So, do you think your institution should have someone associated with it (employees, students, faculty, administrators, owners, CEO, COO, grunt, manager) blogging and/or Facebooking and/or Tweeting about work or on the subject of your organization’s work?
Yesterday I posted some questions about how we should think about doing social media on the user end, but what about on the business end? Is it a marketing tool that your organization, church, school, etc. should encourage people to use?
Back to last week’s marketing summit. Michael Hyatt encourages people to use social media–and encourages institutions to encourage their people to FB and Tweet about work. And, his company does not have a social media policy, they simply expect 
everyone to conduct themselves according to the standards of the personnel conduct policies.
I can imagine that this freaks some people out.
People on blogs, Twitter, and Facebook can say stupid things, put their noses where they don’t belong, and generally make the company, school, church or whatever look bad.
In religious environments, such exposure can be professional suicide, as such institutions tend to guard their theological boarders, and putting one’s thoughts out in the open, less-than-entirely censored, can cause everyone problems.
But there are up-sides, too.
The internet is free marketing. If someone is tweeting about your company and that person has 500 followers, then 500 people have the potential to be exposed to your work. If they link products or events, there is potential for direct sales, subscriptions, etc., and also the potential for retweets to some other person’s 500 followers.
Also, in my quick, non-scientific survey of the web, blogs with regularly posting authors draw more traffic than institutions’ sites, and individuals blogging draw more than institutionally sponsored group blogs.
This is not scientific, but here are a few comparison points using the Alexa rankings:
- In the past month, I have had slightly more traffic on my blog than there has been on my employer’s site, fuller.edu.
- One of the best theologically oriented blogs out there is the Duke Call and Response blog, on Duke Divinity’s Faith and Leadership site. Last month it would have come in somewhere around 35 on the top 50 biblioblogs rankings, what I would consider a somewhat low traffic rate for a site with such leading intellectuals as Gerardo Marti and Rich Mouw posting for them. It’s very difficult to get huge traffic stats on an aggregate blog.
- In the Alexa rankings, Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishing, is about the number 54,000 website in the world. His company’s, Thomas Nelson’s, website has a traffic rank of about 177,000.
I suppose the point is, that unless your business is to generate content (e.g., a newspaper), it is quite likely that an employee who is blogging regularly can provide more exposure for your business than your own business will do simply by creating its own official website.
Is that kind of exposure worth the risks for the kind of organization you are a part of? Is that kind of creation of a regular stream of contact with people representing your organization worth the 20-30 minutes a day it will take for the people in your organization to generate quality content? Do you think that the effects of social media participation would be worth the risks?
Also, this raises the question: should institutions that want to maximize the internet be thinking about developing social media marketing as an institution, or should they instead spend their energy encouraging their people to strike into internet land by themselves?
Thoughts?
yes! Great post! I have done quite a bit of reading in this area. I follow regularly some of the cutting edge blogs about social networking and church marketing. You hit the nail on the head.
I actually think we should be taking it a step further: we should not encourage blogging, tweeting, and facebook user-generated content from our employees (of churches). We should REQUIRE it. Every pastor should have a blog. Every ministry should have a fan page on facebook. Every musician should have a myspace music, etc. ITS FREE PEOPLE!
To not participate in social media is to be invisible. It is, or is fast becoming, like not having a phone number.
An interesting point. Of course, it depends on who the individual is, to some extent, too. It’s not like people are banging down the door to look at my blog (and, unless you know who I am, why would you?)….
(I wonder, how does the “Mouw’s Musings” blog compare to that Call and Response blog that Mouw also contributes to?)
Dr. Kirk I think your caution needs to be heard. One of my best friends almost lost his job over some blog posts. Similarly, when I was preaching at a rural church in college some of my comments on a blog were misunderstood and I faced severe criticism. I was already on my way out, but I think had I stayed I would have been asked to leave. I think young pastors need to be cautioned about blogging.
Blogs can be quite dangerous because they lack context. Unlike a conversation where you can dialog and offer qualification and nuance, blogs are open material on developing thoughts. A person may disagree with their own blog musings sometimes after just a few weeks. Once they are on the net, however, they are “out there” for anyone to see whenever. So, I think that blogs should be done with a lot of caution.
This also raises a question of the pastoral role on a number of levels. Is it best for a pastor to “advertise” himself? Since when did pastors need to promote? I have no idea why someone would require pastors to blog. I just think that’s nonsense.
On a separate note, pastoral blogging raises the issue of prophetic voice. Eugene Peterson suggests that pastors have a subversive spirituality. They don’t say always say everything that could be said because it would be too difficult for people to hear. Whether or not Peterson is correct, my personal experience indicates that a blog forum is one of the worst avenues to give prophetic confrontation because it can be so easily misconstrued or misunderstood.
Lastly, more is not better. A lot of people don’t have much writing worth reading so why would they blog? Blogging is “free advertising” but that doesn’t mean it’s good advertising. It might just be a very public way to show that someone has no idea what they’re doing.
Blogging needs to be weighed carefully and done with discretion. Pastors and scholars may be able to use blogging as an effective tool to sharpen themselves, keep in dialog with others or encourage their people, but they can also be quite dangerous. Young pastors especially need to be cautioned in putting their developing thoughts into a form of print.
Those are good words, Tyler.
Not only is blogging potentially dangerous, it can also be bad marketing–social media done poorly is probably better than social media not done at all. It has the power to put our mediocrity on display for the whole world!
since I was one that suggested pastors be mandated to use social media, I guess I should clarify.
I think everybody in church leadership should be at the cutting edge of social media. That being said, there needs to be good education on acceptable use. There is not much out there however. I write on this somewhat often because I want to be contributing to the social media revolution and how it affects Church.
One of my better articles is here: http://www.shrinkthechurch.com/?s=top+10+things+avoid+technology – and my own blog where I try and dabble in this area is http://www.dannavarra.blogspot.com.
Good thoughts, Dan, thanks for the additional ruminations and links!