, I had the opportunity to sit down with Paul Vogelzang of Capitol Communicator TV and discuss 3121. Video below, highlights after the jump...

So - what is it like, LinkedIn? Facebook? Amazon?

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.

So - what about searching and finding who and what you need?

[...]

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. [...] and, two, as any social media... 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.

Leslie Bradshaw is a 3121 Community Manager and member of the Public Affairs team at New Media Strategies.

Facebook is attempting to measure happiness levels in society by analyzing status updates. 3121 is thinking the same way. As users update their status with what legislation they're working on, what HOB or SOB they're meeting in, or what legislative area is most pertinent, we can potentially see what topics are most important on the Hill.

In order to update your status, there is a "Status Update" widget on Your View or Dashboard. Simply click right next to your name, and start typing away...

Michael Behr is a 3121 Community Manager.

When we launched the promotional campaign for 3121 this summer, I wrote then about our Google AdWords campaign to raise awareness of the new feature, but it's not the only social advertising platform we're using to reach Hill staffers. We've also been using the self-serve advertising available to users of Facebook and LinkedIn. Let's take a look at what we're doing with Facebook.

When 3121 opened up to the full Hill community, we changed the focus of our ads from "3121 is coming" to "3121 is here." In fact, at all times we've kept two ads in rotation at a time - one featuring the 3121 logo prominently and another highlighting some aspect of the campaign we think people should know about.

Here is what our "awareness" ad looks like right now:

And here is what our "opinion" ad looks like:

You may also wonder how we make sure that these ads reach only the right people. With the Google AdWords, we were able to identify people by approximate location thanks to geolocated IP addresses. Facebook uses an entirely different system altogether, and one that may in fact be even more reliable.

And it's very simple: Facebook knows where you work, because you told them. While some advertisers do backflips to figure out whether they are reaching the right people, this is the only parameter we need to set.

With approximately 8,000 people on Facebook listing the United States Congress as their employer, a substantial majority of the Hill is on Facebook (no surprise there). We've delivered these ads 1.9 million times, or more than 230 times per Hill staffer.

And we like to think of Facebook as just the place to reach 3121's most likely adopters. If you're a regular Facebook user, you're more likely to use other social networks, and more likely in turn to understand 3121 from the beginning.

Did you learn about 3121 from Facebook first? Which ads have you seen? Let us know in the comments!

William Beutler is a 3121 Community Manager and member of the Public Affairs team at New Media Strategies.

Thanks to all our Hill early-adopters for claiming their 3121 profile last week. We had an incredible response from our initial outreach. If you work on the Hill and did not receive a login, please email us to get access to the directory, collaboration, and news tools on 3121.

Also, 3121 members (you must be registered) are cordially invited to National Journal Group's health care policy breakfast at The Liaison Capitol Hill on the morning of Wednesday, October 7. If you're interested, please RSVP here. Stop by our table to login to 3121 at the event.

Michael Behr is the 3121 Project Manager.

Here at 3121, we want to take a minute to thank the U.S. Senate Press Secretaries Association for having us join their new media panel discussion last Friday (September 25th). Our community management team from New Media Strategies - Patrick Ottenhoff, Bill Beutler and Leslie Bradshaw - shared both social media best practices, as well as a general overview of 3121 to an audience of over 50 staffers who serve a variety of communications roles for their Member - from traditional press engagement, to social media profile strategy and maintenance.

Patrick was able to share details about the 3121 dynamic directory and our collective engagement efforts to date, while Bill emphasized the importance of combining on and offline tactics. As for me, I hit on what I know best: authentic and sustained engagement.

The 3121 team was honored to be joined by representatives from Senators McCain and McCaskill, as well as Major General Kevin Bergner (a 2-star General from the Army) and his social media support staff.

Didn't get a chance to make it? Here are the "8 Things You Need to Know to Effectively Use New Media" that the team highlighted:

1) The "what's next" question comes up a lot. While we are not futurists, we have observed an increase in platform integration (e.g., Facebook Connect), real-time and / or social search (e.g., Twitter, bing, FriendFeed and Facebook Lite), and the evolution of how we participate and conceive of ourselves online (see especially my mini-PowerPoint that explores the concepts of anonymity, transparency, authenticity, intimacy and translucency).

2) Contrary to popular belief, youth is not a qualification to run a social media account or campaign. This is an easy mental error to make, and one that is all too common. If social media is an important part of your communications strategy, which it should be, then it should be overseen by someone with experience in crisis communications.

3) Executing effective communication strategies via social media is not as much about buying advertising and printing marketing materials; it is about investing in and getting a commitment from your people.

4) As adoption of social media continues to increase, users of social media will increasingly look like America. In fact, like the blogosphere, Twitter has always been dominated by an older demographic. According to Inside Facebook, the fastest-growing demographic on Facebook is women over 55 (anecdotally, our aunts and moms have all joined Facebook in recent months). The bigger Facebook gets, the older it gets and the more like a cross-section of reliable voters.

5) To successfully participate online, organizations need to embrace a conversation-driven (not campaign-driven) approach. Those who chose to friend and follow you online are interested in staying in touch and informed, not just hit up for donations and when new initiatives are launched (though, if you engage authentically and consistently with them over time, like a good friend, they will be there when you need them.)

6) When approaching the web, it should be done holistically - not segmented by platform. In other words, it is not just a Twitter, Facebook, or blogger strategy; it is a social media strategy. Those that will succeed will be consistent, integrated, offer unique value to those engaged online and, related to point #8 below, should be in-step with offline / traditional communications. And, to the question of "where should we be spending our time? More on Facebook or more on Twitter?" we responded: "Depends on what your objectives are." If you are trying to reach women, engaging the BlogHer community is a great place to start. If you are trying to reach early-adopter consumers and producers of media, Twitter is a smart bet (Tip: sites like quantcast can help you get even more granular about demographics).

7) We hardly needed to sell staffers on the notion that Wikipedia is the most important research site on the Internet, especially when Wikipedia typically ranks in the top 3 Google results for their member. We pointed out that two of the most active anonymous IP addresses on Wikipedia is the House and Senate, and that Wikipedia has a certain tolerance for this - the House and Senate are occasionally blocked from editing, but only temporarily - yet there are better ways to engage Wikipedia on their boss' behalf than making not-so-anonymous edits directly. (Shameless plug for my fellow 3121 community manager, Bill Beutler - his blog "The Wikipedian" is a must-read for more insights, as is his PowerPoint "Government and Wikipedia: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly." As a Wikipedia editor since 2006, he knows what he is talking about).

8) Related to point #6, an online strategy will be most successful in conjunction with an offline strategy. That is to say, they will be force multipliers for the other. If you want to accomplish something offline, you can reinforce it by first introducing or reminding people about it online. An increasingly standard campaign tactic pioneered by the Howard Dean campaign, was brought to full fruition by the community members at my.barackobama.com ("MyBO") who were able to organize house parties, GOTV and fundraising efforts online, then following-up with offline "IRL" (in real life) meetings. And another good example of the two-track strategy is, of course, 3121. We have online ads, this here blog, Twitter and blogger engagement... as well as offline events that range from staff briefings, to Drinks-n-Demos, to Happy Hours, to community events like CongressCamp.

Leslie Bradshaw is a 3121 Community Manager and member of the Public Affairs team at New Media Strategies.

3121 Community Managers Patrick Ottenhoff and Michael Behr will be on the Hill in the next couple of weeks giving personal demos in staff offices. We've already stopped by the House GOP Conference and briefed the House Democratic Caucus, and now we're barnstorming offices on both sides of the aisle and both sides of the Hill. If you are interested in getting a full test drive of 3121, and/or in setting up a demo for your staff, committee, delegation or any group of colleagues, email Patrick at pottenhoff@nationaljournal.com.