United Methodist Church Listens, Responds to Social Media
Churches aren't the first organizations that come to mind when you think about intelligent adoption and incorporation of social media. Nevertheless, many feel that if there was ever an organization in need of modern relevance, the Christian church in America is it.
One denomination, the United Methodist Church, has opted for a boldly redesigned web presence to ask users, "What if church wasn't just a building, but thousands of doors? Each of them opening up to a different concept or experience of church - and a journey that could change our world. Would you come?"
10ThousandDoors.org goes far beyond a Facebook page or Twitter account. It pulls in information scraped from the web to track trending topics, then curates collections of articles on those subjects. It allows users to login using Google Friend Connect. The site gathers social video content about "people making a positive difference in our world," and its GO/DO page uses a Google Earth plugin to get users to make connections between the online and the offline.
Apart from being remarkably aesthetically pleasing and entirely modern, the site also blows the lid off of traditional expectations of static church websites. Even non-Methodists or non-Christians would get a kick out of the rich interactivity: The TALK page that allows users to respond to simple questions, the FIND page that directs users to the closest churches with programs most relevant to users' interests, the LISTEN page with audio news features and an iLike music player.
We caught up with one of the minds behind the site, Miiacom's Bayard Saunders, in Nashville, Tennessee. "The big idea," he said, "was to serve the content of the home page like a giant tag cloud based on feeds from news sources, blogs (including Twitter), keyword searches, site paths and referring pages. So by design, the site is constantly refreshed and always highlighting the most relevant content based on the most current topics relevant to seekers."
Saunders also revealed that an ad buy-fueled partnership with Google has allowed for additional relevant innovations, including a Methodist layer on Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Friend Connect, and content fed by individual UMC churches from Google Apps.
"It is ground-breaking, certainly for an official religious denomination's website," he said. "And it's been quite an interesting experience, designing a web presence for 'the God account.'"
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As a Methodist and social media professional, I'm overjoyed, blown away, pleased as punch and totally inspired by how my denomination is embracing the "Interwebs".
This is Obama-election big for me: I'd grown so weary of the self-righteous, hateful way that Christianity was represented in America for the past 20 years or more, just as I was of the bellicose swagger of our former administration. With the election of a bright, thoughtful president capable of strength and nuance, plus the Methodists' open-hearted presentation of Christ's love, I have hope for the country of my birth and the faith of my choice.
I am not surprised to see this as in India we have already done 3 such projects for the local religious communities. Also I would take this opportunity to share a link that would help people in web development- http://bit.ly/OxdIK
Jolie - Many UMC churches in the US have also been promoting the 'charity search engine' GoodSearch.com. Not a bad concept (along with GoodShop.com). Powered by Yahoo!, Google AND Microsoft might want to have a peek :)
Jolie said...
Churches aren't the first organizations that come to mind when you think about intelligent adoption and incorporation of social media.
Jolie, Churches today are now jumping into the Jesus 2.0 bandwagon. They (Churches) will soon be moving on to Jesus 3.0, which is the Jesus Resurrection and the Second Coming of Christ for armageddon.
First Google Friends Connect with 3D view mode:
http://www.sponks.com/fans.php
I really like the way the Methodist's 10ThousandDoors site has multiple layers of connections to lots of sources. Very inspirational. Our denomination, The United Church of Canada, launched its own Web 2.0 initiative a couple of years ago - we invite you to visit:
www.wondercafe.ca
Peace,
A