Social Media Effectiveness research

My latest project aims to understand how nonprofits can use social media to create awareness and develop community.

The Social Media Effectiveness study builds on the 2010 Excellence in Online Ministry study of social media presence management best practices from over 100 leading ministries.

In our continued desire to go beyond the hype to discover real world results and best practices, this study will answer the critical question:

How do ministries effectively use social media to:

Connect with new people and create awareness for the ministry?...

For Some Myrtle Beach Area Churches, Social Media Saves – article from The Sun News, December 2010

Last December I was interviewed by Jake Spring of The Sun News, a daily newspaper in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, for an article on church social media. He was interested in some of my research on how churches are using social media and wanted to know what trends I was seeing.

The article was published on December 24, 2010. I guess I’ve been pretty focused on what my family is going because I didn’t know it had been published and only just thought to look for it. You can see the article online here.

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The Future of Social Media

I have an article coming out in the next issue of Outcomes Magazine called “Future Proof Ministries”. In it I talk about which future technologies have the greatest potential to change the world and how ministry nonprofits should be thinking about them.

One of the technology predictions that I make in the article is that, enabled by the evolution of the Internet, Social Media will become a platform upon which people live their lives.

In the next five years, social media will become application-driven and operate on platform built on an infrastructure created by giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Life will become completely integrated with social media as digital expressions of identities, social interactions, personal growth, and societal contributions are developed.

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...

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

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.

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.

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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

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.

Business as Mission Metrics – Measuring Effectiveness (part 2)

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...