Jesus is sooooo Web 3.0!
Much confusion exists in online marketing circles on the value of social networking tools, sites, blogs, yada, yada, yada… which begs the question, “How do you build community?” Seriously. So, the social scientist quadrant of my brain takes over and I begin to digg into this deli.icio.us question and see what the rest of the online community has to say. I’m sure if the information is out there, by now I must have reddit.
This concept of building community sounds great because it creates the potential to generate traffic to your church web site with almost zero effort but kind of breaks down when it comes time to actually starting building it. Lets consider for a moment the reasons why we might build community for the purpose of marketing Jesus and then we’ll dive into perhaps the factors that actually drive community which might give us some insight into how community actually gets built.
Traffic != Community
Amazon.com gets a ton of traffic and plenty of comments and feedback on products. Does it have “community” or “web2.0″ features? Is it a “social networking” site? Mmmm… maybe, but probably not. In some ways there are elements of community as it seems that there are a fair number of visitors who participate regularly in the review of books, but for the most part these same people are not interacting with each other or the site in a way that is meaningful or brings them back. Next let’s consider knowledge sharing and community. For this let me use the example of, well… how about Micro$oft. Like many other software vendors, the redmond elite have used their online presence to produce a great deal of “knowledge” to be shared with the world. This certainly generates a certain amount of “traffic” and “content” but again, hardly creates “community.”
So what does one do to build this elusive attention getter? Is it possible for it to be built out of the ground and spring to life on its own? I don’t think so. From what I’ve seen oot-n-aboot on the intrawebs, most community springs forth from users who gather around very narrowly focused ideas. Even this site, while it has elements of “web 2.0″ and “social networking” it is (IMHO) unlikely to create community until a population comes together that is interested in this one little niche concept.
In my opinion (worth about as much as the paper this article isn’t printed on), community gets built like this: Information and off-the-cuff comments on topics like church marketing will be read by info nerds like me and may be found by my colleagues around the world who will either agree or disagree with me. They will (hopefully) post their wonderful and encouraging comments on my poorly contrived drivel. They forward these nuisance comments to their buddies who in turn post more fantastic comments and perhaps even submit the content to an aggregator like digg or reddit for the world to ponder. This in turn generates an avalanche of activity on the internet to create more discussion on the topic in other people’s blogs who create trackbacks or links to my site which increases my hit count and page rank, thereby solidifying my place in the anuls of history.
Now… there may be a change-a-comin. The folks at mars hill codex are building some new software called “the city” which aims to create a social networking community for churches with information and sermons and comments, oh my! Will it create community? We’ll see.
Do we build community? Does community build us? DOOD! I don’t know! I just know this guy named Jesus who’s changed my life and his Dad wrote a book that’s really awesome, you should read it. I also know that if I try hard enough to create meaningful information for my peers to help them better communicate about our best friend, then more people will come to know him and we can all get off this spinning mudball a little sooner.
Feel free to leave your comments and get the process rolling. You know you want to.
