DJ Chuang from the Leadership Network has always been a valuable resource for me in terms of facts, figures, and cool asian-style (of course, the most important one is the last one).
In this video DJ shares how in the last 3 years there has been a large growth of Internet Campuses:
My guess is that figure will double in the next year; I’m putting it down.
What do you think?
[HT: DJ Chuang]
A good bud wrote this EPIC blog post (with an EPIC-sized title) the other day titled “Why Willow Creek and Saddleback are Losing Influence While North Point and LifeChurch.tv are Gaining Influence.” It’s a doozy but well worth a read.
It made me think about how one can really measure “influence” and “effectiveness” in terms of online. I know that one could easily drum up specific targets that are all-but assumed in the Christian space (like # of salvations, etc), but that’s not the only thing one could measure (but perhaps it’s the most important? I don’t know.).
It’s a good question to ask though as more ministries jump online because eventually everyone sits down and begins to ask those hard questions and unfortunately there are not many readily-available (and easy) answers.
For North Point, we are interested in helping people grow in their relationship with Jesus Christ; everything else falls under that, and if we’re headed in that direction, especially from an online perspective, I think we’re doing ok. Of course, how does one measure “growth” with Jesus Christ?
Gotcha.
[Image from Dirk]
I’ve been looking into email marketing and email campaign applications and software and realized that I really don’t know of many of the new apps that are out there.
I found CampaignMonitor to be a favorite among designers, but wanted your ideas and suggestions…
So, what are you using? What have you found to be successful? Are you still using email campaigns for your organization?
I’ve been recently investigating better ways to measure one’s effectiveness in terms of Twitter and my return on investment. I’ve been doing this not just for myself but more specifically for North Point Online‘s account, @NPOnline.
PeashootApp.com came up on my radar and I’ll be honest, it looks pretty darn good. It’ll help you grow your audience, measure your return on investment, track your conversions and goals, and more, all in real-time.
Yum.
It’s relatively affordable as well. I’d think that any business (and church) interested (and committed) to using Twitter as a core part of their execution and strategy would want to leverage something like this.
I’ll let you know if I dive in, and please let me know if you do the same.
Here’s a video overview as well:
A very interesting question, right? If you “perform” the functions of a typical pastoral visitation or any other functions generally outlined under “pastoral care” in an online setting, does it count?
William Vanderbloemen ponders this question about his use of Facebook with a parishioner who was in the ICU while he was in another location. He chatted briefly and had a good, worthwhile interaction.
Is this legitimate? Perhaps another questions might be is it really effective?
What’s your take? Is Social Media Pastoral Care “good?”
[Image from Patricia]
Got any web-based/digital superstitions? I got this idea from SoulPancake’s blog today and thought it was an interesting topic to bring to the web-space.
I know I have a number of fears, some more rational than others (actually, a lot of them are just plain dumb), but superstitions…?
Got any? Share them.
[Image from TWCollins]
A silly prayer perhaps but curious nonetheless. A parallel question also might be something like Goodmanson’s: “Would Jesus have a Facebook Profile if He was here today?”
Apparently these questions (and more) are going to be asked at the Christian Web Conference coming up in a few months:
The Christian Web Conference is designed to equip individuals with the vision, knowledge, and relationships that are necessary in order to be thoughtful practitioners and consumers of developing web technologies.
Sounds pretty exciting.
I’m not going to be able to make it this year but I hope they have some live-streams going. Next year, perhaps, they’ll also have some programmers and/or developers in the lineup of speakers, because passion and experience does not necessarily mean expertise.
It’s not a bad thing to be reminded that it’s not the how, the why, the what, the when, the where… but the who. And I don’t think that we can ever be too explicit about that.
Thanks Brad Abare for a good reminder this morning. I’ll take that with a little cream and sugar.
When was the last time you got too wrapped up in tech and forgot the guy who ultimately made it?
I’ll go first: Yesterday.
[Image from Pensiero]
This quick [embedded above] 2 minute video features Mark Zuckerberg, the Founder of Facebook, sharing how the now extremely-large site started humbly working off a $85 a month server.
It doesn’t cost that anymore.
What’s nice is that church websites, in terms of hardware and servers, are even cheaper now. What a wonderful luxury! What surprises me though is how many ministries are paying far too much for their hosting than they need to be spending. You can start on a humble (and very effective and scalable) server and then grow from there.
What are you paying for your ministry/church website and hosting? Can you be doing better?
A very common conversation that many have in the social media and social networking space is about how amazingly-brilliant this and that individual are in terms of social media and social networking and how it’s because they have lots and lots of profiles here and there (and everywhere) and how they use this and that application/service and how they use it all the time.
Experience does not necessarily mean expertise.
Along the same lines is a similar conversation about how “passionate” someone is about social media, social networking, and all that mumbo-jumbo.
Passion does not necessarily mean expertise.
For example, I’m a very ‘experienced’ and ‘passionate’ basketball player and fan: I love the game, I love to play, and I’ve been playing it for as long as I can remember. But, there is no one on the (sane) planet that would ever call me an expert, and I would never self-proclaim expertise either. In fact, I don’t even know all the rules to the game!
But, I’m really experienced at playing basketball and very passionate about how fun the game it, etc., but unfortunately God didn’t give me the skills to be very good at it (I can dribble, but I certainly can’t shoot… and I can’t dunk cause I’m a small asian man and I don’t have the “ups”).
This principle applies, generally, to social media and social networking. So, what does this mean? It means:
What would you add? Does this resonate with you?
If you’d like another professional perspective, check out Owyang’s post as well here.
[Image from TCM]
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