social media – Page 3

Book Review: Smart Business, Social Business, and its implications for ministry

Smart Business, Social Business is the most technical of the three books I read during our holiday. It’s not for everybody. Where the other two were “vibe” based, and supplied principles, this is stats and numbers driven. Where the other two were conversational in tone, this is didactic, and assumes a degree of familiarity with some business and marketing terminology.

Out of the 85 percent of people who want companies to be present in social media:

34 percent want companies to actively interact with them.
51 percent want companies to interact with them as needed or by request.
8 percent think companies should be only passively involved in social media.
7 percent think companies shouldn’t be involved at all.

The data is clear. Consumers want to have conversations with companies they care about. They don’t want to engage with corporate entities or logos, either—they want real, live human interaction and two-way dialogue with employees. And this can only be achieved with another person.

“One of the worst things any company can do is create a thriving community and then abandon it. Unfortunately, this happens all too often. Before launching new communities, Facebook fan pages, and Twitter profiles, a company must get a firm commitment from everyone involved to continuously engage in these channels. Otherwise, the company will surely be at the center of criticism and will probably be featured in a Harvard Business Review case study titled “What Not to Do in Social Media.””

“An advocate is a customer who talks about a product, service, or brand without being asked to. These customers may or may not be influential in social media, but that doesn’t stop them from talking about the brand and telling others about it.”

There’s some interesting stuff on the cash value of social media followers…

“In 2010, social media marketing firm Vitrue determined that the average value of a Facebook fan is about $3.60 in equivalent media each year. The firm calculated this using a wide range of clients and their 45 million aggregate fans before arriving at the $3.60 annual valuation. A couple of assumptions Vitrue makes up front are that each status update posted by the company generates an average of one new impression for each fan. It also assumes that the brand is posting two updates per day. Finally, Vitrue placed a value on each impression by assigning a $5 CPM, which translates to $300,000 in earned media per month, or $3.6 million annually, for a fan page with 1 million fans. The mathematical equation follows: 1M impressions × 2 posts × 30 days = 60M impressions 60M impressions / 1,000 × $5 CPM = $300,000 $300,000 × 12 months = $3.6M $3.6M / 1M fans = $3.60 The one flaw in this equation is that the $3.60 valuation heavily relies on the fact that the company needs to post an average of 730 status updates a year to reach that $3.60 value per fan. That’s just less than two posts per day, which is extremely high; sometimes overengagement can appear to be spam and can result in a loss of fans.”

And a bit on the amplification that social media platforms allow…

“For example, assume that company A has 1,000 Twitter followers. Every time it shares a piece of content, its potential reach is 1,000. Of course, this number will naturally grow as the company acquires more followers. The reach of the messages will increase exponentially as more followers retweet the message. If one of the company’s tweets gets retweeted 10 times and each of those followers has 1,000 followers, the total reach of that branded message would be the following: 1 tweet × 1,000 followers = 1,000 10 retweets × 1,000 followers = 10,000 1,000 + 10,000 = 11,000 total reach An engaged community that finds value in content that is shared on Twitter is likely to share that content with its own microcommunities.”

The plan this book advocates is fairly similar to that presented by Likeable Social Media.

Create social media policies that address employees’ behavior when engaging online.
Train employees on how to blog, use Twitter, and be conversational when interacting in the community.
Develop a metrics model to measure the effectiveness of employee engagement on the social web.
Find and engage with online influencers and the communities where they spend their time

The first two steps are pretty much described by Likeable. The strength of Smart Business is the emphasis it places on listening to what people are saying online – you can join all sorts of conversations by monitoring when people on Twitter are talking about relevant issues, and even what people in your area are talking about with a tool like Nearby Tweets.

Part of doing social media well online is understanding how people behave online, and what sort of people you want to “empower” or build systems around. The book divvies up people according to how they use the net.

Creators—Create and publish content on blogs, Twitter, and YouTube.
Critics—Post ratings and reviews on websites such as ePinions, Yelp, and CNET. These users also comment on various blogs and wikis and contribute to online forums.
Collectors—Collect content in the form of tags and RSS feeds. They also vote for content on websites such as Digg.com.
Joiners—Join social networks but might not necessarily create or interact with any content.
Spectators—Only consume content. They read blogs, watch videos, read customer reviews, and listen to podcasts.
Inactives—Don’t create or consume any social content whatsoever.

The book also advocates finding advocates who will do the talking about your business for you – or, in the case of ministry, will use the channels you create to share the gospel (and stuff about your church) with their friends.

“Whatever the reason, advocates are vocal, passionate, and unafraid to praise the brand (both online and offline). In some cases, advocates even defend the brand against criticism and negative feedback. And even though they might not have hundreds of Twitter followers, Facebook fans, or RSS subscribers, the conversation with advocates about the brand is always authentic. Why? Because they’re being real and aren’t trying to impress anyone.”

You’d hope that comes with the territory of being part of a church – that should involve a significant level of personal investment.

Like every social media textbook everywhere, Smart Business relies on the premise that content is king – and that producing engaging content is fundamental to any social media success. It makes a distinction between proactive and reactive content (this distinction pretty much applies to all forms of consumer/public relations).

“Proactive content considers all outbound engagement and includes the sharing and distribution of brand-related messages on corporate blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other owned media properties. Proactive content can include product- or company-related announcements, industry perspectives, contest management, and other promotions…”

Proactive content gives you the opportunity to plan. This is something we do at Creek Road, because the service, not just the sermon, is defined by the big idea of the passage, we are starting to think about how we build the big idea, questions, and application, into our use of social media. This little snippet from the book is particularly useful.

“Some companies create just weekly or biweekly editorial calendars. However, it’s good practice to also maintain a six-month thematic calendar that documents and includes upcoming events, holidays, product launches, and other topics of interest to customers.”

Reactive stuff relies on having that carefully defined voice, and being quick to engage with criticism – preferably in a winsome way. It’s also worth reacting quickly to positives too, there are some great case studies in these books where encouraging and affirming people who have taken the time to engage with your product has worked to boost the good vibes involved as the interactions spread through people’s networks…

“Reactive content happens as a result of listening to conversations on the social web and responding when relevant. It can certainly include responding to comments on corporate blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, but it can also entail leaving comments on third-party blog posts.”

Here’s a “slideshare” that goes along with the premise of the book.

Smart Business, Social Business: A Playbook for Social Media in Your Organization from Michael Brito

The author, Michael Brito, writes a blog, and you can also follow him on Twitter. He’s also produced an infographic that might help you think about the web.

This book was harder going than the other two books, but it was pretty useful, especially as a companion piece providing some of the technical background and research to support the conclusions the other books assume.

July 20, 2012

Book Review: “Likeable Social Media” and its implications for ministry

I really enjoyed this book. This was actually my second time through (I’d read through it on a previous holiday) – but I wanted to skim over it again having read Platform… its fundamental thesis is that the social media success is tied to being Likeable , which in turn is tied to being a good citizen of the web, giving content away, sharing, and being altruistic in order to win brand loyalty and create ambassadors. So its got some great tie ins with ministry – especially since the gospel should come with built in enthusiastic ambassadors, namely, the church (2 Corinthians 5:20).

“In the beginning, there was Adam and Eve. Eve said to Adam, “You’ve got to try this apple,” and the first marketing interaction in the history of the world had taken place.”

The fundamental conviction at the heart of this book is that word of mouth marketing is the most powerful form of marketing (I agree), but that harnessing word of mouth marketing and even generating it – especially in the age of social media – requires a bit of thought and deliberation, and then an ongoing commitment to being present in a persistent and authentic way.

“Who is better to defend you against negative posters, you or your thousands of happy customers? What kind of company would you rather do business with as a consumer—a company that publicly answers every single customer, or one who seemingly ignores many customers?”

The thought and deliberation happen at the level of thinking about your brand’s personality and the substance or content you aim to share to engage and benefit your audience.

Being authentic means speaking in a language that really represents who you are, but also in a language that resonates with the people you want to connect with – this means, in business, avoiding corporate weasel words or legalise, in the Christian sphere it’ll mean avoiding jargon and in crowd stuff.

You also need to have some grasp of the way each social media channel works, and use that knowledge and the thinking work you’ve put in to figure out a strategy for how you use them (or don’t). I’ve put together something like a social media strategy a while back which has some info about how Facebook works, amongst other useful things, but this book is helpful because it gives you practical homework at the end of each chapter that will leave you with a good sense of how to take your next steps into the world of social media.

There’s some stuff in the book that’s incredibly useful if you’re looking to promote a specific product where you want a purchase decision (which I don’t think you can do with the gospel – there are a few more categories that probably need to be esablished than a Facebook ad or status update can accomplish) – so this advice is relevant for events, or for people who are looking for tips for a small business, there are lots of pearls of wisdom along the way, like:

“Write five sample Facebook updates that combine an engaging question or valuable content with an irresistible offer, and link to your website to buy or learn more. Test, track, and measure the results in order to optimize for future ROI.”

To translate – even when you’re selling something you want to be hooking people with the update so that even if they don’t act, they engage, and including some sort of call to action. And you should experiment till you get it right. This is a theme Platform develops in more depth, I’ll be reviewing it in the next couple of days.

In my experience, and I, at last count, administer Facebook pages for about 20 different churches, events, and businesses, the pages that do this stuff well, and thoughtfully, are the ones that take off – so one page, for a popular drag racing team, has gone from 0 to 7,000 fans in about six months, just by having a well thought out brand, carefully driving people to their page, providing good content, and urging people to share the love and invite their friends.

Here are some examples of helpful “homework” from the book.

1. If you’re a one-person operation or a very small business, write down five things you could say that would seem inauthentic or that sound like marketing-speak to a customer. Then write five examples of how you could say the same messages in a more authentic way on Facebook.
2. If you are part of a large organization, create a plan for how to represent yourself authentically. Recognize that authenticity won’t be easy but that it’s essential. Meet with key stakeholders and management at your organization to determine how you can make communication more authentic across all channels, especially on social networks.
3. If you already have a social media policy, examine it carefully to ensure that it encourages authentic communication, and tweak it if it doesn’t. If you don’t yet have a social media policy, draft one now.
4. If multiple people are responding on Twitter on behalf of your organization, have them sign tweets with their name or initials.

1. Create a social media policy that insists on honesty and transparency as the default expectation. Review with other key stakeholders in your organization what company information, if any, is off-limits and how you can better embrace openness and transparency while still keeping this in mind.
2. If you work at a large organization, determine whether your chief executive officer can effectively use social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook herself to be the ultimate transparent representative of your brand.
3. Closely examine your social media policy to make sure it is aligned with the values of honesty and transparency at its core. If it is not, consider what you could add to help instill these values. Include references to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s code of ethics.
4. Write down three ways you could respond to questions and comments on social networks in a more transparent way in order to further build trust with your customers.

And here are some helpful quotes from the book…

“The formula for ad success is not to link ads to your website or shopping cart but to link to your fan page. Connecting users to your page encourages them to engage with you. They might enter a contest or ask you some questions about products, services, or your industry. They have the opportunity to connect with other people in your community.”

“Also, forget the notion that YouTube is about creating “viral videos” and getting millions of views. Is it possible to create videos on YouTube that will go viral? Sure. But think of the last 10 viral videos you’ve seen on YouTube. Chances are few of them, if any, were created by or for a business. Most of these videos take off organically. Videos that are “produced” don’t tend to go viral. What makes content viral is that very thing that often can’t be produced: the spontaneity of human experience. Even parody videos are based from the initial experience that was captured on video and released to the world, then deemed viral.”

“Many company blogs are unsuccessful because they are updated infrequently, and too often they’re updated with press release-like broadcast material, rather than valuable resources or content. With a blog, you have the opportunity to include longer text updates than you’re able to through Facebook or Twitter, as well as incorporate photos, videos, polls, and other multimedia. You can also tell stories at your own pace and on your own terms.”

One of the central theses of the book, if not the central thesis, is that being successful on the web means being prepared to give away good material in order to build your brand, and goodwill.

I think the great take home messages for people in ministry, or people who are thinking about how to use Facebook for Jesus, is that churches looking to use social media to help spread the gospel, as a way of connecting with people, the secret is in empowering those in the pews to be using your church’s presence as a bit of a call to action in their use of Facebook – we should be encouraging those who are keen ambassadors of Jesus, and members of our church communities to be talking about both Jesus and church in an authentic and engaging way online, we don’t carry the entire weight of producing good content that people will engage with (though our church/ministry pages should be doing that).

There are some interesting ways I’m thinking we could use Facebook advertising spinning out of this book – you could target people who say they’re Christians who have just moved to your area (changed location), you can target friends of friends to invite them along to evangelistic events, you can target people who aren’t Christians to welcome them to your area with the offer of a welcome pack if they like your page, you can target engaged or married people in your area to offer pre-marriage counselling or to advertise a marriage course. Facebook advertising is fairly powerful stuff – which is why it can be insidious when used by unscrupulous people. I read someone I respect greatly who said that the low quality of advertising on Facebook was enough to drive him away from spending advertising dollars, and someone yesterday suggested the inappropriate ads he was receiving were causing a rethink about Facebook’s values – but it’s not Facebook that does this, beyond an algorithm, it’s people using the data and likes you’ve supplied to target you – the key to improving the standard of ads on Facebook is liking more particular stuff (the ads I get are almost exclusively coffee related), and for advertisers – the key is producing relevant ads that might cut through some of the noise of weightloss ads, dating service spruiking, and whatever else you get coming up on your profile.

It’s interesting too that the emphasis on social media success seem to fall around characteristics that are emphasised by Paul as either parts of his ministry, so he has a fairly cross-shaped approach to ministry that emphasises ethos and substance over flashy and impressive stuff, or the modern equivalent. Authenticity. Loving others. Being selfless. Responding to situations that emerge with humility, integrity, generosity, and grace… the guy who wrote this book is basically the most successful social networking consultant going round – and he’s essentially advocating that people behave sacrificially in what they give out online, though he’s doing it with the expectation that it will eventually produce material returns, and we’re expecting that it will build goodwill that will get the gospel a hearing.

There are some great ideas in the book about what sort of content makes good Facebook content and boosts engagement – the ultimate goal is being likeable, and getting people to share the stuff you’re putting out there, which I guess raises a question about how we get people in our churches on board with this and thinking about themselves as ambassadors when they’re online, which probably taps into a bigger issue regarding how we get people to think about ambassadors when they’re offline. Part of authenticity is making sure that the experience people get of our church family is consistent both in the virtual world and the real world.

July 18, 2012

Holiday book reviews

These days, when I go on holidays, I ask for book recommendations on Facebook, download some novels to my iPad, and then spend my holidays discovering the 50 unread books on my Kindle that I bought on a whim, or a recommendation, and haven’t bothered reading yet. Our most recent holiday was a bit like that. I spent some of the weekend reading about the decline of Christianity in America (unChristian), and also about the historical development of American Christianity up to the present (Bad Religion) – both books are analogously useful in Australia (though our Christian heritage is very different to theirs), both have something to say about the way people who want to follow Jesus can operate in a post-Christian world, but I haven’t finished either of them.

I did finish possibly my favourite “How To” book of all time, How to Sharpen Pencils.

Brilliant.

Then, in a possibly award winning attempt to “relax” and “chill out”… I spent most of the weekend reading books about social media and being a better citizen of the internet.

I’m going to post some reviews to these – with some helpful tips and things I’ve gleaned from them, as applied to figuring out how social media can support church and mission in some upcoming posts, but here are the books I read, they range from the practical, to the theoretical, to the technical.

Likeable Social Media by Dave Kerpen
Platform by Michael Hyatt
Smart Business, Social Business by Michael Brito

July 17, 2012

A funny thing happened yesterday: how @CollectiveShout won Twitter (and me)

Anti-sexploitation lobby group Collective Shout does some smart, and necessary work, opposing the degradation of society. They’re like the ACL, only without “Christian” in their name, so not as cringeworthy. And they’re more focused.

Collective Shout cares about such things as logos.

This is theirs.

This is the flag adopted by Greendale Community College in Community.

I can’t look at the Collective Shout logo without being influenced by Community. So I thought I’d be funny. And I dug up a YouTube clip and tweeted:

The marketing people behind @CollectiveShout need to watch this Community clip and rethink their logo: youtube.com/watch?v=Y6oez0…

— Nathan Campbell (@nm_campbell) May 31, 2012
I’ll admit I wasn’t expecting much in response. I was, after all, stirring the pot a little, and mostly just showing off pop culture chops… But I got one. And it was snappy, relevant, and put me right in my place. It was from a real person. They weren’t just toeing a party line.

@nm_campbell seen it mate. you might want to alert the Red Hot Chili Peppers too. Same problem.

— Collective Shout (@CollectiveShout) May 31, 2012

There were a couple more tweets exchanged following this – but I left way more impressed with Collective Shout than I planned to be, this, people, is how you use social media – they actually do a great job on the social media awareness/activism front, so it doesn’t surprise me that they’ve got someone behind the keyboard who is savvy and engaged enough to produce this sort of response to pseudo-criticism.

June 1, 2012

Convergence and Conversation: When the main thing is talking about the thing, not the thing itself

Sacha Baron Cohen has a new movie out, and by all accounts it’s incredibly puerile and terrible. I’m not going to see it. Borat was enough for me. I’ve always had a soft spot for Baron Cohen and the way he used outlandish characters to highlight the outlandish traits in normal people, as uncomfortable as that became. But his kind of under the radar shock humour, luring unsuspecting victims into making fools of themselves, always had a limited shelf life as his notoriety increased. I reckon he actually peaked with Ali G. Who is, for mine, the funniest interviewer ever.

It seems though that to create genuinely funny humour of the type he had become accustomed, Baron Cohen had to create a terrible movie that then became the vehicle for catching people unaware and reproducing some of his shock comedy, in character.

So, we have examples like this train wreck on the Today Show. I’ll embed it. But watch it at your own risk, it’s crude and it’s simply here to illustrate a point. It’s some of the most uncomfortable breakfast television you’ll ever see.

Baron Cohen is maintaining his brand – people will still think of him as an edgy, and funny, comedian who puts people in awkward situations, this time journalists, because of the press circus surrounding the movie. The TV opportunities are now the vehicle for his comedy. I’m no more likely to see the movie because of moments like this, but at least it has generated the kind of response I’m sure Baron Cohen enjoys most. It’s where the art is now. I wouldn’t be surprised if his press appearances become the main reason people buy the DVD version of the movie, so it’s a tactic with a bit of a silver lining.

Here’s how a boingboing review (which contains a vivid description of the offensiveness of the movie in the opening para) describes what’s going on:

“This is what The Dictator was made for; to spew, into the world of the living, the fully-formed obscenity that is Aladeen.

Sacha Baron Cohen’s characters come into their own when they are put into contact with real people—and even chat show hosts are people—because, as Ali G taught us, the embarassing reaction and our own cringing is at least half of the humour, innit.”

This is an interesting theory – treating content creation as a launchpad for something more long term.

As a media strategy it’s not bad – particularly in the social media world where engagement and conversation are the big goals that lead to conversion. The idea is that you develop loyal fans of your brand who purchase your products and become advocates who talk about your product to their friends. You do that by producing content they want to share, or content that gets people talking. And the movie and associated interviews have ticked that box.

This has me thinking a bit about how this principle applies to church communication and social media stuff. I’m doing a bit of thinking at the moment about how the church I’m part of can use Facebook better, and get people being ambassadors not just for our church, but for Jesus, when they’re online (incidentally, there’s a great Church Marketing Sucks post/series on this).

This is one thing I reckon Mark Driscoll does really well. He’s phenomenal not just at scouting out opportunities in the press, but creating them. I have started to wonder if that is why he and wife Grace went so far and were so graphic in their marriage book – for the shock factor. It’s pretty much the Christian equivalent of the Dictator. The book flew up the best sellers list, fanned the flames of controversy around the Christian blogosphere earlier this year (seriously, google it), it certainly had people talking, and Mark and Grace Driscoll have been touring the US on the back of the book seemingly ever since – including this amazing stopover on CNN with Piers Morgan, who’s not a massively successful TV superstar, but still gets around 500,000 viewers a night.

This isn’t all of it – you can read a transcript here. It’s pretty much a mix of everything that’s good and bad about Mark Driscoll.

“MORGAN: But why was — why should it be one rule for her and one rule for you?

DRISCOLL: I think I was selfish and I think I was being a hypocrite. And I’m not going to defend things that I’ve done or said or thought that were wrong. No.

But I do believe — and this is where we’re going to get to Jesus — that he died, he rose, he forgives me, he helps me, and I hope to keep changing and doing better.

MORGAN: But for people watching this, you know, especially younger people, for example. They said, well, it’s all right for you. You know, you had all this sex until you were 19, then you get —

DRISCOLL: Well, it wasn’t a lot of —

MORGAN: Then you got born-again so you had sort of sown your wild oats and then — and then you’ve become a born-again virgin. But for them, you’re trying to punish them and they can’t have anything.

DRISCOLL: Well, I think, ultimately, sex is best reserved for marriage. And I think if you look at the statistics of sexual assault, sexual abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, there’s a lot of people that are suffering, too.
…
I mean you’re not your average pastor, are you?

DRISCOLL: I don’t know.

MORGAN: Saying stuff like that.

DRISCOLL: I have fun. Sometimes I get it wrong.

MORGAN: Do too many people in the world of religion take it too seriously?

Is that part of the problem?

DRISCOLL: I think we should take Jesus seriously. We should take the Bible seriously. We probably shouldn’t take ourselves nearly as seriously. And that’s how I approach it.

MORGAN: Do you think you’re a tolerant kind of guy?

DRISCOLL: I love people very much and it’s — it’s —

MORGAN: That’s not the same thing.

DRISCOLL: Well, it’s — how do you disagree, sometimes, with people that you love?

That’s a very difficult issue for everybody, but for a pastor in particular, because —

MORGAN: But do you preach tolerance?

DRISCOLL: I’ve preached that we should love our neighbor, that we should accept —

MORGAN: But tolerance — tolerance in particular.

DRISCOLL: Why — you keep hammering it. What — what do you mean by tolerance?

MORGAN: Tolerating people who may have a lifestyle or a belief that you don’t agree with.

DRISCOLL: Yes, we have to. And that’s — when Jesus says love your neighbor, you know, he knows you’re not going to agree with all your neighbors, but he wants you to love them, to seek good for them, to care for them.
…
However, like everything in life, shouldn’t it be dragged kicking and screaming into each modern era, and be adapted, like the American Constitution.

DRISCOLL: Yes.

MORGAN: Because, you know, my — my view about this is — is not that I don’t respect Christians or Catholics or whoever who — who absolutely swear by every word in here. It’s just that it’s — I just don’t believe anyone who is genuinely Christian should be spouting bigoted opinions about sections of the community for their sexuality.

DRISCOLL: Well, I think when it comes to the Bible, you’ve got three options. Take it, I believe what it says. Leave it, I don’t believe what it says. Or change it —

MORGAN: Or adapt — or adapt the wording —

DRISCOLL: Which would be the changing it.
…

MORGAN: If it was in — the majority of Americans believed in it, would you then go along with it?

DRISCOLL: Would I officiate same-sex weddings and things of that nature?

MORGAN: Yes.

DRISCOLL: I couldn’t, according to conscience, no.

I think the big issue for families in America is really men who walk out on their families. I mean, right now, the average child born to a woman under 30 is born out of wedlock —

MORGAN: Yes, but that’s why —

DRISCOLL: — with no father.

MORGAN: — see, that’s my whole point about this. There are so many feckless guys out there —

DRISCOLL: That’s really —

MORGAN: — right?”

I’ve gone a bit nuts with the quotes – but I reckon this is a great example of public engagement that is both Christ focused, and engages with social issues. Which is what Driscoll does best. This interview almost makes the (by all accounts justifiable) controversy around the book worthwhile. And like Baron Cohen’s work one wonders if Driscoll produced the book with half an eye on how things would play out past its release.

The third little example takes the form of a book review, a public discourse between critic and author, the book is Ross Douhat’s Bad Religion (which I’m reading on my bus ride at the moment), the discussion happened on Slate.com (starting here). It’s an incredibly gracious discussion which I think is probably more valuable than the book – and it was why I purchased it.

None of these cases simply involve the content producer reproducing their content – in each case there’s a development of the core concept before a wider audience, that adds value. It’s good stuff. And now I’m wondering how this works at the level of the local church – how we turn the content we produce regularly (sermons etc), into sharable chunks, or leverage the work on new mediums.

Anyway. That’s a long post about some stuff I noticed in some stuff I read.

May 24, 2012

How the Reformation went viral

The 95 Theses were the beginning of a social media campaign which went viral. This is an interesting take on the Reformation – but hear it out.

Image Credit: Art.com (you can buy this as a print)

Does social media cause change?

The Reformation, like the revolution in a famous Malcolm Gladwell piece, may or may not have been fuelled by social media. Or Luther’s equivalent. Propaganda 1.0.

Here’s Gladwell’s summary of the argument he doesn’t agree with.

“The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns.”

Gladwell thinks it is high risk activism that brings change – rather than “social media” – but this is a bit of a category error. He thinks people are trying to argue that social media is the basis of activism rather than a channel for communication, and he’s dismissive of “one-click” activism (as am I – especially in the form of awareness raising).

“Boycotts and sit-ins and nonviolent confrontations—which were the weapons of choice for the civil-rights movement—are high-risk strategies. They leave little room for conflict and error. The moment even one protester deviates from the script and responds to provocation, the moral legitimacy of the entire protest is compromised. Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that King’s task in Birmingham would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail. But networks are messy: think of the ceaseless pattern of correction and revision, amendment and debate, that characterizes Wikipedia. If Martin Luther King, Jr., had tried to do a wiki-boycott in Montgomery, he would have been steamrollered by the white power structure. And of what use would a digital communication tool be in a town where ninety-eight per cent of the black community could be reached every Sunday morning at church? The things that King needed in Birmingham—discipline and strategy—were things that online social media cannot provide.”

Activism, be it Martin Luther King’s rallies, or Martin Luther’s nailing of 95 theses to the Wittenburg Door as a highly symbolic and evocative PR stunt, requires both a medium and a message. Further, this package requires channels and connections by which it is transmitted. Which is where social media comes in now, and where the virality of the reformation and its use of social media gets interesting. This is where Gladwell’s piece is perhaps too dismissive of the technology.

The Reformation went viral

The Reformation was another grassroots protest movement, which according to this fascinating history published in the Economist, which is wonderfully rendered and somewhat persuasive, was aided by the social media of its time.

“It is a familiar-sounding tale: after decades of simmering discontent a new form of media gives opponents of an authoritarian regime a way to express their views, register their solidarity and co-ordinate their actions. The protesters’ message spreads virally through social networks, making it impossible to suppress and highlighting the extent of public support for revolution. The combination of improved publishing technology and social networks is a catalyst for social change where previous efforts had failed.

That’s what happened in the Arab spring. It’s also what happened during the Reformation, nearly 500 years ago, when Martin Luther and his allies took the new media of their day—pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts—and circulated them through social networks to promote their message of religious reform.”

Luther understood something of the way to spread his message via the media of his day. The response to his initial PR stunt was a bit of a “tipping point” to borrow another Gladwellian phrase.

“The unintentional but rapid spread of the “95 Theses” alerted Luther to the way in which media passed from one person to another could quickly reach a wide audience. “They are printed and circulated far beyond my expectation,” he wrote in March 1518 to a publisher in Nuremberg who had published a German translation of the theses. But writing in scholarly Latin and then translating it into German was not the best way to address the wider public. Luther wrote that he “should have spoken far differently and more distinctly had I known what was going to happen.” For the publication later that month of his “Sermon on Indulgences and Grace”, he switched to German, avoiding regional vocabulary to ensure that his words were intelligible from the Rhineland to Saxony. The pamphlet, an instant hit, is regarded by many as the true starting point of the Reformation.”

Luther’s message went viral, between 6 and 7 million pamphlets were circulating in German speaking nations…

“Unlike larger books, which took weeks or months to produce, a pamphlet could be printed in a day or two. Copies of the initial edition, which cost about the same as a chicken, would first spread throughout the town where it was printed. Luther’s sympathisers recommended it to their friends. Booksellers promoted it and itinerant colporteurs hawked it. Travelling merchants, traders and preachers would then carry copies to other towns, and if they sparked sufficient interest, local printers would quickly produce their own editions, in batches of 1,000 or so, in the hope of cashing in on the buzz. A popular pamphlet would thus spread quickly without its author’s involvement.

As with “Likes” and retweets today, the number of reprints serves as an indicator of a given item’s popularity. Luther’s pamphlets were the most sought after; a contemporary remarked that they “were not so much sold as seized”. His first pamphlet written in German, the “Sermon on Indulgences and Grace”, was reprinted 14 times in 1518 alone, in print runs of at least 1,000 copies each time. Of the 6,000 different pamphlets that were published in German-speaking lands between 1520 and 1526, some 1,700 were editions of a few dozen works by Luther. In all, some 6m-7m pamphlets were printed in the first decade of the Reformation, more than a quarter of them Luther’s.”

December 27, 2011

#QantasLuxury: How to manage the fallout

This morning around 220 media outlets have covered the #qantasluxury debacle. It’s also certainly given social media and PR bloggers something to write about. If you buy the “all publicity is good publicity” line – then the campaign was a success.

Image Credit: @Kellulz, via The Australian

But you shouldn’t buy that line… because it’s dumb. The good thing about media coverage in traditional media outlets is that they’ll typically be interested in objectivity – which for them means getting both sides of the story (though in many of the cases below, this hasn’t happened).

Which means talking to Qantas. Which means that all publicity represents an opportunity to promote your brand.

A better phrasing of the rule is that “All publicity is only as good as you make it,” or “Good publicity promotes your brand.”

And while its possible that Qantas has strategically immolated itself on Twitter so that it can get this opportunity, that seems a little unlikely. Every story opens by bagging out the campaign. It wasn’t a well thought out move on the airline’s part.

Here’s a sampling of responses…

The Age – Qantas makes a hash of tweet campaign
The Age – Qantas Luxury – not having to face flak
The Australian (Media Blog) – Qantas Twitter Fiasco Launches Spoofs
Courier Mail – Qantas in First Class Twitter Fail
Courier Mail – Miffed passengers take tweet revenge
Reuters – Epic Fail for Qantas Twitter Competition
NineMSN (who clearly don’t understand apostrophes and words ending with s) – Qantas’s Epic PR Fail
The Hindustan Times – Qantas does a PR self goal dive
The Hong Kong Standard – Qantas spirals into PR infamy
The Mirror – UK – Qantas twitter hashtag campaign backfires as unhappy customers hijack it

The Reuters story is especially important, because it feeds content to newsrooms all over the globe – and that was bad for Qantas, because they haven’t got any comments from the airline. PR disaster management 101 is getting your messages across to the newswires.

What these stories are reporting is the tongue in cheek quip that Qantas fired back in response to the flood of responses – and while the quip kind of worked on Twitter, when it runs in a news story it just makes you look dumb. There’s a PR rule about never saying anything on camera you don’t want taken out of context… it works on social media too.

“But Qantas put on a brave face, taking to Twitter again to quip on Tuesday, “at this rate our #QantasLuxury competition is going to take years to judge.”

Or

“Qantas tried to laugh off the Twitter backlash later in the day, tweeting that it would take some time to judge the competition as the responses flooded in at a rate of 20 a minute.”

That doesn’t look like a company that is taking this crisis seriously.

But they are handling the fallout as best they can. When they get to speak that is… This line isn’t bad:

“A large number of our customers were disrupted and inconvenienced by the recent industrial action and fleet grounding. However, services have returned to normal and our customers can book flights with absolute confidence that they will not be disrupted by industrial action.”

That’s great. If they get that message, for free, into hundreds of stories it’s at least a silver lining.

Sadly it came after a few lines defending the campaign, and the prize… these aren’t great lines, because they show just how much Qantas doesn’t really get the whole social media thing, and gives a bit of insight into why this was botched… and a few media outlines are just running these quotes, not the paragraph above.

“We receive positive feedback from customers via social media about the Qantas premium inflight products. Over the past 12 months we have conducted a number of competitions for customers, fans and followers on our Twitter feed (@qantasairways), giving away these products,” the spokeswoman said.

“We launched the #qantasluxury competition as part of our ongoing social media strategy. The competition is giving away Qantas First Class pyjamas and amenity kits and a number of people have legitimately entered the competition.”

There’s no humility there. No acknowledgment that they got this massively wrong. Saying “a number” is the most deliberately vague statement ever issued, and at this point the positive entries in the competition are doubtless from professional competition enterers, or the families of Qantas board members.

Perhaps the funniest thing is that this move comes just two days after Qantas hired four full time social media people to manage the online fallout following the lockout.

November 23, 2011

Social Media Infographic: Who’s using what

If you’re thinking about social media and whether or not you should bother engaging with it either in business, or in ministry, then here’s some more evidence that you should. Especially because anybody born from 1978 onwards is a “millennial” or a digital native, as home in the virtual world as they are in the real world.

Click it for a bigger version.

Via Blogbydc

Also worth checking out the Nielsen Social Media Report (PDF – though you may need to fill out a form)

And this bunch of tips and links from Steve Fogg.

October 21, 2011

Infographic of the Day: Some more amazing social media stats…

While we’re on the subject…

This is why we Christians need to think about how we use social media for Jesus.

Via Jeff Bullas

October 12, 2011

How to use Facebook for Jesus

I gave a talk last night that was semi-evangelistic/semi-practical advice type talk, with some tips for using Facebook as Christians. It was an interesting exercise for me to think through the professional stuff I’ve done with Facebook and how it applies to being a Christian individual (rather than a Christian organisation – I’ve posted a social media strategy for promoting Christian stuff over at Venn Theology).

I promised I’d post the tips online – I don’t know if anybody actually wants them, but I’m a man of my word…

The first point I made, speaking to a group of slightly younger than me tech-savvy types – is that digital natives, the people growing up alongside the Internet, increasingly get all their news, and the information that shapes everything they think about the world, via the Internet. Which has implications for us as Christians – because we need to get the gospel into their news feeds.

There’s all sorts of research out there about digital natives and media consumption, you can google it, or you can take my word for it…

To set the scene for these tips – I used Philippians 2 to show that becoming a follower of Jesus restores the way we relate to each other, because our inter-human relationships were damaged by the fall…

Using Facebook to Encourage one another
We can use Facebook to encourage each other. I’ve got five tips here for how we can encourage each other using Facebook.

1. Set aside some deliberate time to send somebody an encouraging message to their inbox. One where you’ve thought about what you want to say, don’t just tell somebody they looked nice tonight, tell them that something they did or said was helpful to you, or that you appreciated something they did, something they might have felt like nobody noticed.

2. Post encouraging comments on people’s walls, tag them so that their friends can see, and tell them that they helped you love Jesus more by whatever it was they did. That way not only does the person you’re thanking know, but their friends know that person is serious about loving Jesus, and your friends know that you are serious about loving Jesus, and other people who experienced the same benefit from that person’s work can join in. Now, we run in to problems if we start doing stuff expecting to be thanked on Facebook – that’s not why we serve, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t encourage each other in our service.

3. Share real moments from your life where you’ve struggled with something and God has helped, or where you’ve really appreciated something – and thank God for it. It’s important that these moments are real – or both your Christian friends and your non-Christian friends are going to know you’re faking, and that’s actually discouraging.

4. Share the occasional Bible verse. I love the Bible. I’m sure most people in this room love the Bible. And it’s great to excite each other with the gold that is to be found in the Bible – but you don’t have to make every update on your wall a Bible verse. Let me tell you something interesting about Facebook, about how it works – Facebook has this thing called Edgerank, Edgerank determines how often your statuses appear in your friend’s newsfeeds – basically edgerank calculates how much people like your statuses by how many interactions you get on each one – and Bible verses operate on what’s called a law of diminishing returns – the first time you post a Bible verse, everyone’s going to notice, some people are probably going to comment – heaps of people will like it, especially if it’s a positive verse about love… but if you post a Bible verse every day, pretty soon even your Christian friends are going to ignore you, the same way people would if you just randomly approached them in the street and quoted Scripture at them. It’s a sad reality. But if we want to use Facebook to genuinely encourage each other we need to be thoughtful in the way we use it, and the way we engage in relationships. I think, as a general principle, it’s just as important online as it is offline to win the right to tell people about Jesus, not just to assume that we have something really important to say so the person we’re talking to has to listen.

5. Respond when people indicate they’re having a tough time – don’t just “like” their comment, and don’t give trite advice – but reach out to them and show that you care, offer to chat, chat on Facebook, do something in the real world – that might be a little controversial, but send them flowers, drop in, cook them something – do something to show that this person isn’t by themselves, show them that you love them, that you’re compassionate – show them that you’re a Phillipians two type of person… the word that our bibles translates as encourage means get along side, it means showing people that we’re in life together, we should be using Facebook to do that. One of the other great things about Facebook is that whether we mean it or not – other people will see that we love each other. Now again – we’re not loving each other just so other people will see us – but Jesus says in John 13 verse 35 – he says that people will know that we belong to Jesus because of the love we show for each other.

Then I shared a story about my friend Scotty, who I reckon is the best Facebook encourager going around. And I said avoid doing the reverse of encouraging when you’re online. Philippians 2 says arguing and grumbling isn’t a great look for Christians… and arguing and grumbling on Facebook is in a public and semi-permanent forum.

We can use Facebook to pray for each other.
This was my second point. Here’s the stuff I said in the talk…

One of the things I like to do is each time I log in to Facebook, I’ll go to my profile, and I’ll pray for the people Facebook pops up on the left hand side of the screen – those random friends that Facebook serves up for you each log in, but you could also pray for people when it’s their birthday, or pray for people when you see from their status that they’re having a tough time with something – Facebook gives us little snippet views into people’s lives, and view is enough for us to pray for the person – because God is in control of their lives too.

I haven’t done this, but I wonder how people would respond if you told them, in an inbox message, that you’d prayed for them – I think people, even if they aren’t Christians, still like to be prayed for… but like I said, I haven’t gone down that path.

Sometimes we forget just how powerful prayer is, pray for your Christian friends, pray that your non-Christian friends will meet Jesus – but at the same time use Facebook as a tool to encourage your brothers and sisters, and to reach out to your non-Christian friends.

You can use Facebook for Evangelism
I opened this point by talking a bit about digital natives, and a bit about the powerful testimony our relationships with one another is to non Christians, and how it’s important, giving how public Facebook is making our lives, to live lives that match what we say. And to not be holier-than-though, but to be people who openly admit our sinfulness and our dependence on God.

Here were some of my quick tips for how you can use Facebook to reach your non-Christian friends.

1. Check in at Church, or at youth group – let people know that being a Christian is something you’re serious about. Then, go back and comment on your check in and say what you enjoyed about church. If your friends from church do this – comment on their check ins. Make it clear that you enjoy being part of God’s family. If your friends think you go to church stuff because you have to, not because you want to, it’s going to make it harder to get them along.
2. Be real. Don’t make your Facebook a fakebook. Make it clear that you’re somebody who is living for Jesus, but let people know that that is really hard.
3. Invite people to church events on Facebook – most youth groups put their stuff online as a Facebook event. Invite your friends along, send them a link, and then send them a message telling them you’ve invited them – or better yet, ring them, text them, send them something outside the world of Facebook to let them know that you think this event is important.
4. Have meaningful discussions – it’s easy to turn Facebook into the home of trivial discussions. Don’t limit it to that. Talk about serious issues from the perspective of someone who loves Jesus. Comment on news stories, share links… get people talking, get people thinking – remember that most of your friends are getting all their news online and help them find important news by being a reporter for them. If you find a story you think one of your friends might think is really interesting – tag them, and ask their opinion – people love sharing their opinions.

October 2, 2011

Social Media Propaganda: Because the Internet needs you

The social media war is heating up. Soon Google Plus, Facebook, and Twitter will be doing just about anything to get you on board. I’m on all three. And I’ve got to say, for the record, that the number of conversations on each platform about the other platforms is getting a little out of hand.

Anyway. These posters might help you decide.

They’re for sale as posters on Etsy.

August 15, 2011

On a serious note…

A while ago I started a second, or was it a third, blog. It’s called Venn Theology. I promised to post serious stuff there. I’m still figuring out the balance for what goes where. But you’ll find, if you look, that I’ve posted some stuff this week. One of the things I’ve posted, is, I think, of particular value. It’s a social media strategy. Or the framework for one, for promoting Christian events. Perhaps it will be of some use to you, perhaps not. I’m ju

July 22, 2011