Comments (4)

By Richard Hamilton, July 7, 2009 10:11 am

Came across an article by Scott Berkun (via CollideMagazine.com) berating social media for over-hype and and the proliferation of noise. And it hurt (a little). Scott makes some excellent points and his post is worth reading for anyone invested in social media.

But, for all its woes and shortcomings, there are two things that make today’s social media important. Its interactivity and its real-timeness. Scott acknowledges the first of these, but I believe the real power of this “movement” lies in the freshly broken ground of real time. Twitter has always existed here, but now Facebook has joined them. OneRiot allow us to search in real time. Twitter, Digg, Delicious, and Flickr all have real time Meta searches. Real time makes social media!

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?