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I get a lot of questions about how churches can use social media. Almost 100% of the time, the person basically wants to be taught a new technique that will help them use a tool like Facebook to attract new people to their church. Generally, I bristle a bit at the idea that social media’s usefulness for churches is all about attraction. Thus, I tend to not give out many how-to’s. Instead, I try to focus on getting churches to re-engage with their story and help them use things like social media to tell that story. However, I have a simple idea that I want to share in hopes that some church will give it a try and let me know how it goes.
If your church is like most churches, you probably have a significant number of people that barely use email and will most likely never use anything like Facebook. Does that mean that those folks have no role in social media for your church? I don’t think so. They will just need a little help. “Where will that help come from,” you ask? I’d be willing to bet that your church is also very likely to have a social-media-engaged population that is right under your nose. Maybe it is the youth group or some young adults? Whoever it is, I’m certain their are at least a few people in your congregation that are using things like Facebook. Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to get those folks together.
I’m certainly not suggesting that the youth group teach the elders how to blog or set up a Facebook profile. That will go nowhere quick. However, what if, on a couple of Sundays, a time was set up for story-sharing and faith-listening. What if the young people were given an assignment to ask some of the older folks in the congregation about meaningful moments in their faith life? Those youth or young adults would then be responsible for sharing what they learned on the church’s Facebook page or blog. The older folks could, in return, listen to the faith stories of the younger folks and provide their reflections of what they learned to someone who could post them to the social media space as well. With just a Sunday or two’s worth of work, enough stories could be gathered that the church could post one a week for a few months.
Sure, this idea is not completely fleshed out, but maybe that’s okay? What I like about it is that it encourages different generations to really listen and engage with each other’s faith stories. I also love the fact that, by sharing them on sites like Facebook or the church’s website, it invites the world to participate in that “faith listening”. To me there is no more powerful way to introduce your church to the world than through the stories of your faith. How much better is it when you can also more deeply introduce yourselves to each other?
Could your church do something like this? What ideas does this post give you about ways to engage multiple generations through social media? Am I way off?
Will Boyd is owner of 3 Story Church, a church web and social media firm that is focused on helping churches tell their stories. He has worked with Sojourners Magazine, the Disciples of Christ Historical Society, Goddard College, the Disciples Divinity House at Vanderbilt, and others. Will also recently finished a bachelor of arts degree from Goddard College that focused on the role of new media and social technologies in the world of sustainable marketing. Will lives in Seattle with his wife, a Disciples pastor.
Photo: StarMama (Creative Commons license)
I’m not known for being an optimist. In person, I can be a little sarcastic, ironic, and cynical — and the people who know me also know that’s part of who I am. They “get” me — at least I hope they do.
But in the realm of social media, I’m discovering, sarcasm sometimes doesn’t play as well. No one can see the arched eyebrow,or the quizzical look, or hear the inflection of irony in your voice. There’s no context – just your comment standing out there, all by its lonesome. Sometimes, it still works, but sometimes, it doesn’t.
Now, that doesn’t mean that you have to suddenly craft a whole new persona for Facebook and Twitter — one where your updates are nothing but “Chicken Soup” platitudes. As I wrote a couple of months ago, it’s important to be yourself on social media. But being yourself doesn’t mean typing the first remark or response that comes to mind.
One good bit of advice that I’ve seen floating around is to balance the negative or critical with at least 10 times more positive remarks, tweets, and updates. Social media can build up, support, encourage — but it can easily tear down, crush, and undermine. I don’t have any ready-made criteria for deciding to post something or not (if you do, please share it). Just stop, think — and if you change your mind, you can delete it.
Sometimes, just like in the ‘real world,’ an apology is in order too.
What do you think? How can we make social media a positive space? When is critique, irony, or negativity okay?
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Rebecca Bowman Woods is news and website editor of DisciplesWorld.
You can follow her on Twitter.
As many of you may know, I had the great privilege of presenting at the Church 2.0 resource group at the 2009 General Assembly of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). It was a great time, and I hope those that were able to attend got something out of it. I do realize however, that there were some folks that attended who left a bit disappointed. While I spent my time discussing how the changes happening in social media are changing the church, some people simply wanted to know how to use Facebook. Unfortunately, in a setting like the General Assembly resource groups where everyone has a different experience level and different needs, those types of how-to discussions are nearly impossible to have. On the other hand, the how-to’s of social media tools are certainly important.
Just yesterday, my wife brought home a back issue of The Christian Century which had a great article that begins to bridge the gap between our discussion at the General Assembly of how social media is changing church and how churches can use tools like Facebook. In “The church on Facebook“, Lenora Rand does a great job at showing how, rather than being an advertising tool designed to draw new people into the church building, these social media tools are allowing churches to live their mission in new ways. I won’t recap Rand’s article here, though I do suggest reading it. What I will do is provide 3 simple ways (not techniques or strategies) for how churches might think about “being church” on social media tools like Facebook.
1. Evangelism
A church’s Facebook page can be a great evangelism tool. Quite simply, everything that happens at the church should also be posted on the church’s Facebook page. However, just like evangelism doesn’t end with the minister, Facebook evangelism doesn’t end with the church’s Facebook page.
Every Facebook page, group, and event has a button that allows that information to be shared. Those members of your church who are already using Facebook already have lots of friends that aren’t members of your church. By simply getting church members to use that share button to share the events and happenings of the church with their friends, Facebook truly becomes social media. As I discussed in the Chruch 2.0 resource group at General Assembly, it is the sharing that makes these websites social. Having a Facebook page is good for a church. Having a Facebook page where the church members share the information and content with their friends is evangelism.
2. Outreach
In any communication, listening is usually way more important than speaking. I think the same thing can be said of church outreach. If we as churches want to be relevant, we need to become better listeners. Social media tools like Facebook can be great hearing aids for our churches. When your church begins to use Facebook, concentrate more on what you as a church can learn about people, both inside of and outside of your church, than on how to attract people to come to your church. Ask questions and listen to the answers. As Rand’s article illustrates, find out who your church can be praying for. You might be surprised how much more powerful it is to engage people in community rather than broadcast information AT them.
Of course, just like with evangelism, while this kind of outreach can be done through your church’s Facebook page, it is often best done through the members of your church who are already on Facebook. A church with a Facebook page can be engaging. A church whose members are actively engaging others is a church that is truly reaching out — whether on Facebook or not.
3. Worship
If you think that worship can only happen between 11:00 am and Noon in your church sanctuary, then Facebook and social media may not be roads your church is ready to go down. However, if you are willing to get creative, social media tools like Facebook can provide great opportunities for your church to “be church” in radically new ways.
What if your church held an online Bible study by creating a Facebook group? Church members could invite their friends to participate whenever it was convenient. Some folks might not ever walk into a church building simply because they are invited, but they might just be willing to stop by a Facebook group when they have a minute and check out what their friend has been telling them about.
Consider providing short devotionals on your church’s Facebook page. How cool would it be if different members of your church posted a short weekly or daily devotional to Facebook based on that upcoming Sunday’s lectionary text?
Be creative and try new things. You never know what might be the thing that will provide a space for worship to someone inside or outside of your church. After all, isn’t that what church is all about?
I completely understand the desire we all have to find a simple tool that will make the job of attracting people to our churches easier. However, social media is not that tool….and that really shouldn’t be our goal. The real work is not getting more bodies into our pews on Sunday morning. The real work is connecting with God and God’s children in real and meaningful ways, and that work of forming relationships with each other and with God is no different or easier than it has ever been. Social media tools like Facebook don’t do the work for us, but they do give us new spaces in which to do our work. They give us new spaces to “be church.”
Will Boyd is owner of 3 Story Church, a church web and social media firm that is focused on helping churches tell their stories. He has worked with Sojourners Magazine, the Disciples of Christ Historical Society, Goddard College, the Disciples Divinity House at Vanderbilt, and others. Will also recently finished a bachelor of arts degree from Goddard College that focused on the role of new media and social technologies in the world of sustainable marketing. Will lives in Seattle with his wife, a Disciples pastor.
I just spent a week in Grand Rapids at the United Church of Christ’s General Synod. I had the opportunity to write for the UCC’s news team and was asked to cover some interesting topics and activities: Rep. John Conyers’ visit to Synod to talk about health care reform, youth mission projects in the community, interviews with several youth who participated in the UCC’s Sacred Conversations on Race, resolutions on the global food crisis and the Accra Confession, and immigration reform.
How should Twitter be used during meetings and conventions? Photo: aflcio2008 (Creative Commons license)
I also observed how people were using Twitter during the convention, and how the UCC news staff participated and included Twitter in convention coverage.
Using Twitter during conventions isn’t new. People who are attending will often agree on a hashtag (a word or a combination of letters and numbers preceded by #) to include in meeting-related tweets. This makes their posts easy to find using Twitter’s search feature (type in #gs27 to see all UCC Synod-related tweets). Some Twitter applications allow more sophisticated tracking of hashtags, and alert you when someone Tweets using the hashtag — UC News director Gregg Brekke uses twhirl, and his laptop would beep and display every #gs27 tweet as soon as it appeared on Twitter.
Gregg and the UCC’s communications staff did their own Tweeting from the @gdbrekke and @unitedchurch accounts. They also gave others’ Twitter efforts a boost by retweeting interesting tweets. And Gregg included several Twitter users’ comments in the UCC’s daily, 4-page convention newspaper, in the “Overheard” section.
Having just bought a new Blackberry and equipped it with Twitterberry, I came to General Synod ready to Tweet myself (@rebeccawoods). Previously, whenever I went to an event, the sheer difficulty of tweeting from my old mobile phone limited me to a few Tweets per day. Posting anything from a non-qwerty keyboard was a pain, and I couldn’t see if anyone replied to me, sent me a direct message, or retweeted anything I’d posted until I got back to a computer with internet access. It almost wasn’t worth the trouble.
This time, having upgraded, I had to contemplate new questions about using Twitter during an event:
How much to Tweet? Normally, I post 2-6 times a day. This is what those who follow me are accustomed to. I might be able to get away with a slightly higher volume during the convention, but not much. I’ve unfollowed folks who post too much, and to me, more than 10 times a day (15 if you’re really interesting) is too much.
What to Tweet? Few people following me are from the UCC, and many don’t know anything about it. So I began by letting people know what I was doing: going to cover the United Church of Christ’s General Synod. I think I included a link to the UCC’s Synod site, in case someone wanted to check it out (I hope I included a link — if not, that was a missed opportunity). I also tried to tweet about things that might be of interest to others: getting to meet Conyers and journalist Ray Suarez, links to articles, etc. Not too much insider stuff, although some of it was unavoidable.
What not to Tweet? There were some great speeches and sermons, but I only posted one line from one speech. I probably could have done more. Often, in my opinion, those don’t translate well. There’s just something about being there. Same with worship. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with tweeting during worship, per se, it’s just a question of whether you immerse yourself in doing it, or take a step back and tweet about it. It also connects with others who are there, experiencing it with you…but not so much with those who are on the outside. I also chose not to tweet during discussions or interviews, or to pass along the myriad comments I overheard in bars and restaurants. The most fascinating part, to me, was reading what people posted during business sessions and particularly, discussion of resolutions. A protest broke out after one vote, and I was in the newsroom watching the proceedings on closed circuit TV. The cameras, of course, didn’t show the action. But people in the convention hall were tweeting about it!
What are your experiences with Twitter and conventions or meetings? Do you have any rules or advice?
Here are a few links:
From Chris Brogan, social media expert extraordinaire, 27 Things to do Before a Conference. [Some of these might seem like overkill for a meeting like General Synod or the Disciples’ upcoming General Assembly]
From Mari Smith, Ten Ways to Tweet from Live Events [scroll down past the stuff that is related to the Social Media Summit
To see how a conference becomes a year-round community, log on to Twitter [if you have an account] and search #sxsw.
John Lydon mosaic by Ed Chapman. Photo: dullhunk (Creative Commons license)
“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” – Ecclesiastes 1:2b (NKJV)
Anyone who’s using social media and has tried to talk with someone who’s not using it about why you use it has undoubtedly encountered the perception that social media is an exercise in narcissistic navel-gazing. And yes, to a small extent, they’re right — Twitter and Facebook and Friendfeed and YouTube are populated by people sharing the minutae of their lives — sometimes in earnest, and sometimes, tongue-in-cheek. [IMO that’s part of the beauty of it–check out this application that picks up all the Tweets with the words “love,” “hate” “think” “feel” and “believe” in them and then tell me you don’t agree].
What I often sense behind the “social media is vanity” objection is that the person objecting understands that the walls between one’s “public” and “private” image have been torn down. And rather than trying to reconstruct those barriers, people have decided to go out and play in this in-between space.
Yep, that’s a little frightening — more so if you’re a prominent leader in your local community, in business, in the church, or in some other sphere. There’s the “public” you, and the “private” you, and you’ve worked hard to cultivate your public image. You want people to respect you, and venturing into social media feels a bit too much like that recurring nightmare of standing in front of the crowd to deliver a big presentation or sermon, and suddenly realizing you forgot to get dressed that morning.
Social media experts are up on this, and they’re ready to help. Do a Google search on the words “build personal brand” and you’ll get lots of good links. While the idea of building a personal brand is not new, there are plenty of people with excellent (and free) advice on how to do this in the dawning age of the public/private sphere.
If I could choose one bit of advice, though, it would be this: Just be yourself. Don’t become paralyzed by the fear that you might accidentally reveal a political preference, or a detail or habit or like or dislike that will suddenly cause your carefully cultivated image to crumble. If you allow fear to be the litmus test for every Facebook status update, blog post, or Tweet, you’re doomed from the start. All you’ll be doing is building a “personal bland” — a vanilla version of yourself that stands out even more in the colorful realm of social media.
This doesn’t mean you should let it all hang out, of course. Use your best judgment, know that you’ll make mistakes, and learn from them. The fact that your athlete’s foot is acting up may be TMI, but people won’t be shocked if you tell them you hate folding laundry, or that you have a favorite TV show. Posting your favorite ice cream flavor might elicit some “me too’s” from the crowd, and (I promise) it won’t damage your credibility.
As long as it’s not vanilla.
Photo: TheGiantVermin (Creative Commons license)
Confession: I’m not a fan of crowds. I’ll do just about anything to avoid them. Mostly I don’t like the physical aspect of crowds – the ever-present threat of having my toes stepped on, catching an elbow in the kidney, or of simply being wedged together with people I don’t know.
Another reason for avoiding crowds is the crowd mentality — the tendency for emotion and action to become magnified and transmuted. If you’ve ever seen a bar fight or been to a rock concert, you know what I’m talking about.
This same tendency exists on the Internet, where “buzz” often trumps believability and we lose the combination of reasoning skills and intuition that would make us say “bullpucky” if we heard or read the same thing from a single source. We ought to take anything buzzworthy with a grain of salt (just one example: the thousands of “Obama is a Muslim” rumors that made the rounds before the election).
I like a lot of things about social media, but Twitter and Facebook can amplify our human tendencies to behave like lemmings headed toward the proverbial cliff. What’s new with social media is that you can actually watch it happening.
Over the weekend, the Twitterverse was abuzz with news (marked with the #amazonfail hashtag) that Amazon.com reclassified as “adult” some of its books and other materials, especially those dealing with LGBT concerns and feminism or even having gay fictional characters. Not only that, but Amazon removed their sales rankings. Media outlets including the Wall Street Journal picked up the story, and so did bloggers (see here,and here). From what I understand, Amazon’s actions meant that reclassified materials (including Augusten Burroughs’ memoir Running With Scissors and an autobiography of Ellen Degeneres) would not show up in Amazon’s search results. This is a big deal – with the number of items Amazon carries, not showing up on the first or second page of search results can mean a significant drop in sales. Your product is rendered all but invisible unless someone knows exactly how to find it.
Now, no one at Amazon is denying what happened. What’s troubling is how quickly an explanation for this turn of events spread – an explanation that’s maybe a little too convenient. More or less, the explanation is that Amazon secretly caved to pressure from the Religious Right and reclassified/deranked these materials to stave off a boycott, and keep the fundamentalists at bay.
It’s hard to believe Amazon would cave to this type of pressure, while completely underestimating the backlash not only from the LGBT community, but from the hundreds of thousands of grown ups who deplore censorship and value freedom of expression. Amazon is a business — a publicly-traded company. They’re not immune to making mistakes, but I doubt they’d make such a stunningly bad business decision. Much as I’d like to know what the heck happened, I just can’t buy this explanation. It’s way too simple.
Amazon called it a “glitch” but the Twitterverse and blogosphere have mostly dismissed this explanation (and it IS lame — Amazon should give people a little more credit and a more detailed explanation, even if it’s incomplete).
Prediction: as the long arc of this story develops, look for alternative explanations that are complex but make more sense, like this one from tehdely at Livejournal, who worked for SixApart when something like this happened to them.
To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, for every problem there’s a solution that’s neat, plausible, and wrong. And in this case, I can’t believe the solution is to blame and flame Amazon. Let’s resist the buzz and put the outrage on ice, at least for a few days. The truth will eventually come out. Until then, pass the salt.
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Rebecca Woods is news and website editor for DisciplesWorld magazine.
Photo: Luc Legay (Creative Commons license)
When we began the Social Monday blog feature a few weeks ago, our goal was to feature Disciples involved with social media and social media marketing. Some offered thoughts on how social media’s distributed network model might give new insights on how to be the church in the 21st century. Others gave helpful how-tos for getting started in social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, and blogging.
We heard from author and podcaster Christian Piatt on Church 2.0: Spider vs. Starfish, parts 1, 2, and 3. Social Media pro and consultant Will Boyd, of Seattle, asked “Can Twitter Save Your Church’s Soul?” And John E. Smith, director of the Strategic Learning Group, discussed how social media makes unseen connections and networks tangible in his post, The Visible Web. And after introducing the feature (which debuted as Social Friday its first week and featured a brief overview of Twitter), I wrote about Pandora Internet Radio (have you tried it yet?) and the ”25 Things About Me” Facebook phenomenon (I know, you’re thinking, that was SO two months ago!)
We’ve decided to continue the feature, but here’s the catch. We want to hear from you. What are you questions, when it comes to social media? What have you tried, what’s working, what’s not? What lessons can you share with the rest of us?
You can post your questions and ideas in the Comments section at the bottom of this posting, or email them to news AT disciplesworld DOT com. Want to guest blog for us? Email a short proposal (3-4 sentences) on what you’d like to write about.
John E. Smith, guest blogger
Much is being written these days about the power of the Internet and Web 2.0. Social media has become the new “place to be” and you can hardly breathe without hearing about blogs, wikis, Twittering, podcasts, and other tools of the online trade. The idea of a company without a website now seems quaint.
The ability to function in an online environment is quickly becoming a baseline competency for everyone, rather than the realm of the lucky few. You can find almost anything or anybody online, if you know how. Will Boyd’s recent NewsMuse blog posting was an excellent overview of the uses of social networking media tools.
Who knew “Google” was a verb? Who knew I could “tweet”? Who knew I would someday want to?
It’s a wonderful, brave new world out there in cyberspace . . . so why am I nervous?
I may have figured it out. While watching President Obama’s inauguration, I was keeping an eye on the update comments made by people as they watched the broadcast on the Facebook website: Obama on the left side of the computer screen and a scrolling list of online remarks on the right side, coming from computers or cell phones as events unfolded in Washington. At the height of Obama’s speech, over 4,000 comments were being made every minute. They ranged from poetic to sublime to mundane to just silly, and everything (even Aretha’s hat) was fair game.
I was “boggled” by the amount of information I was receiving. It was both fascinating and disconcerting. This was a relatively new sensation for me, so I considered why this was happening. Finally, I got it: The Internet makes it all visible.
Thousands of people having their personal reactions to an event, and I got to see it all. There was too much going on too fast to take in and react to, other than the general sense of so much thought and communication occurring instantaneously. While I got a general idea that many people were happy, I lost most of the nuances and details that I would have “caught” if I were with a few friends watching on TV.
This is the online world. There are an untold number of discussions occurring right now, complete with comments, rebuttals fair and not, on almost any subject you can name. Google a topic like “leadership” and the sites, documents, blogs, and videos pile up like grains of sand on the beach. Much of this discussion and thinking was going on before, but we could not see it, like we do now. The Net makes it all visible.
We may have tended to think that what we experience in our personal “bubbles” is what is going on. We can no longer indulge that fantasy. Life is loud, multi-faceted, and way too complex for anybody to have a complete handle on.
Hence my question: Is this visibility of human interaction created by the online world positive or negative for us?
I’m no techie, just a person trying to “muddle through.” Questions like this are important to me as the world continues to change at an accelerating pace. So I asked a form of this question on LinkedIn, a business networking site, and received numerous responses from intelligent and thoughtful people from all over the globe.
One of my favorite came from Andrew Thorn, a leadership consultant and all-around Good Guy, who said:
“I could not help but think about God as I read this question. He has the ability to hear and see everything all at once. Did you see the movie Bruce Almighty? Bruce had a hard time dealing with life because he got to experience God’s omniscient capability …. Somehow God can see and hear everything and still be present. That is an amazing thought.”
Yes, Andrew . . . an amazing thought! As I move into a world my parents could not have imagined, it’s also a comforting thought. No matter how complex our lives get, no matter what new technology or challenges come to us, God is able to cut through the noise and distractions to hear each of us, no matter how many are praying, or whether we tweet, blog, talk or just think, our messages will get through . . . all of them.
Now I feel less nervous about tackling podcasting.
John E. Smith lives in Maryland Heights, Missouri and is a member of Webster Groves Christian Church. He welcomes invitations to connect on both LinkedIn and Facebook (free registration on both sites is required to connect). His blog is called A Matter of Strategy and you can follow his fledgling tweets as @JohnESmith on Twitter.
The world is aflitter over Twitter. The micro-blog service seems to be popping up everywhere in our culture lately. From television news coverage of the Presidential debates to the first reports and images of the crash of U.S. Airways flight 1549, Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets have been getting a lot of attention and press. All of this attention, in my opinion, is absolutely warranted. These new social technologies are allowing people to connect with each other and share information in ways that we could have never imagined 20 years ago, and this has major implications for churches.
When people are connecting, no matter what over, there is always opportunity. Corporations, our government, non-profits, and churches are all logging in to the social media world to try and tap into this wealth of warm bodies to win over as new customers, donors, and even parishoners. Personally, I have used Twitter to contact customer service about my cable television service, blogs to obtain information about everything from news to products to candidates, and my favorite podcast helps me decide which new gadget is my next “must have.” My own church, University Christian Church in Seattle, uses Twitter, podcasting, and blogs. Even Disciples World is using Twitter. With all of the new possibilities new communications tools like Twitter have to offer, social media is the answer to our churches evangelism and outreach prayers, right? Not exactly.
While these tools are certainly wonderful, they are not magic pills to reach a new generation of people. Setting up a Twitter account or Facebook page for your church will not automatically make your church attractive to the 20 something crowd. Contrary to what we may wish, there is no tool or program that will make people want to come to our churches. What makes people want to be a part of our church communities is the same today as it was 2,000 years ago — storytelling. When we are able to tell our story (i.e. God’s story) to the world both honestly and relevantly, we tap into the same power that drew and continues to draw so many to Jesus. It is from the telling of our story (who we are, why we are here, what we are like, etc.), not the technology itself, that tools like Twitter derive their power for churches.
So, how do churches go about telling their story using these new tools?
First, churches need to become good listeners. These new social media tools are all about conversation. As we all know, the key to being a good conversationalist is being a good listener. These new tools are not like radio or television where the goal is to broadcast a slick message to as many people as possible. Instead, these tools focus on two-way communication. Often times, these conversations are messy, silly, hard…anything but slick and easy. They are, however, quite often meaningful. Communicating like this outside of the church walls can be a new experience for churches, but it is not impossible. If a church wants to begin using something like Twitter, the best thing for them to do is to start by seeing what other people and organizations are talking about and how they are talking about them.
Second, churches need to be willing to play. Jesus told us that we must become as little children. Social media offers churches a great opportunity to do just that. When a church enters the world of social media, it will make mistakes. It will do and say things that seem silly at times. That is okay. In order to be a good teller of its story, a church needs to be willing to speak like a human and not like an organization…and humans look a bit silly from time to time. So go out and make mistakes…it is the best way to learn.
Finally, churches need to be honest as they tell their stories. A church that tries to be something it is not will not enjoy much success in the world of social media. If people sense you are not being honest, they will stop listening to you. You don’t have to be flashy or cool to be relevant and engaging. Your church’s power to attract people doesn’t lie in cleverly crafted marketing copy or cool graphics. Instead, it lies in the power of God. Trust that.
Social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, podcasting, or blogs are nothing to be afraid of for churches. While the technologies may seem new and strange, they can be learned. The heart and soul of these tools, though, is nothing new to churches. Churches have been telling their stories for a long time now. If your church chooses to use some of these new tools (and I hope you do), use them bravely and honestly. Have fun with them. And, above all, tell your story well!
Will Boyd is a social media and new media producer and consultant. His company, Will Boyd Media Solutions, specializes in helping faith groups and non-profits navigate the world of social media, podcasting, and technology to tell their stories to the world. He has worked with Sojourners Magazine, the Disciples of Christ Historical Society, Goddard College, the Disciples Divinity House at Vanderbilt, and others. Will also recently finished a bachelor of arts degree from Goddard College focused on the role of new media and social technologies in the world of sustainable marketing. Will lives in Seattle with his wife, a Disciples pastor.
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