in the long run. People don’t want to buy what you’re selling. They want to know who you are.
Before we move on to learn more about who all these religiously engaged social media participants are, take a moment to consider this: What would it mean to your church or other faith organization to have an active cohort of people who, even for five minutes a day, were interested in gathering to pray, comment on scripture, discuss the needs of the world in light of their faith? If those folks were willing to gather outside your doors, would you be willing, as a ministry leader, to take time to encourage them and help to enrich their time together?
Well, these folks might not be outside your office door, but they are certainly right outside your digital door, on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more. Indeed, the Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that a full 65 percent of American adults who use the Internet are members of Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn— participation that has doubled since 2008 and is increasing at a rate of about 10 percent per year.
LIKING
“Liking” on Facebook is when you click the word “like” under a post, photo, or video. This causes a teeny thumbs up icon to appear below the post:
“Liking” is a quick way to show you’re paying attention, give a nod of approval, or just say “hello” on someone else’s Facebook wall. It makes minimal, but often meaningful, engagement possible within your Facebook community.
See Chapter 3 for more on using Facebook in digital ministry.
WHO INHABITS THE DIGITAL WORLD?
Generically speaking, the typical social media user looks something like this:
Typical U.S. Social Networking Participant6
Globally, social networking participation skews more toward men, a trend which is echoed among participants in the largest social network, Facebook:
Typical Facebook Participant7
Twitter is used far less than Facebook. Twitter itself reported some 100 million active users in the second half of 2011, but there have been significant questions about how active most of those users really are.8 Still, Twitter’s growth has been strong, with more than three hundred thousand people joining each day. Its growth has been amped up by its role as a conduit for on-the-scene reporting after natural disasters in Haiti and Japan and political uprisings in the Middle East. Beyond the urgent or otherwise newsworthy, the site has proved to be a valuable resource for researchers tracking the more general public mood,9 which makes aggregated Twitter feeds a gold mine for understanding how people feel about politics, economics, and other important issues—like, oh, faith, spirituality, religion—on a daily basis.
Its 140-character format is particularly attractive to mobile phone users, making it a more accessible platform for social networking in regions where more expensive desktop, laptop, and tablet computers are thin on the ground. Outside of the U.S., Twitter is most popular in the Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, Indonesia, and Venezuela.10 Based on data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a typical American Twitter participant looks something like this:
Typical U.S. Twitter Participant11
In Chapter 3, we will provide some further notes on the characteristics of the users of other social media platforms, but this overview of users of the two largest platforms and of social networking sites in general should help make clear that the people most absent from many mainline communities—those under age fifty, men, and people of color—are most likely present in social networking communities. And they are far from uninterested in religious or spiritual concerns.
When we look at the profile of typical Facebook or Twitter users in light of our most immediate communities and those we most hope to engage, important questions are raised about how we map the world from our particular perspectives. From where you sit, what is the center of the universe, toward which the bulk of your interest, energy, and time gravitates? To what extent does that gravitational pull prevent you from engaging the needs of the wider world in your ministry? How would you mark the borders between your world and the worlds outside your door? Where would “thar be dragons”—areas of real or imagined danger that seem off limits in your community—and how do they stand between your ministry and those it would more richly serve?
The worksheets that follow are meant to help you think about what your world looks like from the inside out and, perhaps a bit more, from the outside in, since we’ve found that the best social media strategy is one that starts with an assessment of where you are right now. We’ve also shared a community social media assessment that will help you to better determine the resources and expertise you will be able to bring to your digital ministry and the skills you will want to develop as you move forward. Take some time, then, on your own or in small groups in your community, to think through the worksheets that follow as the basis for a fuller social media strategy.
PART I: MAPPING YOUR WORLD
As we’ve discussed, a map is both conceptual and spatial. It tells at least as much about how people see the world at any given time as it does about the reality of towns and cities or roads and the rivers they cross. People serving churches and religious organizations carry certain maps of the world in their heads as much as anyone else does, and these maps subtly guide the way we approach and practice our ministries.
For example, Elizabeth led members of a church communications committee through a workshop exploring the challenge of engaging people shaped by digital culture. They began by thinking about the mappa mundi within which their church tended to operate.
They noticed that, although their belief and the church’s mission put Christian witness at the center of their world, in fact, the challenge of keeping up the building was really, as one group member said, “our Jerusalem.” Everything revolved around dealing with the physical property, which hardly allowed them to reach out to those outside the church without a fairly transparent agenda to snag them as pledging members. Moreover, it meant that boundaries between the church and other community organizations were fairly inflexible, as few in the committee had time to take up work that might turn them away from member-seeking and fund-raising. However much they claimed to want to engage young adults and encourage greater diversity in their community, they had mapped their world in such a way as to set such people far beyond their borders, in mysterious, unexplored lands where creatures with which they could not imagine contending might roam.
Working together to sketch their map of the world helped them to see their reality more clearly. It also gave them the opportunity to identify places where they might build bridges, crack a window open a bit, or invite new kinds of networked, relational engagement. Of course, this did not just apply to digital ministry, but extended into their local ministry practice as well.
The first step, in both locales, is having a clearer sense of your own mappa mundi as it shapes ministry practice. From there, you can move on to consider who lives within your world and with whom you might like to connect and what borders you would need to cross. Use the guidelines below to develop a mappa mundi for your community,