In Naked Conversations, the authors make the point that “waiting until we have all the facts” is sometimes deadly (they give the example of heart attacks; that is better to act quick upon a few key warning signs than to “wait until we have all the facts“…p.200) So many companies and organizations are using this approach on the Web and on Blogging. They want to wait until there is a “marketing study” (never mind the fact that usually the “marketing types” who are the practicioners of such “methods” are the ones guilty of not even taking notice). The time to have “taken notice” is long past. The world has moved on. There’s already a siginificant set of companies and people and organizations who “get it” and there’s the ones who have a large portion of their audience wondering when they’re going to catch on.
Like the social networking. This has become the “portal” driver. Common interests are the impetus to build aggregations of resources. The outfits like MySpace (which has become the “generic” identifier for the Social Networking concept….ie. sites based around a social networking concept are often referred to as a “MySpace-type concept”. The basic idea is that “online social circles” are generated by “gatherings” around certain conversations, issues, media (iTunes, etc.), and then advetisers can be attracted by handing them “spaces” where they know the demographic and can target. This seems to be a prime situation for the church; not so much as an “advertising draw” (though it can be that), but as a way of trying to find out what people are looking for, and seek to “hook up” people, perhaps with a “Meetup” type approach where local churches can be hosts for people with common interests to meet each other. I don’t know how many times that I meet local people via the Web in the past few years of blogging (btw, I ‘m just a week or two away from 4 years of blogging).
If we believe that it is important to “hook people up” with local expresisons of Christian community, then here’s an opportunity with a captive audience (actually, many captive audiences).
