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In the five hundred or so years between the inventions of the printing press and the Internet, we have lived in a broadcast media environment of books, radio, newspapers, and television. These media served as highly effective platforms for sending a single, well-crafted, attention-getting message out to as many people as possible. But broadcast media afforded little opportunity for feedback, except, perhaps, for letters to the editor. In the church, we have used this one-to-many broadcast communication model in sermons, printed newsletters, letters from the pastor, and broadcasting worship services on the radio or local television community access channels.

TAGS AND HASHTAGS

A tag is a word or very short phrase that describes people or content of interest to online users. It helps to make information online searchable by people with similar interests.

Individual blog posts will tend to have set of tags—keywords—that describe the contents of the post. For example, the tags church, ministry, social media, Facebook, Keith Anderson might mark a post about a workshop Keith’s done on digital ministry.

In addition to helping others to find content and understand its main themes, tagging can be an expression of identity—a sort of digital tattoo— that names what’s important to a particular social media participant.

On Twitter, tags are marked with the # symbol, so you will find people who end each tweet with a denominational tag like #ELCA (for Lutherans) or #TEC (the Episcopal church) to signal the spiritual identity of the tweeter regardless of content. This is called a hashtag. posting on your organization’s Facebook wall.

Social media represents a profound shift in this model. Today, almost anyone can publish a blog, have a YouTube channel, and host their own internet radio station. Anyone can comment on, extend, qualify, discuss, and share your sermons. As we will discuss in the next chapter, now even small congregations can have a robust media platform.

Rather than waiting for your monthly newsletter, now people can and want to follow you on Twitter. They can “like” your organization’s Facebook page and follow your church ministries in real time. They can “friend” and “follow” other members. They can chat, message, mention, and “tag” you. They can help generate content and conversation by posting on your organization’s Facebook wall.

These dramatic changes necessarily shape our message, presence, voice, and practice of ministry. However, because this broadcast model has been so pervasive, most people first approach social media as simply another form of broadcast media—as one more way to blast our message out there and get people to join our church or organization. This approach to social media is bound to fail. First, because the emphasis is on the needs of the institution rather than the needs of the individual. It’s about our message. Second, because people want and expect to engage with you personally. They don’t just want information. They want and expect to have a relationship.

“FOLLOWING”

“Following” is how people connect on Twitter. Unlike on Facebook, where you must request access to another user’s profile by “friending,” on Twitter you can access almost any user’s tweets by clicking the “follow” button on a user’s profile:

Only if a user follows you back can you use Twitter features like private messaging, but, as you’ll see in Chapter 3, there are lots of other ways to connect on Twitter.