Comments (3)

By Richard Hamilton, January 23, 2009 12:22 pm

Businesses are constantly blurring the lines between advertising and social media. I have despised a lot of these campaigns. Think Dr. Pepper and Chocolate Rain. I don’t mind advertising through social media and I certainly don’t think it hurts the authenticity of the medium. Myspace did that.

One that recently caught my attention was the Angry Whopper Facebook App. Users boot 10 friends and get a free Angry Whopper. I thought it was genius. Facebook did not. They axed the app saying it was inconsistent with Facebook’s values. I thought the idea was genius.

Social media is a constantly changing beast with virtually limitless potential for good.

How is your church using social media? (Maybe I should ask, is your church.) Some churches have opted for rip-off christianized versions of social media, like GodTube.com or GodSpace.com. Others have come to the game late. I remember starting up a xanga site for my youth group months after all my students had started their xangas (which happened to be right around the time myspace took off). The tragedy of being late is that you end up chasing every trendy format around the web 2.0 (2.5, 3.0, whatever) with limited results.

Twitter is still strong. It just passed Digg in popularity. I just downloaded the e-book “The Reason Your Church Must Twitter” and am planning to review soon. I twitter. A lot of my friends twitter. But if your church is just now figuring out twitter, it may be too late. By the time you get the hang of it, it may not be the social media giant it is today.

So, where does the church fit into the social media scene?

Comments (3)

By Richard Hamilton, November 12, 2008 4:25 pm

The American Humanist Association is the most recent religious group to enter the arena of mass marketing. Just in time for the holidays, they have released an ad campaign much like the one backed by Dawkins in London, which was highlighted on epicdialogue a few weeks back. In a recent interview with FoxNews, Fred Edwords, a spokesman for the AHA said, “Our reason for doing it during the holidays is there are an awful lot of agnostics, atheists and other types of non-theists who feel a little alone during the holidays because of its association with traditional religion.”