Street to the Seat

The world of social media, and all the new websites and technologies that keep emerging and ending up on the cover of Newsweek, is moving at such a rapid pace that it can be hard to really nail down what is going on. Here is my attempt to boil social media and the revolution that is happening on the internet down to three words.

Epidemic

You have probably heard the term “viral” surrounding the web, especially in relational to a quickly spreading video on Youtube. A consistent dynamic of the social media platform is that it has created an environment that is incredible at creating epidemics. In a white-paper written by authors Jeremiah Owyang and Matt Toll and publish by Dow Jones they described the epidemic of social media this way:

“Author Malcolm Gladwell describes it this way in his best-selling book, The Tipping Point: ‘Ideas and behavior and messages and products sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious disease, they are social epidemics.’ … The social media platform truly leverages the Web’s massive scale to carry information – fact or opinion – globally and instantly.”

Almost every website you visit allows you to share an article or fact with a friend from an interface on their site. And even more specifically, tools like Facebook or Twitter, are ‘one to many’ tools that can allow the spread of information broadly and quickly within a specific network of people or to the world.

Participate

An even stronger theme on the internet is having everyone participate. Comments on blogs, writing a comment on someone’s Facebook profile other than your own, and even Wikipedia. The internet is now breaking down the traditional cycle of how information is communicated from the broadcast model, where they speak and we listen. Now every fact, every event, and every article can be weighed in on instantly by anyone.

The industry term for this in social media is “user generated content”. This relates more specifically to people writing their own opinions through blogs, publishing their photos through Flickr or Facebook, and putting their own videos out on Youtube. The hierarchy of distributing content has been flattened, and anyone can now publish directly through and to the internet.

Conversation

The strongest theme of all is the conversational element of the internet that has emerged. The same white-paper from Dow Jones says;

“Understanding the power of blogs … is important, as social media refers to a form of communication where two or more individuals can participate in a discussion, virtually in real time, with special emphasis on more people – “engaging in conversations” in a very literal sense. Social media is two or more directions in communication, using simple tools that are as easy as e-mail.

From the 10,000-foot view, social media enables individuals to connect to each other and then share using easy-to-publish tools. (Creating a blog from scratch can take less time than creating a cappuccino.) The visible discussions that result can include customer experiences, both negative and positive, about any particular brand”

With conversation comes relationship, but relationships in a new and dynamic way. Community is now being redefined beyond geography and towards affinity. But the potential to connect and communicate in authentic conversations through these tools is very real.

The social media platform is not going away. And as these new technological and sociological realties being formed on the internet become mainstream (if they haven’t already) how your church and ministries use them will become as important as your weekly church bulletin, if not much much more.

(Guest Blog Post by Tony Steward)