All Your Data Are Belong To Us

All Your Data Are Belong To Us

Concerned about Facebook’s use of your private data? Consider this – while a lot of attention has been given in the past year to Facebook’s aggressive push to capture more and more data about users, Google has (more or less) managed to fly under the radar as it embedded itself into the entire fabric of the entire Internet.

Google is watching you right now

The amount of information that Google collects from your web browsing session is staggering. Yet we don’t hear as much backlash against Google, largely in part because the data collection happens behind the scenes with most users unaware of how frequently they’re sending data to Google.

The guys at Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.) Lab have developed a clever browser plug-in that demonstrates this by sounding an alarm every time data is sent to Google from a web site....

Social Media Demographics – Top Social Networking Sites

Social Media Demographics – Top Social Networking Sites

Effective social media strategy starts with knowing your audience.

Every social media site attracts different users for different reasons. Whether your a business, a church, or a ministry, your ability to effectively reach and engage through social media greatly depends on knowing where your audience is online.

Below is demographic information for the world’s most popular social networks. Knowing the demographics of your target audience allows you to determine how much of that audience you can reach on each of these sites. Focusing on the sites with the greatest reach will maximize the effectiveness of your efforts and help you make the most of your social media strategy.

Top Social Network Demographic Data

(Data as of April, 2010)

How To Do Strategic Segmentation – Step 3: Identify Unmet Needs

How To Do Strategic Segmentation – Step 3: Identify Unmet Needs

Strategic segmentation is a process for developing strategies that appealing to specific customer groups, increasing you effectiveness in serving that group in a way that is both profitable and sustainable. The first two steps in the strategic segmentation process are to identify key audience characteristics that define subgroups and to understand the core motivations that influence how those subgroups will engage with your organization.

The next step in the strategic segmentation process is to identify any unmet needs that represent an opportunity (or a threat) for you to serve those customers. Unmet needs are important because they are the source of discontent (whether known or not) that will cause someone to want to change. If that person is already a customer, then unmet needs can be a threat because it may be their relationship with you that they change.

But the other side of...

Speaking at the 2010 Christian Leadership Alliance conference

Next week (April 19-21), I’ll be in San Diego for the 2010 Christian Leadership Alliance conference.

The Christian Leadership Alliance (CLA) is the nation’s leading resource for enhancing the organizational effectiveness of churches and para-church ministries. As part of this year’s conference, the CLA partnered with Monk Development to create the Ministry Internet & Technology Summit to ministry technology leaders and leading thinkers together to address critical technology issues and prepare for the future.

Internet Ministry Research

I have been working with the Christian Leadership Alliance and Monk Development to develop new research that looks at how ministry organizations plan and execute their web strategy. The goal of the research is to identify best practices, trends, and case studies in the hopes of providing clarity, guidance, and new opportunities for ministries online.

In addition to interviews with different Internet ministry thought leaders, we have developed two research initiatives that will provide a broad picture of the current state of Internet ministry.

The

Church Social Media Strategy – Researching Your Audience

Church Social Media Strategy – Researching Your Audience

When churches begin thinking about how they can use social media and the internet to do ministry online, it can be hard to know where to turn for valuable advice.

There are plenty of resources that talk about the ins and out of social media, how to use tools like Twitter and Facebook. I honestly think that more people go hungry in this country than those who go without hearing about social media. But it’s hard to know if you can trust the advice you’re getting from so-called social media experts.

And even if it comes from a reputable source, it’s hard to know how to...

Business as Mission Metrics – Measuring Effectiveness (part 2)

Creating Eternal Value through Strategic Management

Business as Mission Metrics – Measuring the Effectiveness of BAM Efforts (part 2)

What the Business as Mission movement does not measure

If the Business as Mission movement does universally agree that a particular metric is not indicative of BAM success, it does is not mean that metric isn’t valid. Of all of the measures tested by the BAM survey, only a few were rejected by a significant number of respondents (Table E). The common aspect of all of these metrics can together is that it is questionable whether any company should be responsible for...

How To Do Strategic Segmentation – Step 2: Understand Customer Motivations

We’ve covered how strategic segmentation can help you develop effective strategies for appealing to specific customer groups in a way that is both profitable and sustainable. At this point you’ve identified key audience characteristics that allow you to both classify subgroups of your audience and inform ways that you can relate to those groups with your products and services.

The next step in the strategic segmentation process is to understand the different motivations that lie behind their decisions and behaviors.

Understanding Customer Motivations

In Strategic Market Management...

Business as Mission Metrics – Measuring Effectiveness (part 1)

Creating Eternal Value through Strategic Management

Business as Mission Metrics – Measuring the Effectiveness of BAM Efforts (part 1)

One of the root challenges for BAM leaders is managing the numerous demands on their business. The BAM leader’s responsibilities of planning, organizing, managing resources, and leading are all shaped by the availability of information, the expectations, value systems, and influence of key stakeholders, and (to the extent they are used) business and management principles and theories. Significant attention has been given by the corporate sector to studying each of these factors.

Recently, the popularity of social and environmental responsibility has increased focus on...

Ministry Opportunities For 59 Year Olds

What a great way to start this day…

*Well, it’s not really the “start” of my day. The start of my day was (per usual) wrangling two small children, bundling them in layers and layers of winter clothes, and driving them up to daycare (while singing our ABC’s at the top of our voices).

But once that was all sorted, I settled in in front of my laptop, opened my web stats site (I use GetClicky.com because it shows real time stats) and saw that I someone found Kingdom Strategist by searching Google for:

“ministry opportunities for 59 year olds”

Let it sink in for a...