Tag: Facebook

Are you a Christian and into Social Media?

If you are, and you have thoughts about how to use Facebook and Twitter in ministry – then you should totally head to Venn Theology (which I assume you all read already) and comment on this post. Do it.


Image: Well timed Dilbert from Church Crunch.
In a week or two I’ll start not cross promoting so much because I’ll assume you’ve all been made aware of it. But in the meantime, I like this post a lot. And I think it’s important and I’d like to make it a bit of a resource post when I have conversations with friends who are in ministry and are thinking about how to use “social media”… I have those conversations often.

December 11, 2010

Facebook Email… umm… I mean “New Messages”

So, Facebook have announced their gmail killer that isn’t really a gmail killer at all – but a new fangled way of controlling what you read and who you read it from. The new “messages” accounts (which include an optional Facebook email address) will be rolling out in invitation only beta for a while. If you want an invite you should go to this link (if you haven’t already).

I’m the kind of guy who wants Facebook and Google mining all my data so they give me more relevant ads and less ads about Christian dating and bad coffee. You might not be…

November 16, 2010

Life through the lens of Facebook

A cool video, with a few swear words (in text).

November 15, 2010

Data Visualisation: Break up season

A guy named David McCandless put together some data visualisations for a talk he gave at TED. You can watch it here.

But in my opinion, his really interesting research went into this graph of when people experience relationship break downs based on mentions of “break up” or “broke up” in Facebook status updates.

Here’s the graph (posted on Information is Beautiful):

He also put together this cool “if Twitter was 100 people” visualisation that I’ve posted before (I think)…

And this one on caffeine and calories, that I know I have posted before.


(Bigger)

Data visualisation is the future of communication – Christians need to think about how we can use it well to communicate the truths of the gospel.

November 14, 2010

Joining a gang

I appear to have joined some sort of gang. You can join it too (if you’re on Facebook). It’s called “Don’t Stare at Bears Carrying Pineapples” – and it has an important message to share with the world.

Join up. There are badges.

And weird bears with pineapples (though this one does appear to be a koala).

November 13, 2010

PrayerBook

My little sister reviewed The Social Network, and the way Christians use Facebook for her church. It’s a good review. Even if the audio makes her sound a little bit like a robot.

The review closes with some practical ways to use Facebook as Christians. You should listen to them. But this video seems as good as an intro I’m going to get to introduce this idea I’ve been using for a while to the whole world without seeming overly pious. I hear a lot of Christians bagging out Facebook because it “doesn’t promote real relationships” or it has replaced time with real people or because it promotes superficial relationships over deep ones.

I don’t get it. Sure. It can. It can be artificial. But any type of relationship can be artificial. Wrong use doesn’t negate right use. And let me suggest a cool right use. You know how Facebook randomly throws up faces on your profile in the left hand column? Wouldn’t Facebook be a more productive place, spiritually speaking, if every time you logged on to your profile you prayed for those six people. I don’t do it every time I log on – but I try to, and it has been a great way of remembering to pray for people you don’t see that often.

November 8, 2010

Social media strategies for churches

I was talking to some people yesterday about churches and social media strategies. I’ve followed a bunch of people who are involved with ministries, and churches, and promoting ministries and churches on Facebook. And I think they’re doing it wrong… but what would I know.

The wrongness was the spirit of my speculative posts “Has John Piper ruined Twitter” and “Has Mark Driscoll ruined Facebook” – most churches rely on their minister posting pithy one line updates to Facebook and Twitter generating an echo effect where people retweet and like and share to their hearts content. Which is only part of the social media story, and is usually pretty lame. Blowing one’s own trumpet is never cool. No matter how good your faux-hawk is, and no matter how much you’re able to make grown men cry in your sermons. Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate Desiring God and Mars Hill, and Piper and Driscoll, and I think they contribute greatly to the global church and use the Internet brilliantly. But you’re not (unless they’re reading this) Piper or Driscoll. And if you’re a minister of a church and you’re filling my Facebook or Twitter news feeds with how much God is moving in your church, or how great your sermon was, or how great it was to spend time with your church family  – and that’s all your doing – then that’s really not why I’ve added you Twitter in particular, or probably, being really honest, on Facebook. I’ve added a person, not a ministry PR machine. I want your reflections on stuff, and if you’re a minister then that will doubtless include stuff about your church and your ministry, and how much you love your people, and how awesome they all are… but please, don’t be a two dimensional caricature. You are not your church. Get a Facebook page for your ministry – but even then, don’t be lame about it. Don’t just spam people with endless things about how good the stuff they were already at was, and don’t spam them with things about upcoming events.

Social media is social. It’s meant to be interactive. The best social media strategies do what is called “seeding” content. You don’t blow your own trumpet. You get others to blow it for you. If you run a church Facebook account, or Twitter account, why not ask a bunch of tech savvy people at church to post their own thoughts, advertisements, photos or reflections to TwitFace? Why not ask people to live tweet certain events, or go home and serve their brothers and sisters by posting the thing that struck them most about the sermon. Don’t do it yourself. Why not get people to post photos of your events, get them to make them their profile pictures. Get them to talk to each other (that’ll show up in the news feed of mutual friends). Get them organically promoting events and inviting their friends personally, rather than sending out some form email.

Social media works best when it is social media – when people are participating in the production and distribution of content – rather than just contributing to the noise side of the signal to noise ratio on the internet. People’s inboxes (in all virtual forms) are so full of rubbish and spam – why not contribute some meaningful content and interactions to their lives instead of just trying to be an ever present presence online.

And if none of that seems to work, if you can’t get people saying stuff about your church online, then maybe consider this webcomic (via ChurchCrunch)…

November 1, 2010

Infographic: What your profile picture says about you

In infographic form.

Via Geekologie.

October 30, 2010

Putting Social Media in its place

I love Facebook. I love blogs. I understand Twitter. And for years I grappled with how to use them professionally. I read through a bunch of posts on Facebook’s blog the other day and I’m blown away by how powerful the platform is, and how much potential it has to connect people.

But it can never. ever. replace proper face-to-face relationships. And if the extent of your “online marketing” strategy is “be on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube” (and I’m sick of seeing those logos crop up on ads for obscure things as though I’m more likely to buy a car if it’s got its own Twitter account) then your strategy is dumb. It’s part of your brand. And it’s good to be contactable, and to be getting exposure, but if there’s one thing the stupid breast cancer awareness campaigns of this week, and earlier this year, show – it’s that for many people – Facebook “activism” and “marketing” have supplanted the real thing.

Malcolm Gladwell took a stab at this idea in a recent piece for the New Yorker. Some interesting quotes:

Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools. Facebook warriors go online to push for change.

This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information.

The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.

Some of this grandiosity is to be expected. Innovators tend to be solipsists. They often want to cram every stray fact and experience into their new model. As the historian Robert Darnton has written, “The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the Internet.” But there is something else at work here, in the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.

Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”

He makes this point about social media “activism” and where it works, citing an example of a webtrepreneur, Sameer Bhatia, who found out he had leukemia but knew nobody with the same bone marrow type.

Bhatia needed a bone-marrow transplant, but he could not find a match among his relatives and friends. The odds were best with a donor of his ethnicity, and there were few South Asians in the national bone-marrow database. So Bhatia’s business partner sent out an e-mail explaining Bhatia’s plight to more than four hundred of their acquaintances, who forwarded the e-mail to their personal contacts; Facebook pages and YouTube videos were devoted to the Help Sameer campaign. Eventually, nearly twenty-five thousand new people were registered in the bone-marrow database, and Bhatia found a match.

But how did the campaign get so many people to sign up? By not asking too much of them. That’s the only way you can get someone you don’t really know to do something on your behalf. You can get thousands of people to sign up for a donor registry, because doing so is pretty easy. You have to send in a cheek swab and—in the highly unlikely event that your bone marrow is a good match for someone in need—spend a few hours at the hospital. Donating bone marrow isn’t a trivial matter. But it doesn’t involve financial or personal risk; it doesn’t mean spending a summer being chased by armed men in pickup trucks. It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise.

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.

Facebook is all about people salving their consciences by appearing to care – it sets a really low bar for participation – like posting “where you like it”…

“Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. The Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition has 1,282,339 members, who have donated an average of nine cents apiece.”

And “Social Media Evangelist” Anil Dash agrees with him. With some reservations. One of them is that there are some things, when it comes to communicating a message and bringing about change, that the virtual world just can’t supplant.

Who are the “they”? It’s not really clear. But even as someone who’s had an “evangelist” title in the past, I don’t come to refute Gladwell’s strawman argument. His point is that today’s social networks are fundamentally unable to drive the sort of social change that fueled upheavals like the civil rights movement. I agree; As I said last year, Facebook often enables politics of the sort that convinces college kids that changing their middle name on a website is a form of activism. And the idea that the uprisings in Iran were driven by Twitter or any other social media is clearly refuted by realities such as Hossein “Hoder” Derakhshan, the father of the Iranian blogosphere, being sentenced to nineteen years in prison. The traditional method sit-in and picket-in-the-streets form of protest is clearly a failure online.

There’s also a world of difference between using social media platforms to coordinate action, and using them to stage action or report on action. Facebook is terrific for organising events – social and political – and it is a wonderful way to disseminate information – but it is not a place to stage a protest or to bring about real change. Participating in “awareness raising” on Facebook can not be the only string in the activism or communication bow. It just won’t work. It doesn’t bring about change in the world – it aids the process.

That is all.

October 12, 2010

Contains “adult content” (according to Facebook)

I like Facebook. I’m not one of those bandwagon jumping player-haters. I don’t get antsy about privacy issues because my philosophy is that if you don’t want people knowing you do something you probably shouldn’t be doing it. But today, Facebook went too far. They sent me this, and removed two of my photos.

“You uploaded a photo that violates our Terms of Use and this photo has been removed. Facebook does not allow photos that attack an individual or group, or that contain nudity, drug use, violence or other violations of the Terms of Use. These policies are designed to ensure Facebook remains a safe, secure and trusted environment for all users, including the many children who use the site.

If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit our FAQ page at http://www.facebook.com/help/?topic=wphotos.”

These two photos.

So I sent them a complaint letter. This is what I said:

Dear Facebook Staff and Mr Mark Zuckerberg,

I love Facebook. I have been an enthusiast at both a professional and private level – defending you to my peers and potential advertisers (I worked for a membership based community service group that helped small businesses promote themselves). I think your platform is incredible. I even read your Facebook blog, and despite thinking that all night coding sessions that produce exciting new products sound a little bit nerdy I don’t tease you for it, even on the inside. Even in the face of your continued redefinition of the concept of privacy I’ve defended you and decried the decisions of my friends who have turned in their Facebook badges and ridden off into the sunset.

You were helpful when my account was once hijacked by a hacker. Which was great. So I have faith that this letter will be passed to the appropriate people and acknowledged by something other than a form letter.

But Facebook, overnight (my time, Australian time), you removed two of my photos and issued a warning. Now, I’m sympathetic to the cause of keeping nudity and smut off your servers. I think other parts of the internet could learn from you at that point. I’m an evangelical Christian currently attending seminary. If anyone is going to be in your corner, wanting to keep your service “family friendly” it’s me.

Let me explain what it is you deleted and why I think that decision was wrong.

I recently took part in a study tour in the historically significant archeological sites of Corinth and Ephesus – cities that are significant not only because they contain remnants of the Roman empire, but because they feature in the Bible (there are even books named after letters sent to the churches in the cities). The archeological sites are of interest to Christians and to Roman history buffs. Categories many of my friends fall into.

The photos removed were from a museum in Corinth. They were deemed significant enough to be placed on display at a museum run under the authority of a team of academics and archeologists from the United States and Britain – not for their merit with regards to Christianity (they don’t have much to say about the death of Jesus in the place of sinners for their free forgiveness, and his resurrection and lordship of all things). The subjects of the photos, various casts and sculptures of parts of the human anatomy, were from a temple in Corinth where sick or sad Corinthians would place sculptures representing the physical malady they were praying for. First century Graeco-Roman culture was quite sexually driven, so their prayers were often along those lines. Obviously. Based on the sculptures. So the photos were in no way titillating, and they were clearly from a museum exhibit. I’m wondering how it was that they were considered “nudity” when they were clearly made of stone and not part of a body?

Yours Faithfully,

Nathan Campbell (username nm.campbell).

Now, some of you might think there’s an inconsistency between me suggesting that innuendo laced status updates shouldn’t be put on Facebook by Christians lest they cause their brothers to stumble, which was one of my arguments against the breast cancer awareness campaign (though not the thrust of that post). If you can’t tell the difference between appropriately talking about sex, and turning sex into cheap laughs and lewd talk then we can talk about that offline, over a boxing match, in which we participate.

October 10, 2010

Awareness raising is overrated

All publicity might be good publicity. But publicity is not created equal. And if you think telling me where you leave your purse when you get home in some sort of innuendo laced update on a social media platform I’m going to have the following reactions:

a) feel mildly uncomfortable.
b) think “what is going on here”
c) google the repeated phrase.
d) go “oh, that’s stupid.”
e) not think positively about your cause.
f) not donate.

There’s a world of difference between good awareness raising – where the campaign is linked with the cause in the public consciousness (like Jeans for Genes Day and even Movember), and campaigns based on being cryptic and excluding people not in the know.

Awareness as the “ends” of a campaign is ridiculous. Awareness is a means to an ends in PR. Campaigns should push people towards the end, not just stop at people being “aware.” What good is being “aware” of breast cancer? It’s not much good for the sufferers, or for those who are genetically predisposed to suffering.

See Stuff White People Like for a more biting summary of this problem than I am able to produce. Basically raising awareness is the stuff people do when they are not interested in actually doing something.

“An interesting fact about white people is that they firmly believe that all of the world’s problems can be solved through “awareness.” Meaning the process of making other people aware of problems, and then magically someone else like the government will fix it.

This belief allows them to feel that sweet self-satisfaction without actually having to solve anything or face any difficult challenges. Because, the only challenge of raising awareness is people not being aware. In a worst case scenario, if you fail someone doesn’t know about the problem. End of story.”

This campaign is as dumb as the bra colour one from January. I saw it defended, when a friend dared to question it, as “awareness raising” which is the window dressing of real action.

Newsflash: Everybody is aware of breast cancer, most people have lost a friend or loved one, or know somebody who has. If you have the public profile of breast cancer you can actually just ask people for money. Set a funding target. Go for it. Have a telephon (is that how you spell the fundraising thing done by the telephone?).

Here’s the message that is apparently doing the rounds… tell me how anybody thinks this is a “success”…

“About a year ago, we played the game about what color bra you were wearing at the moment? The purpose was to increase awareness of October Breast Cancer Awareness month. It was a tremendous success and we had men wondering for days what was with the colors and it made it to the news. This year’s game has to do with your handbag/purse, where we put our handbag the moment we get home for example “I like it on the couch”, “kitchen counter”, “the dresser” well u get the idea. Just put your answer as your status with nothing more than that and cut n paste this message and forward to all your FB female friends to their inbox. It doesn’t have to be suggestive. The bra game made it to the news. Let’s see how powerful we women really are!!!”

Let’s see how powerful we women really are? I’m sorry. If the “power of women” is using Facebook to get on the news then somebody tell our Jules, or Hillary Clinton, or any other successful woman. Most of the PR industry are women, if power is about media attention then those women are the gatekeepers. And if anybody in PR thinks this campaign has had a serious effect on the image of breast cancer – other than trivialising it – then I’m yet to meet them.

Furthermore, if women need to resort to sexual innuendo to be powerful then there’s something vastly wrong with society. Seriously. I thought we’d moved past that.

That is all.

UPDATE: Funnily enough, a corollary, a perfect foil, a Facebook awareness campaign that works (in my opinion), is going on at pretty much the same time. The “RU ok” campaign is a perfect example of an awareness raising campaign that actually benefits the purpose it promotes. It encourages people to ask their friends if they’re ok – and it raises curiosity without trading on double entendre or outright crass innuendo.

October 7, 2010

Facebook Demo-info-graphic

Is your mother on Facebook? Old people are signing up like never before…

September 18, 2010

Privacy infographic

I’m not paranoid about the data Facebook, Google and Apple are gathering about me. Because I put too much stuff out there voluntarily for that to be overly concerning, and I don’t do anything I wouldn’t want the world seeing anyway. But some people find this sort of thing scary.

From here.

September 11, 2010

History in Facebook Updates

What would events in world history look like in Facebook updates? Sadly these are just one block image and not separate ones. But they’re very funny. From Cool Material.

September 3, 2010

How to identify awkward social interactions

You’ll find it easier to get away from the old school “friend” you didn’t really like all that much next time you bump into them thanks to this, the four levels of social entrapment, identifying these situations is half the battle. Sometimes they happen at supermarkets, so you can probably start ordering your groceries online to avoid that one, sometimes they happen while you’re sitting in a cafe – which is why I make my coffee at home. Unfortunately, that leads to people dropping around unannounced, just for coffee.

Conversely, if you would like to catch up with your old friends in a meaningful way (and Facebook isn’t “meaningful” or “catching up”) then there are some typically awkward conversations to avoid.

There is, of course, the fifth social entrapment in church circles – which involves obligation, it looks like going to working bees and joining committees, and awkward conversations with new people where you ask them what they do and then talk about the weather.

Perhaps a solution to all of these problems is to work at having interesting things to say and to ask people about that extend past the weather, last night’s dinner and your job.

h/t Mikey.

September 3, 2010