There are a range of reactions to the current situation from the “digital elite”. Some are canceling their accounts. Others giving up and opening up their privacy settings to be as public as possible.  I personally have not taken any action – yet – but I am starting to understand the concerns.

We all will have to make our decisions about what we will do with our personal Facebook accounts. But a bigger question that concerns me much more is how churches and ministries respond. Many ministries (such as Lifechurch) have begun to heavily commit to using Facebook. I am working with two organizations right now who are considering heavy work inside of Facebook.  I, myself, keep this blog as a page on Facebook. But if you do heavily use Facebook, what does that imply? If the “medium is the message”, are we then giving implicit approval to the use of Facebook and its terms of service? And if our use of Facebook encourages people to create accounts and/or begin using Facebook more, should that concern us?

So, will this all blow over?  Just as Facebook was starting to be seen as more important than Google, will its decline begin? What do you think? What will your church or ministry do?

Also – on a related note – I’ve finally got a real “username” for my Lessons From Babel Facebook page: http://facebook.com/lessonsfrombabel.  Check it out – and if you’re not a fan, what are you waiting for?

At the conference, David’s focus was on the use of Google AdWords and Facebook ads as a ministry tool.  Jesus.net is one of the biggest Google AdWords users and has had tremendous success.  In this post, I just wanted to summarize some of what he shared with us. Remember, this advice is for those looking to pay for ads via the Google or Facebook networks, not necessarily general SEO advice:

• All ads should be in line with your ministry’s focus and budget. They should be strategic!
• 94% of Google searches use multiple word phrases, not single words. If you are going to buy ads, focus on multiple word searches.
• You should take advantage of negative keywords as well, so you can better target your audience without being too general.
• Use all the tools provided, including: Google Insights for Search (http://google.com/insights), Google Keyword Tool (http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal).
• Customize your ads by location and by ministry, if applicable.
• Facebook advertising is a bit more expensive than Google, but it is much easier to target your ads.
• Facebook requires an image with their ad: make it relevant!
• Facebook is relationship-based, so your ads should draw people into a relationship. Link to a fan page or something else within Facebook that the user can interact with.
• When doing these types of ads (Google/Facebook paid ads), you should plan on doing a lot of testing first to see what works!

What is your advice for AdWords or Facebook ads? What has worked for you?

I wrote last week that I believe we are now in a “post-website” world, where the organizational website, while important, is no longer the centerpiece of how we interact online.  Continuing to think along these lines, the question then becomes: what should be the main focus of our online communications and interactions?

My answer to that question is not simple. I believe that the best way to interact with our target audience is to build relationships with them online.  And one way to build relationships with them is to insert ourselves into the “streams” of information that they consume everyday.  To have the maximum reach possible, we must understand the streams that our potential audience wades through on a daily basis and become part of it.

Streams can be found in many places online:

• Facebook status updates: get your content on people’s wall. Depending on your target audience, this may be the #1 way to get into people’s streams. Facebook is now the #1 site that people spend their time on.
• Twitter: get your message into Twitter clients, whether that is text message, Tweetdeck, or Twitter.com itself.
• Email: many people still use email as their primary “go-to” tool. While this may seem “old-school”, it also can be powerful and effective for certain target audiences.
• RSS reader: the more tech-savvy out there (and those who prefer to read) probably use an RSS reader to aggregate content into one place. Be sure you make a feed available.
• Mobile apps: as mobile devices become more and more integrated into our culture, you will want to make it easy for people to get your content delivered to their mobile device.
• Search results: if people are looking for you, can they find you?
• Wikipedia: many people go to Wikipedia first when trying to find information. It is listed as a “top 10″ web brand. Wikipedia results almost always show up in the first page of search results.

This idea is nothing new, marketers have been thinking in these terms for decades. Billboards, television and radio ads, door-to-door salesmen, telemarketers and multi-level marketing companies all understand this. Our potential “customers” will not come to us, will not engage with us, unless we go to them first.  But of course, many of these methods have an extremely negative connotation: we may not want our ministry to be identified with telemarketing or advertising.  So do we forget the idea of streams and just build a great website, hoping that it will get visited? No.

As I stated in my answer to my initial question: the main focus on our online communications and interactions should be to build relationships. To do this, you need a carefully crafted strategy that is research-based and encompasses a variety of online methods.  Some ideas on how to do this include:

• How will your ministry start your relationship with someone online? Will you post ads asking them to “subscribe” or “follow” you? Will you look for recommendations through friends?
• Each “stream” should be carefully identified and its role in your strategy examined.  The number of content items you place into a stream should be enough to get noticed but not so much that it is considered “spam”. Remember: users can choose to stop getting your stream.
• If you choose to have multiple streams (and you probably should), work to find tools that allow you to manage them from one place. For example, if you post to Facebook and Twitter, you can link them together so that only one update needs to be done.
• Don’t offend – if it is not appropriate for your content to be delivered through one of these methods, then don’t! Remember, each stream has unique pros and cons. Some are more public than others. Examine each thoroughly.
• Who is going to manage all of this? Don’t think it will run itself! Someone on staff should have this in their job description!

This is a topic that I will be continuing to work through as I put together my book. I would love your feedback! What other “streams” exist out there? How are you engaging them? What are some of the differences you’ve found between different streams?

As part of my preparation for my book on strategic online ministry, I am working my way through some of the latest books and other materials on the topic. As I review these for myself, I will also share my thoughts about them on this blog.

When I first started reading The Church of Facebook by Jesse Rice, I was a bit cynical. The title seemed a bit corny and so many people have said so many things about Facebook already that there couldn’t be anything new to say. Besides, any book written about a specific technology is going to be outdated a year after it was published, and since this was published in 2009, I figured it was already going to be out of date. But, as I began working my way through the book, I was pleasantly surprised in many ways by this book and would recommended for reasons having nothing to do with finding out about Facebook or online ministry.

The book begins with a quick history on the rise of Facebook, in which the author compares the impact that Facebook has had to other technological breakthroughs in modern history. I did find it a bit hard to buy the comparison of Facebook’s impact to that of air conditioning or London’s Millennium Bridge. The discussions of how quickly Facebook’s popularity rose and the founder’s plans for the future can be found in many places. But for the uninitiated, it provides a good background on the popular social networking tool.

The book then continues with a discussion of the human need that sites like Facebook are filling. Facebook, according to Rice, provides us with an environment much like home: it provides us with a sense of control, it gives us a sort of “family”, and it is place to put our “stuff” (at least our digital stuff).  We are drawn to Facebook because it surrounds us with the things we are the most comfortable with.  It also provides us the ability to stay connected with more people, introducing us to the concept of “hyperconnectedness”. How many of us are “friends” on Facebook with people we would never have kept in touch with otherwise?

There are disadvantages to all this connectedness as well, and this is where Rice begins to set the stage for the main message of this book.  Facebook is designed to appeal to our “naturally adolescent assumption that the world is watching, and offers us a spotlight, a microphone, and a stage as vast as cyberspace from which to act out our assumption.” When we update our Facebook account, we are assuming we have an audience, and therefore each update is made in order to get a reaction. This turns our friends into an audience and turns us into performers. In fact, if we thought no one would ever read our updates, would we post them in the first place?

Rice’s prescription for all this is to remind us of the life of Christ. Specifically, he recalls the story of the woman at the well, and brings those lessons into his ideas for how we can utilize Facebook in a new way:

Rice then goes on to lay out a plan for how we can use Facebook to imitate Christ by being intentional, humble, and authentic.

This brings me to my biggest criticism, and perhaps also my biggest praise: This book is really about something much bigger than just Facebook. This book is about how we live our lives online. We must be intentional about our online lives. And this starts by being intentional about our “offline” lives as well! We must understand that everything we do online is recorded and kept…forever. We can use our online selves as a way to demonstrate Christ to a lost world.  My biggest issue with the book, then, is that it seems to only focus on Facebook! The suggestions it makes for how to live our online lives apply equally as well to any other social technologies as well.

For those of you interested in how you can be intentional, humble, and authentic online, I recommend The Church of Facebook. If you like, you can buy it from my Amazon bookstore and support my work! You can find out more about the book and read the first chapter at Jesse’s site here.

I encourage you, if you haven’t already, to become a fan of this blog on Facebook and to share it with others who are doing ministry online as well. I also encourage you to interact with my posts and let me know what you think.  Thanks for your support and I look forward to good discussions on online ministry.

If this is true, then, maybe we shouldn’t be spending so much of our time becoming experts in a new technology until this evolution has happened.  In his paper (and subsequent book) “IT Doesn’t Matter“, Nicholas Carr makes the case that organizations should not be “first movers”, but should instead let others take the chances and then, once the best practices for using a specific software package are discovered, jump in and begin using it. This minimizes risk and allows the organization to focus on their business instead of the latest technology. Many would argue that ministries should follow the same pattern: focus on your ministry and don’t jump in to a new technology until it has stabilized and reached the mainstream. In many ways this makes sense: for those ministries who put a lot of effort into Friendster and now are wishing that they had waited and put this effort into Facebook instead, this sounds like a great idea.  And maybe it is for some ministries.

But ministries aren’t corporations trying to improve the bottom line. We don’t want to be risk-averse: in most cases running a ministry is a risky enterprise.  We need to go where people are, and, if possible, we need to go where they are going to be!  By moving to social media tools early, we learn how to use them, we can innovate new solutions by experimenting and then, when the tool becomes popular we are already there. And if, like Friendster, the tool only has a short popularity before something takes it place, we can learn from our experience there and use that experience to quickly move into the new environment.

So if you feel that learning how to use Twitter for your ministry is something you should take a “wait and see” attitude on, you risk not learning how to utilize a “micro-blogging” platform for your ministry. And even if Twitter is dead a year from now, the experience of learning how to use it will better prepare you for whatever comes next.  If you are wondering if you should get your ministry into Second Life, again I answer that you should at least begin working with it enough to understand its implications.

But, you say, you don’t have enough time or people to do all of this! Well, no ministry can do everything, but you have to have a strategy in place that drives your decisions.  This strategy should help you understand who you are, who you are trying to reach, and what methods will be used to do this. I will write on strategy in an upcoming post – right after I give my Internet ministry strategy workshop in Indiana later this week!

I am part of an online message board that discusses using the Internet for evangelism.  A recent message there highlighted a blog post that highlighted the use of online social networking as a tool for evangelism. Specifically, the post shows how Facebook could be an excellent way to interact with Muslims in other countries and to answer their questions about the Christian faith. The post is quite interesting, and he makes several good points. In fact, I do believe that Facebook can be a GREAT tool for reaching others for Christ.  But as I said in a previous post, we must be as open and authentic as we can when doing this. And this is where the ethical questions comes up.

The author of the blog (he goes by “Blogger”) puts a list of instructions on how to get on Facebook and interact with a Muslim, and includes the following:

You can sign up for a free account by following the steps at http://www.facebok.com/. (Please add a “o” to make “book”.) You may consider not spelling your name exactly as it would appear on your passport. When you are asked which “network” you would like to join, type in the country that the Lord has placed on your heart.

So, in order to share the gospel of Christ, we should change our name and act as if we live in a different country? According to Facebook, if you join a regional network, it should be associated with a place that you live (from the help):

To join a regional network, you simply have to let us know where you live on the “Networks” tab of the Account page. Just enter your city, and we’ll show you the regional networks closest to you. You cannot change regional networks frequently, so please be sure to pick the right one to join.

In fact, Facebook makes is quite clear in their “terms of use” that they expect all users to be providing accurate information about themselves:

In consideration of your use of the Site, you agree to (a) provide accurate, current and complete information about you as may be prompted by any registration forms on the Site (“Registration Data”); (b) maintain the security of your password and identification; (c) maintain and promptly update the Registration Data, and any other information you provide to Company, to keep it accurate, current and complete; and (d) be fully responsible for all use of your account and for any actions that take place using your account.

I know that many missionaries go into “closed” countries under false identities and share the gospel covertly, so is this any different? Besides possibly getting banned from Facebook, the problem I have is that if I have built up a relationship with someone in, say, Saudi Arabia, who believes I may be living there and then they find out that I am an American but just chose the SA Facebook network so that I could better reach them, would they feel betrayed or misled?

One of the principles of Facebook’s design from day one was that people will be willing to share more information about themselves with those in their own networks. In fact, it is the default setup in Facebook to keep your information more open to those in your networks and more hidden from those not in your networks. Some may say that by falsifying your network setting, you are in fact allowed to see more information that was intended.

So am I way off base here? Is it a problem to share Christ this way? Should missions organizations encourage their missionaries to do this? What should our responsibility be when we create online identities about ourselves?

But are any missions organizations giving this a focus? I honestly don’t know…but I’ll find out!