Several minutes ago I tweeted: “Saying we’re doing social media because we use some of the tools is like saying my pet bird reads because he shits on the newspapers in the bottom of his cage. “

If you’re not using social media for conversations to get to know your audience,  what’s "social" about that?  You’re just using and being traditional media as a MARKETING and advertising bull horn.  You’re just dumping old media broadcasting into new media.  The church seems to have a real hard time learning this.  We may even say that we see that there is a new media out there,  and we bring it in and fill it with what we think needs to be “out there”— we use it as a tool for self promotion.  But what we should be learning is that the conversational nature of the Social Media enables us to go beyond pushing out our wares and to begin to represent by our presence what the church has to offer.  That is: our community and its mission to find in God’s gathered people that place to BE as a people a light;  a people set apart by our commitment to be a place where radical friendship is possible,  and where we work together to find what it is God wants to use us to do to BE the change that we say we seek. 

We do not represent change by trying to shoehorn old marketing into new “Social” media.  Especially this people called church.   Chris Brogan tells people curious about or involved in Social Media to tweet 9 good things that OTHERS are doing for every tweet that points to ourselves.  God IS active,  and the church IS experiencing can be found to be in the middle (indeed ,  the locus)  of such activity,  so there is are  lot of things to engage about.  We seem to be utilizing Social Media in order to appear “current” and that “we get it”,  but we continue to miss how the social web puts the audience up front as the way to find out what the conversation should be (and IS,  regardless of whether we actually get it — (ala Cluetrain Manifesto)  — if we aren’t listening ,  the audience gravitates to those who do.