Using Social Media in the Local Church

The local church is comprised of a community of people of varying degrees of participation and dedication. The community is drawn together by the mission of the local church – the Great Commission which commands the church to go and make disciples as followers of Jesus. The church will seek to fulfill the Great Commission in a variety of ways. The Great Commission has a definite social element involved and therefore should examine the Social Media as part of the church’s strategy.

The intranet’s core technology was conceived as a social medium. Email, the origination point for social computing, got started 39 years ago. Discussion groups and file sharing got started 30 years ago as USENET. “Talk”, a real-time chat program like Yahoo! Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger arrived on the scene 26 years ago. And now venerable World Wide Web made its debut two decades ago. The Internet has developed from being social to becoming actively social. The sheer number of people who enjoy and participate in social media makes it compelling, The church members and future members are out there sharing photos, making connections, telling stories, giving advice and watching videos.

• There are more the 2.9 billion emails accounts
• More than 400 million Facebook users.
• 13 billion photos on Facebook and Flickr alone
• More than 161 million visits per month on Twitter
• 133 million blogs

The initial step should be to examine how the local church should get started and to prepare how the media should be used within the organization.

Questions to examine.

1. How can my church use social media to pursue specific objectives?
2. What are the risks, and how can they be managed?
3. What are some examples of social media techniques that have provided real results?
4. How do we know what’s being accomplished?
   

The seven categories of social media

1. Publishing Platforms – these consists of platforms and tools that allow the author to set the content of the initial publication and allow others to add commends or to link using RSS feeds. Examples: Blogs, Podcasts and VLogs or Video Blogs.
2. Social Networking Sites – these allow for the users to interact by becoming friends and/or sharing favorites. This allows for the people to connect to others. Examples YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace and Facebook
3. Democratized Content Networks – these sites allow all users to contribute equally and to vote for the best content. Examples: Digg, NewPR, Wikipedia.
4. Virtual Networking Platforms – these often require third party interfaces. Examples: Second Life and There.com
5. Information Aggregators – these are publicly available machine driven aggregators of niche content, usually with some human interaction . Examples: Techmeme and Power 150 Kitchen Sink.
6. Editing Social News Platforms – these are sites which users can recommend other links and can make comments on the stories. Examples: Fark and Spin Thicket
7. Content Distribution Sites – sites allow the users create, collect and/or share content and distribute them through RSS, code and email. Examples Scrapdogg, Del;.icio.us and Clearspring
   

Through a series of blog posting, I will examine how several Social Media elements can be utilized by the local church.

A question of Why. . .

From the past

The Stimulus Package was passed prior being read or totally comprehended because it contained money for shovel ready projects which would provide for advancements to the infrastructure.
Since the passage of the Stimulus Bill

• Why has the unemployment rate continued to rise to 9.8%?
  
• Why does Virginia have the fifth lowest unemployment rate of the nation when they rank last in utilization of stimulus money for road enhancements?
  
• Why does the current administration continue to try to explain every piece of bad news on the past eight years? Was the President a Senator during the past eight years and part of the problem as well?
  

The Present
During the 2008 campaigns, many candidates stated that the War on Terror needed to be focused on Afghanistan rather than Iraq, why does the President hesitate to send additional troops to complete the campaign as soon as possible?

The Future

The Health Care Reform debate uses facts like
· There are 48 Million people without health care or is that 30 Mission people?
· There are 60 people who die every day because they do not have health care.
· The Majority of Americans, Doctors of the AMA, Nurses, Lawyers, Senior Citizens support heal reform.

• Why the poll numbers are for people who support Congress’ Health Care Reform continue to lower and those opposed continue to rise?
• Why should we trust a Committee to provide a comprehensive health care reform when they cannot write a bill rather than a concept document?
• Why should we trust a Committee to provide a comprehensive health care reform when they are unable to upload the document to the server?

Are commercials becoming more offensive?

I have noticed that TV commercials are leaving you with questions about the integrity of the company in which they represent.

There is a commercial for Heineken Light Beer which starts with an usher at a basketball game leading two men to their seats in the nose bleed section of the stadium. The crowd erupts from the action of the court and a man in a red shirt jumps up and knocks four beers out of another’s band. The beer spills on the seats of the two men being led up by the usher. One of the men says to the usher, “It all cool”, but the usher directs them to front row seats where they sit by an attractive woman and are offered free Heineken beer.

What about the guy who has his beer spilled. This guy had to walk down to the concession stand, stand in line and pay a premium price for the four beers, walk back up the stairs to his seat only to have the guy in the red shirt knock them out of his hand. The usher ignores this man altogether and plight. Is the man who had the beer knocks out of his hand less important that the two men just arriving at the arena? I guess he is less valuable to Heineken.

There is another beer commercial, I believe that it Miller Beer. The truck driver enters the stands at a horse track and he is mumbling about the people who are at the track to be seen. The driver walks into the box seats and starts re-boxing the beers out of the ice. The driver then states that these are beer is going to the people who desire them and he starts handing them out to people in the grandstand.

I do not know about you, but where I am from it is called stealing when you take from people who paid for a beer and give it to people who did not pay for them.
Is miller beer saying that they value some customer over others? Why would you value people who will drink your beer if it is free over people who may have bought their beer but may not drink it?

drink your beer if it is free over people who may have bought their beer but may not drink it?
The there is the Sprint commercial that place at the court room during a divorce hearing and the judge is a lumberjack. The verdict is for joint custody and the commercials shows the cutting everything in half including the house, painting and evens the family dog.

Based on the commercial, can you turn in a phone cut in half without penalty?