March 4, 2010
The Missionary and Social Media
Here is a summary of the talk I gave to my missionary colleagues this morning, entitled "Facebook is Your Friend!"
When the internet was in its infancy, surfing the web was a spectator sport. You looked at a website, said "that's nice", and moved on. With the advent of weblogs, however, it became much more participatory, and the social web (some call it "web 2.0") was born.
What follows are the categories of social media, as I see them:
Blogs: Online journals where posts are archive (usually chronologically) and where readers can make comments and interract with the author and other readers. This was the first form of social media I participated in, and it continues to be my favorite. I currently have to blogs: this one in English, and the Caderno Teológico in Portuguese.
Networking Sites: Facebook, MySpace, and (here in Brazil) Orkut are all designed to create networks of people. "Connecting" is the goal. While these can be tremendous wastes of time (sorry all you Farmville players out there...) they can also be valuable means of communication.
Microblogging: A recent addition to the social media spectrum, microblogs (of which Twitter is the most popular) limit posts to small blurbs. The idea is to get as many "followers" as possible in hopes that they will read, respond to, and even "retweet" what you have "tweeted". The content of posts can range from the profundity of John Piper's theological musings to someone who feels it important that you know what he had form breakfast this morning.
Media Sites: Services such as Flickr and YouTube allow you to post visual and audio content online. These can be subscribed to (as in podcasts) or embedded on a blog.
Of course the question remains: why should missionaries blog? The next slide gives a few of the reasons.
In short, social media--rightly used--can be a powerful tool in enhancing the ministry of a missionary, both in the field and on the "home front".
If you are convinced that this is something you should try, here are three steps you can take to get started today.
The final point deserves a little explanation. It comes from a philosophy I first read on Michael Hyatt's excellent blog (in a post titled, ironically, 25 Things I Hate About Facebook). He sets for the idea of considering your blog as your "homebase" and using the other elements of social media as "outposts" to drive traffic to it. I have adopted this practice, with great results.
In my mind, my online presence looks something like this:
In closing, I leave you with this, something a friend posted on Facebook today on the subject of missionaries and social media:
You're a Baptist, so this analogy may not work too well for you [editor's note: this made me smile], but it seems to me the difference between hearing a quarterly update and reading regular FB updates from a missionary is like the difference between knowing that some friends are playing a card game across town and walking by the table and someone handing me some cards and saying "sit down and play, we just dealt you in." It brings a different level of involvement.
Talk back to the missionary: This article is, of necessity, incomplete. What else should missionaries know about social media? How can we best use it? Make your voice heard in the comments section.
Posted by Andrew on March 4, 2010 4:06 PM.
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.comingstobrazil.com/cgi-bin/mt4/mt-tb.cgi/2075
Comments
Posted by: Daniel at March 5, 2010 12:38 AM
I'm sure it's UNO.
Posted by: Andrew 
at March 5, 2010 6:19 AM
Subscribe via
A card game!! *gasp*
Nice.