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 I endeavor to stay on top of all the latest news and opinion surrounding online ministry, I have turned to Twitter as a resource. By “following” those who post about Internet ministry, I can keep up to date with what they are thinking and get the latest news and opinion in near real-time. I have a love-hate relationship with Twitter, which you can read about here, but do feel that there are some ways it can be used as a positive contributor to my work. Since I also follow a multitude of other people besides those who tweet regarding online ministry, I have created a Twitter “list” of those who fall into the Internet ministry category so I can better track them.

And you can follow it too: the list name is:  ”@DaveBourgeois/online-ministry“. If you have suggestions for others to be on this list (including yourself), let me know in the comments. My only criteria is that those in the list use Twitter to post primarily about online ministry. I will be actively managing this list, so if someone on the list tweets mostly outside of this topic, they will be removed.

Here’s the current list right now:

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!

Last week, Cynthia Ware came to my Internet Ministry class here at Biola.  Cynthia shared with my class her vision for the Church and new media. Especially interesting was her presentation of “New Media Values”, which really gave the class, and me, perspective on how our culture and technology are shaping each other.  I won’t present those values here, I will leave that to Cynthia (write that book!).

One thing Cynthia said during her time leading discussion was that understanding new media is critical to understanding what the Church will look like in the future. Just as understanding how the medium of “print” led to the development of a Paul-centered church (thank you, Shane Hipps ), so new media will shape the church through the influence of its values.

Which leads us back to Twitter.  Over the past couple of weeks, I have been back “tweeting” and “getting tweeted” (that just sounds dirty somehow), and I am still ambivalent about it. And the video I posted from the Daily Show didn’t help. But our class discussion with Cynthia led me to make a decision that I would continue to move forward using Twitter, but this time very intentionally. Here are some overriding principles I have come up with, based upon my own experience and Cynthia’s “New Media Values” (write that book!):

• I need to determine exactly “who I am” when it comes to Twitter and then respond accordingly. I don’t think I can be “@DaveBourgeois the Christ-follower, husband, father of six, researcher, teacher, church elder, Mustang driver, book reader, pizza eater, and watcher of The Office” on Twitter. Though some of those “following” me may want to know my feelings related to all of those subjects, most do not. Which leads to the next point.
• I need to find the best people to “follow” and follow them.  Just as I won’t be Twittering about all aspects of my life, I only want to follow those whose “tweets” are those I will value. For me, that means, for the most part, those who post about how the Internet and new media are being integrated into ministry.
• I need to tweet regularly about what I am doing in the area I have chosen. My default inclination is generally to think “why should someone care what I think”. But I need to respect those who are following me and let them in on what I am doing and thinking in the area of Internet and new media research. This will open up conversations and keep my line of thinking in the public view. This also encompasses several of those “new media values” (write that book!).
• Finally, I need to decide the appropriate place for Twitter vis-a-vis my blog. Some things need more space (such as this post) and they need to be blogged. Some things can be put out as a tweet. And some should have both!

So there you have it. I will be continuing to use Twitter, for a while at least. If this strategy does not produce fruit, then I may re-think it down the road.

Finally, a coule of post-scripts to this. First, this decision has really made me decide that there is going to be a split between how I use Facebook and how I use Twitter. Facebook will be relegated to personal relationships, Twitter for professional.  I will be turning off the Twitter to Facebook updating and the importing of my blog posts into Facebook. The second is that I see Twitter as just the first of many of these SMS technologies. It may not survive competition from newer services, just as MySpace is losing to Facebook.  Yet it is still important to understand how to effectively use it. More on that in a future post.

Find me on Twitter.

Twitter offers real time access to some of our most important leaders’ and newspeople’s least important thoughts, 140 characters at a time. It’s no wonder young people love it, according to reports about young people by middle aged people.

Cynthia – save us!

Note: embedded flash player below – if your browser does not support, watch it on Hulu.

So I signed up last year and began subscribing to messages from a few people, but the novelty wore off quickly and I pretty much disconnected myself.  It seemed that all I got were messages from people telling me that they were having a latte at Starbucks or that they hated the weather or other commentary that was just not interesting to me.  When I spoke at the Internet Ministry Conference last fall, there was unbounded enthusiasm among much of the “ministrati” (that is, the ministry digerati) for using Twitter as a ministry tool (though there was also a minority of Twitter haters as well). I tried to understand their enthusiasm, but I just couldn’t. To me, Twitter was just another honk in the vast sea of Internet noise.

Last week, Cynthia Ware visited my Internet ministry class.  She has been a big fan of Twitter for quite a while and sees its potential for ministry.  Though I don’t (yet) share her views, I think a discussion of Twitter’s capabilities for ministries is important, so I invited her to speak in my class next month on just that topic.  I asked Cynthia if she had a resource that could help me understand some Twitter “best practices”, and she pointed me to a new e-book on Twitter called The Reason Your Church Must Twitter, by Anthony Coppedge.  This book explains what Twitter is and how it can be used in a church setting.  It does a good job of explaining the fundamentals of Twitter as well as giving specific examples of its use.

After reading the book, and further discussion with Cynthia, I am going to withhold judgment on Twitter and re-evaluate it.  In fact, I do have one theory about Twitter that I will put to the test over the coming weeks: Twitter could be the breakthrough tool that will bridge the online/offline gap. Every organization that plans on using the Internet for ministry must deal with how to bring the online and offline worlds together. Twitter, with its ability to integrate with mobile devices and web sites, may be the tool that finally allows us to bring those two worlds together.

So, I am re-starting my use of Twitter and giving it renewed effort. I have updated my Twitter username to “DaveBourgeois”, I have begun “following” several more people, I have installed a Twitter “gadget” on my home page, I use Twitter to update my Facebook status, and I have installed a software tool called twhirl which is supposed to make Twitter easier to use. I have even put a Twitter “widget” on the sidebar of this blog that shows my latest “tweets” and gives you the option to “follow” me.  I will keep you posted on my thoughts as my experiment progresses, both on this blog and on Twitter, of course!