NRMCA operates several discussion groups within the social media site "Linked In" as a way for its members, partners and others to discuss specific topics on a national and sometimes international scale. Just within the area of promotion, NRMCA hosts four separate discussion groups: Concrete Parking Lots, Sustainable Concrete, Pervious Concrete, and Streets and Local Roads. The number of members in each discussion group ranges from 47 in the Streets and Local Roads group to a high of 400 for the pervious concrete group.

"That’s 400 industry professionals able to pose questions to the group, provide insight into new technologies, offer answers and opinions or simply gripe about certain aspects of that particular promotion topic," said NRMCA Senior National Resource Director Doug O'Neill.

For example, an NRMCA partner recently needed help with a question about pervious concrete. Pervious concrete can be used around trees and shrubs because of the open voids which allow necessary air and water to penetrate into the ground around the root systems. It's one of the many benefits of using pervious concrete that seems to make perfect sense and is very rarely questioned, until now. O'Neill said an NRMCA partner asked him "do we have any proof that pervious actually does what we say it does in terms of being good for tree roots systems?"

"In all the presentations I’ve done on pervious, I’ve never been asked that, so it seemed like a perfect topic to present to the Linked in Discussion Group on pervious concrete promotion," he said. Within hours, industry experts too many to mention weighed in on the topic and provided O’Neill and our partner with a plethora of information, from university studies to pictures of projects finished years ago that showed healthy trees as proof.

"These Linked in discussion groups have taken awhile to gain acceptance, and some more than others, but overall these are tremendous ways for our industry to keep in touch, share information and get answers that otherwise we would not be able to obtain," O'Neill concluded.