It’s important to clarify that giving others hope through your work isn’t reserved for “humanitarian” professions like education, ministry, or health care.

To me, work that gives hope is work that seeks restoration for the brokenness of this world. Hope is given when we offer justice to the oppressed and marginalized, physical wholeness to the diseased and dying, community to the isolated and lonely, and spiritual joy and connection to those alienated from God.

This is what giving hope means.

If you want to see an example of what I mean, watch how Arriva, a bus company, did it in Denmark.

Did you see the look in his eyes? You can see the joy of belonging, the feeling of connection and loved.

Something as simple as celebrating an employee’s birthday had an unmeasurable impact on how he feels about his job. Suddenly, driving that bus is no longer just his job, it has become so much more.

This is the substance of hope. This is how easy it is to give.

We need to change the way we think about our work. Focusing on how we can give others hope is one way to do that.

What hope can you give others in the work that you’re doing?

Here are 22 ways that I see these organizations adding Fast Follow to their social media strategy.

Church social media uses

• Sending time-sensitive messages
• Sending service time or event reminders
• Notifying people of inclement weather service cancellations
• Promoting ministry-specific events
• Communicating prayer requests or member needs
• Sending daily devotionals
• Providing supplemental information (such as additional Bible verses to read) during services
• Communicating to parents whose children are in the church nursery
• Providing online giving or tithing instructions during collections
• Connecting with youth group participants through out the week
• Facilitating impromptu gatherings by inviting all church members who are currently in a specific area to get together

Ministry social media uses

• Sending specific ministry-project updates
• Integrating it into giving campagins
• Ministry workers and missionaries can use it to send updates from the field to supporters
• Promotional campaigns
• Using it for staff/team communication
• Using it during emergency response situations

Business social media uses

• Creating real-time promotions and special offers
• Combining it with location-based social media tools (like Foursquare) to stage live events or promotions (e.g. the first X people who show up where your marketing team just checked in win a prize.)
• Use it to send tips or advice on ways to use your products.
• Create a real-time FAQ – forward questions from customers to the account and direct people to a link where they can find the solution
• Use it to build a community of customers

There are many more ways this tool can be put to good use as part of a social media strategy.

A word of caution

It’s important to keep a few things in mind, though, when using Fast Follow.

• Fast follow is a broadcast tool - the main value of Twitter is in the community of other users that you connect with. It’s important not to sacrifice the quality of your two-way conversations as you integrate these one-way broadcasts.
• To that end: Separate the Twitter accounts you use for each purpose - if I’m signing up to receive daily devotionals from a church, I probably don’t want a text telling me that some kid named Jimmy just threw up.
• Remember that Fast Follow is an opt-in service – users choose whether or not to subscribe so make sure you are using the associated Twitter account to add value to all subscribers. People aren’t going want to text messages of @replies or trivial tweets.
• Be mindful of the financial cost to users - not everyone has an unlimited texting plan. Keep in mind every time you tweet that it may be costing an audience member money.
• Be mindful of the other costs to users - remember that with every tweet you are interrupting your subscribers. Be respectful of your subscribers by:
  • using the service sparingly;
  • only tweeting at hours that are appropriate to the type of message you’re sending;
• Make the most of each tweet - you only have 140 characters to get your message across. Before you send a message make sure you’ve thought about what you’re trying to communicate and what you want the recipient to do. If you can’t achieve clear and actionable in 140 characters then you probably should find a different means for communicating.

What other ways do you see for churches, ministries and businesses to use Fast Follow in their social media strategy? Add your Fast Follow use cases in the comments below.

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. Watch this video to see just how deeply Google has become entrenched in most web sites:

Click here to watch the video on Vimeo.

Privacy issues and the local church

Sharing of personal data has become the “cost of doing business” of the web. It is a significant issue for churches who are looking to use their web sites and social media tools to do ministry online. Here’s a snapshot a 2,000+ member church’s top concerns about using social networks .
This data was collected as part of an audience profile I recently did (contact me if you’re interested in conducting this type of research for your church or non-profit).

While the data is unique for this church, it does highlight an important point. One in three (36 percent) members of this church believe that social networks expose their private information to others. Significantly more people people are concerned about privacy than about wasting time online. Church leaders need to be prepared to address the privacy concerns of their members.

I’d love to hear what you think. Were you aware of how integrated into the fabric of the Internet Google has become? Does this concern you? Why or why not?

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)

		Facebook	Twitter	MySpace	LinkedIn	Ning
Number of users		540,000,000	96,000,000	72,000,000	38,000,000	17,000,000
(% of users)
Gender
Male		40	40	34	50	36
Female		60	40	66	50	64
Age
65+		4	3	4	4	3
55 – 64		12	10	6	17	11
45 – 54		25	21	20	28	20
35 – 44		21	28	16	28	25
25 – 34		14	19	12	16	17
18 – 24		7	9	8	4	9
0 – 17		17	10	34	3	15
Income Level
$150K+		4	5	2	9	3
$100 – 149K		11	9	6	16	8
$75 – 99K		18	16	11	21	14
$50 – 74K		34	26	36	24	27
$25 – 49K		26	31	39	19	36
$0 – 24K		7	13	6	11	12
Education Level
Graduate degree		9	7	4	14	6
Bachelors degree		17	23	9	38	17
Some college		40	49	43	34	49
Highschool diploma		14	10	12	10	11
< Highschool		20	11	32	4	17

(via Flowtown; data from Google Ad Planner)

This is just another move in Facebook’s strategy to become the information currency system of the web – aggregating all the  information about you by connecting to your Facebook profile and then selling access to that information to marketers.

In addition to the demographic, social, opinion, and digital behavior data that Facebook gathers, adding information about a user’s location allows businesses to identify and tailor their marketing messages to the people that are most likely to purchase their products.

Geo-targeting (determining the physical location of a website visitor and delivering different content to that visitor based on his or her location) is the newest trend in internet marketing and is fueling the development of geo-location services like Foursquare and Gowalla. Integrating geo-location into the world’s number 1 website creates the potential to identify the physical location of Facebook’s 540 million users.

The opportunity for local churches

Setting aside concerns about privacy and consumerism, this move by Facebook has the potential to significantly enhance the efforts of local churches in:

• growing the local body;
• serving the local community.

Using social media to grow your church

Church leaders should be interested in the growth of their church. Not because growth means they are successful, but because growth means the Christ is successful. That His ministry is succeeding in its ultimate purpose: to glorify God.

Geo-targeting on Facebook means that local pastors have a direct means of reaching people in their community and inviting those people into relationship with the church. The targeting functionality that Facebook offers to advertisers could be used to engage people when they are in your neighborhood and let them know that you’re there. It’s same strategy that led to the wide-spread adoption of church signs, only adapted for the digital age. There is the potential for many additional creative and effective ways that your church can attract new people through Facebook using geo-location.

Using social media to do ministry online

Geo-targeting also enhances the ability for churches to do ministry online that I’ve discussed before. Now there is the potential to not only identify people who are hurting (who are in need of a Savior) but to minister to them in person because you know where those people are.

I’m not advocating stalking. I can just imagine some well-intentioned Christian walking up to someone and saying “Excuse me, I saw your latest Facebook status update about how your dad is a jerk. I just wanted to let you know that our Father in Heaven loves you and would never take away your X-Box 360 for a week.”

But what I am saying is that this system could create opportunities for us to identify those in need, know more about their circumstances, and engage them in a way that is appropriate – wouldn’t that make your ministry more effective?

Beyond profit, beyond the web

Facebook is aggressively pushing to grow it’s system and to add features that will increase the value it offers to advertisers. Their profit motive is clear and should not be mistaken to be benevolent.

But the motives of churches are more pure (not entirely pure, but much more noble in my opinion than that of Zuckerberg and his team). How can we take advantage of what Facebook is and the opportunities that it is creating to advance the Kingdom?

– Irving Janis

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 the coin is that unmet needs are tremendous opportunities. Opportunities for you to serve your customer in a new way, strengthening and increasing the value of your relationship. Opportunities for you to meet that need and earn a new customer. While motivations shape a customers actions, unmet needs catalyze that action.

So how do you go about identifying unmet needs?

Identifying Unmet Needs

David Aaker suggests three methods for identifying unmet needs in his book Strategic Market Management (affliliate link):

1. Use Customers to Identify Unmet Needs
2. Imagine an Ideal Experience
3. Use Creative Thinking

Use Customers to Identify Unmet Needs

Customers can provide great insight into how well their needs are being met. The best tool for accessing customers is market research. Through individual or group interviews, you are able to explore aspects of the customers’ experience and begin to dig into what elements of the experience might not be fulfilling their needs. Good customer research will:

• capture the customer’s actual experience/usage;
• identify any problems or frustrations;
• identify places where the experience doesn’t live up to the customer’s expectations;
• identify ways which the experience falls short of experiences with other vendors;
• elicit feedback on ways the experience can be improved.

In addition to asking customers to share their experiences, there is tremendous value in observing customers as they engage with your products and services. Observing customers gives insight into product shortcomings and the other environmental factors that contribute to needs not being met.

Imagine an Ideal Experience

Customers’ self-identified needs are often influenced by the customers’ frame of mind toward their circumstances. Having users conceptualize their ideal experience is a great way to identify unmet needs that users value but might not identify as important.
The simple question “What would an ideal experience with us be like?” can help you understand what elements different customer groups value and then tailor your product or service to emphasize the positive aspects.

Use Creative Thinking

In addition to the potential for customers’ direct feedback to be biased by their worldview, self-identified needs (real and imagined) will often be constrained by convention. Often the best opportunities to add value to your customer groups come from thinking outside of the box.

In my previous post Creative Thinking for Dummies I laid out three principles to follow for effective creative thinking. They are:

1. Separate ideation from evaluation
2. Look at the situation from different angles
3. Create feedback loops for refining the best ideas

In addition, here are several techniques for inspiring creativity:

• Get multiple people to participate – the diversity in perspectives and backgrounds can inspire new ideas.
• Challenge obvious assumptions.
• Evaluate options based on the potential impact regardless of feasibility.
• Break the problem down into smaller parts or tasks.
• Use triggers (like a random word) to stimulate new lines of thought.

These techniques will help you to imagine potential new ways to meet unmet needs in your market.

Conclusion

Having identified customer sub-groups and explored their motivations and unmet needs, you’re now in a position design and develop new products and services to capture the opportunities that you’ve uncovered. It is important that your strategic planning process begin with this level of understanding about your market to maximize the effectiveness of your efforts.

If your organization needs help identifying your customers unmet needs, I offer a number of strategic customer research and analysis services that can help. Feel free to contact me here.

Question: What unmet needs exist in your church or business’s audience? What’s the strategic value to your organization for filling those needs?

The truth is that everyone is capable of being creative. Yes, there are those who are extremely gifted, but these people are hardly worthy of being idolized.

Here are three principles for effective creative thinking that any individual or organization can follow:

1. Separate Ideation from Evaluation

“There no stupid ideas, just stupid people.” The process of coming up with ideas (ideation) needs to run its course. Even obviously bad ideas can lead to good ideas. But nothing shuts off the creative process like judging the merits of each idea as it is presented. For more effective brainstorming designate different periods for coming up with ideas and evaluating ideas. Establish a rule preventing providing feedback on ideas during the brainstorming and assign someone the responsibility of (politely) reminding people not to critique ideas until later.

2. Look at the Situation from Different Angles

Break free of the biases and assumptions that dominate your own worldview by forcing yourself to imagine different perspectives. This way you will be able to see other possibilities, emphasize things that might not be important to you but are important to your audience. You’ll also identify unintended consequences or outcomes of an idea.

3. Create Feedback Loops for Refining the Best Ideas

Once you’ve generated a list of new ideas, you need a way to filter out the bad ones and refine the good ones. One effective approach for thinking deeper about your starter ideas is the de Bono Hats system (or the “Six Hats System”).

Using this approach, members of a group rotate through different colored hats, each representing a specific way of thinking about an idea or problem.

• Questions (White) – considering purely what information is available, what are the facts?
• Emotions (Red) – instinctive gut reaction or statements of emotional feeling (but not any justification)
• Bad points judgment (Black) – logic applied to identifying flaws or barriers, seeking mismatch
• Good points judgment (Yellow) – logic applied to identifying benefits, seeking harmony
• Creativity (Green) – statements of provocation and investigation, seeing where a thought goes
• Thinking (Blue) – thinking about thinking

This process helps you to flush out your ideas by focusing on different aspects of the situation.

Following these three principles will help you get your creative juices flowing. What other tips do you have about the creative thinking process?

– Sanjay Kumar

The next phase in the evolution of the Internet will be the “Semantic Web” where machines not only exchange data and information but are able to derive “meaning” from the information that is being shared. Because meaning is subjective and influenced by situational factors, information on the Web will need to be interpreted within the context of the people who are using that information. This means somehow tying the information on the Web to personal information about the individual that is interacting with the Web information.

Facebook is aggressively pursuing a strategy that would make your Facebook profile the media of exchange for information about your online activities. Facebook wants to contextualize the information on the Web by tying it to your Facebook profile so that everything can be interpreted based on your digital identity.

Different web sites would then exchange information with each other, using your Facebook profile to facilitate the exchange, allowing them to (theoretically) understand what that information “means” to you.

Thus, your Facebook profile would be used in the same way that money is the media of exchange for economics.

Why does Facebook want to broker the exchange of information on the Web?

It’s all about the Benjamins. (They do it to make money, of course.)

The most obvious way to companies integrate the Internet into their business is to create digital equivalents or complements for different aspects of their operations. The first examples of commerce on the Web were digital equivalents of the exchange of goods (e.g. Amazon.com) or digital equivalents of business functions that support the exchange of goods (e.g. online advertisements).

In the Web 2.0 {pronounced “two dot oh”} era, we saw the rise of digital equivalents/replacements for other (non-commercial) aspects of society and culture. YouTube is a perfect example of this as the site enhances the ability of people to create, interact and distribute videos (the digital elements created are: storytelling, media, communication, interaction, and sharing).

In this era we’ve seen people attempt to create (with varying levels of success) digital equivalents for nearly every type of experience a person can have. This is what is at the core of the rise of online churches in the past few years (I refer to this period as Acts 2.0, the digital equivalent of the events of Acts Chapter 2.)

The challenge of profitability.

One of the big challenges the companies behind these Web services face is developing a sustainable business model.

This is often difficult because the scale of the Internet and the breadth of options increases people’s price sensitivity (creating an expectation that most of what is on the Internet should be free or low cost).

For Web services that have real-world business equivalents overcoming this is pretty straightforward since their offering is tied to a real-world, perceived value. However, for services that are based on life experiences that people aren’t accustomed to paying for (like interacting with friends), it is extremely difficult to convince people to pay for the online equivalent (in this case, participating in a social network like Facebook).

How to make  money online.

Find out what people are like to pay for and figure out a way to integrate that with what they’re doing on your site.

The best example of this is display advertising (putting text or image advertisements on web pages). Other examples are offering premium service levels (like LinkedIn’s Business, Business Plus, and Pro Account types or Kingdom Strategist Platinum). Another example is digital market places within social networks (apparently you can buy a tractor on Farmville for $20???).

Because of the volume of activity that people do online, there is (theoretically) a HUGE opportunity to engage people there and get them to spend money. But in order to do so, companies must overcome people’s resistance to spending money online.  AND they must do so at a scale that makes it a worthwhile investment for the company.

Digital stalkers – you can learn a lot about someone by tracking their every move.

Enter Cookies.

Cookies are tracking code that register and record information about your actions on a web site. Cookies allow companies to know everything about what you do on their site: what pages you visit, what links you click, what pages you enter on, what pages you leave on…

This information allows company to better understand how users are engaging with the content on their site. Companies then use that information to optimize the browsing experience in the hopes of optimizing your engagement with the site and motivating you to spend money (or click an advertisement which will earn the company money).

The problem of cookies is that they only tell you what someone does on your site.Imagine, if you could collect data about everything someone does online? Of course, here’s where privacy concerns come in. It’s one thing to track what someone does on your site. But tracking everything is a little creepy.

Cookies can only tell you so much.

Despite the tremendous amount you can infer about someone based on what they do online, it is really really hard to understand someone’s motivations and needs simply by observing actions.

The advantage the Facebook has is people actually volunteer this type of information and put it in the profile and statuses. You can tell a lot about someone based on their Facebook profile… what they like… what they need… what drives them…

On top of this, our social relationships greatly influence our behaviors (especially our purchasing behaviors… which is really what these web sites care about). Again, advantage Facebook. It knows not only information about you, but information about your friends… and their friends… and their friends’ friends…

So even though Facebook doesn’t offer much that people are like to pay for, it has something that is very, very valuable:

• Personal data about the lives of its 540 million users;
• Captive attention of its users (the average user spends 17.94 minutes per day online).

Those two things alone are a potential goldmine for Facebook, and Facebook knows it. It’s this same combination of scale and insight about its users that boosted Google to its $161 BILLION market cap (as of June 3, 2010).

The advantage that Facebook potentially has over Google is that it can tie activity data to an individual profile that (theorectially) is an accurate digital representation of who a person is. (Though Google is trying to catch up in this arena, using Gmail to create personal profiles and then tying that to information it collects from it’s multiple communication, productivity, search, and social services.)

The value of tying everything back to a profile is that it allows Facebook to personalize your experience on the site based on what it knows about you and people like you. This ability is the basis upon which Facebook will try to manipulate you to spending money. And this is the basis for other companies’ willingness to pay to advertise to you on Facebook.

Not content to be #1.

Despite being the #1 most visited web site in the world, Facebook isn’t content.

It has 540 million unique visitors, but that’s only a fraction of the over 1.8 billion global Internet users. Facebook’s strategy is to grow its database of profiles and web activity in order to increase the value to its advertisers and partners.

The best way for it to do this is to extend its profile functionality to other sites on the web.

The genius of this strategy is that it adds value to users (you and me) as well. Facebook could track and use the information it collects about you without your knowledge or permission (oh wait, it DOES do this). But integrating the social experience of Facebook to other sites is enough to make some people want to share their information about what they do off-Facebook.

But don’t be fooled, Facebook is more concerned about its own benefit and being able to offer greater benefit to advertisers. Remember, it’s all about the Benjamins.

Facebook’s Information Currency Strategy

The two main thrusts for Facebook’s information currency strategy are Facebook Connect and Facebook’s “Like” Button.

These two features of Facebook allow users to engage in online activity on sites other than Facebook while linking it back to their Facebook profile. In this way, your Facebook profile is becoming the media of exchange for information about your online activities, in the same way that money is the media of exchange for economics. Facebook is aggressively establishing its profiles as the information currency of the web.

So is this a good or bad thing?

In my opinion, it’s neutral.

From a sociological perspective, it enhances the relational elements of the Internet which is a positive advancement that can minimize “escapism” or people acting fraudulently. But solving those problems is still a long ways off.

From a privacy perspective, it creates a lot of concern as Facebook will have access to even more information about you and what you do online. And Facebook does not have a great track-record when it comes to privacy issues.

But the move does create benefit for everyone involved:

The benefit to Facebook is it grows its database of personalized web behaviors, making it even more valuable to online advertisers who want to get their products in front of the people who are most likely to spend money on them in a way that increases their desire to spend money on them.

The benefit to other sites is access to this information, the promotional benefit of having Facebook users suggest the site to their social circle, and the efficiency of using a popular login system versus creating their own.

The benefit to Facebook users is that it extends the social experience of Facebook to other sites on the web. The benefit of Facebook Connect is that users don’t need to maintain multiple profiles and logins.

But the thing you have to remember is that Facebook is driven by a profit motive. We’d be foolish to think that this profit motive will prioritize the well-being and interests of people.

Prioritizing people iss the church’s job, not Facebook’s. As Archbishop William Temple pointed out:

The Church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members.

How should churches respond?

Facebook’s strategy makes me wonder, what would a Christian-equivalent look like?

Normally I am against creating Christian-versions of popular culture. I refer to this as “me-tooism” and I think it sends the message the Christianity is irrelevant and unimaginative.

But in this case I think a universal profile that allows sites to access information about a person and their history has tremendous potential for churches and ministries to create enhanced web experiences that minister more intimately and effectively.

Imagine if a church web site “knew” that a certain visitor had previously searched Google for “ministry opportunities for 59 year olds“ and dynamically presented that visitor with all of the church’s resources aimed at that age group.

Or imagine if the visitor’s recent history indicated they we’re experiencing some crisis, like unexpected pregnancy? The web site could dynamically engage the person, in a personal way, and begins a process of ministering to them, starting on the site and moving them into a ministry path of healing. All done with compassion and offering the hope of Jesus Christ.

From a technology perspective such a thing is possible. This is the direction that the web is heading.

What Facebook’s strategy shows is that you need scale to make it work. Unfortunately, no ministry comes close to the amount of traffic of a Facebook or a Google. For that Christian organizations will need to work together.

The other thing is you need pure motives. This effort will need to be coordinated in such a way that encourages accountability and protects the integrity of the effort. It needs to open to encourage scale but it needs to be governed to protect the integrity of the system. It seems like an impossible challenge but this is the future of the Internet and I know that Christians can rise to the challenge.

As we move into the new era where the Web seeks to understand the meaning of things, the Church must work together to make sure that the Truth is the basis for those meanings.