Beware Social Media Snake Oil
December 8, 2009
That was the title of an article written by Stephen Baker this week in BusinessWeek. The subtitle sums up the article nicely.
Hords of marketing “experts” are promoting the value of wikis, social networks, and blogs. All the hype may obscure the real potential of these online tools.
One of the big things we have learned at Unifyer in the last 18 months, is that you can not just “Build it and They Will Come.” You have to ask yourself why are you desiring and online community for your church or organization? Unifyer was built as a communication platform first and foremost. In the article Stephen says,
A Forrester Research study shows that despite buzz around Enterprise 2.0, less than 15% of the knowledge workforce makes use of internal blogs, wikis, and other collaborative tools. “Email is still dominant,” says Ted Schadler, author of the report.
I find this quote interesting as some of our churches have told the same thing. We can not get our ministry leaders to leave their email and communicate inside Unifyer. How will they know that they are communicating with the correct people? There seems to be a distrust with these tools as they do not provide the same level of assurance that our communication has landed at the correct destination. The problem is that we are now limited with who we can communicate with and our conversations are fragmented in many different email inbox’s spread over the city.
However, the churches that are intentional about using Unifyer for all internal church communication are seeing 25% of their weekend attendance sign in each day and 55% every week. They have focused on using Unifyer for its original purpose, as a communication tool. A place where each church member can connect to their ministry of choosing. This only works when every ministry is posting updates and helping create the destination Unifyer needs to be.
We have one church that has shared with us how their church members are turning off their email notifications because their Unifyer site is becoming a destination site that is checked each day. That is pretty cool.
What is your purpose for using social media or web 2.0 community tools for your church?
March 24th, 2010 at 4:19 pm
ibesusuwuzub…
Download mp3 with Hypno-Twist …
April 20th, 2010 at 10:03 am
м…да грязь,насилие,жестокость….
Hords of marketing “experts” are promoting the value of wikis, social networks, and blogs…..