The question this week was posed, how should the church use twitter.
I may not be popular with this statement and you don’t have to agree, but I don’t think it really should. So here are some thoughts on that.
DennyWeinman.com
musings and mishapse of a technical creative
Filed under Rants …
Two Fifty- Tuesday
I wrote a guest post over here .
I am also brewing a review on Chamsys MagicQ lighting software which most of you may not care about.
The Creative Process
I think a lot of what we do is built upon our childhood. (until we’re told not to be creative any more)
I was talking with @JonathanMalm about things we did as children that very much mimic what we do professionally today. At Christmas I was excited to get presents and unwrap the boxes, but when I go back and look at pictures I’m playing with the boxes more than the toys. I can remember building fake ray guns, space ships and who knows what else with some boxes, tape and a little imagination.
Starbucks cold cup
Starbucks has done a lot of cool stuff for their coffee, recycled paper sleeves to show how environment conscious they are, while protecting your hands. Stoppers to plug up your coffee lid so you don’t end up with a lap full of scalding coffee and smiling faces to serve you your hearts desire.
These are all great things but when it comes to cold drinks I get a thin plastic cup and end up with drink sweat all over me, my pants, my desk, my papers.
What the heck? Lets get rolling on a post consumer paper coozie or something for these suckers!
Two Fifty Tuesday
Well the new Starbucks branding is out in the wild. It’s really the ‘anti’ Starbucks since it doesn’t even carry the name but to me it still carries a brand identity that they’ve been instilling in us since they started popping one up on every street corner. Continue reading
Two-Fifty Tuesday
I think to many times we run around dealing with emergencies and looking out for number one that many times we come across as self-righteous jerks that really don’t give a crap. If you have a tendency to treat people like that you’re going to loose friends, clients and relationships. It isn’t that hard to figure out and fix. If people give you the cold shoulder or your finding it increasingly difficult to communicate (or you don’t communicate) this may be your sign.
“You can’t apologize your way out of being an a$$” – Rework (censored for those faint of heart please use your imagination)
Since you can not apologize your way out of it move on but try harder next time.
You may not be able to teach an old dog new tricks but you can identify behavior and begin to try and catch yourself at less than ideal moments, or keep your mouth shut.
I bring this up because I have had several dealings with Guitar Center where I should have received genuine apologies and simple rectifications that would cost them nothing. Instead I’ve been given a bad taste locally and corporately.
It seems that whether you go into the store or deal with them online they really don’t care about giving you a good experience, instead of a genuine I’m sorry it ends up being a ‘we’re sorry for any inconvenience you may have experienced’ which negates their fault and I still don’t have a fix.
I will now go out of my way to avoid them everywhere.
Monday Morning Musings
It’s 7am on a plane over who knows where so I’ll dump a little bit on what I thought of Superbowl commercials last night. (As I wrote this a concoction of antibiotics, vitamins, aleve and espresso hit my stomach as well as turbulence and for the first time I thought I might loose everything on an airplane)
As someone who is a consumer of media and products, but also an evangelist for what I believe in I think most of what was shown last night was absolute rubbish.
I made the statement last night that commercials at one point meant something, and here is what I meant by that. When companies got together and marketed their products they not only said hey what is going to make our product sexy and stand above the rest, but they also looked at their targeted consumer and connected with them in some way. There was heart behind what they said, and an advert is your voice to the masses when you are watching something like the Superbowl.
So every company that paid an exuberant amount for ad space (regardless if they paid for their ad or had a fan create it) put a million arrows in their quiver and then shot them all at once.
I’ve been reading Rework by Jason Fried and David Hansson and they hit this nail on the head (as well as many others). “You’re aiming for a long term relationship, not a one night stand” This was in response to adverts that go out making some incredulous claims of product miracles. Frankly after watching most of the commercials last night your products have herpes or some other sexually transmitted disease and I’m probably not going to touch them for fear of feeling like I was with a two-bit hooker.
Another comment I made last night was, where were the humanitarian commercials at? There is usually at least one spot that is dedicated to some kind of aid effort either global or local and usually it involves one or both of the Superbowl teams and under privileged children. Last night, I saw none of those (and maybe I missed them in my admitted frenzy of tweeting). What happened to helping the people in Haiti, Africa, Australia or Egypt? There have been plenty of world crisis’ in the past year but apparently no one wanted to help out during one of the most watched US events of the year.
No, an ad asking for support might be to pricey for some small organization like charity water to pay for, but if a huge entity like Coca-Cola came along side and said “we’ll support you” they could. The next time I thought about who I’d spend dollars on to buy a drink I’d more heavily consider coke, because they cared.
I’d get pumped for a collaborative effort to support relief in other countries wouldn’t you?
Sometimes a global view can earn you more respect with your audience than a World of War Craft train-wreck or a Kim Kardashian Catastrophe.
Two-Fifty Tuesday, on Wednesday
I figured since I didn’t post this yesterday I’d back track a day and do a two-fifty post.
This verse is constantly tumbling around in my head. Something I adopted as “my verse” years ago.
“Philippians 2:3 Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.”
That entire chapter is crucial on living the Christian life, on being a church, a staff, a community. What irks me is that so many times within the structure of what we consider God ordained we have people who insist on ignoring being like minding with Christ. People who thrive on rivalry, conceit and placing themselves before others.
I think we could all use a healthy dose of humility in our lives to bring us back down to earth. This applies to every Christian, especially lay leadership and more notably paid leadership. It isn’t our ministry, it isn’t our church, it isn’t our congregation, it isn’t our messages, it isn’t our worship, it isn’t our technology.
That is why in persecuted countries Christ prevails. They have no room for conceitedness. In America we’re lazy physically as well as mentally. Because this well oiled machine we built as church just works, we’re allowed to sit on auto pilot and receive the glory for it. I think maybe we should rethink the modern church structure and start over. The gospel does not change but we certainly need to, the goal is to to become like Christ.
It is not about you.
How to not suck – 101
This blog post could be potentially heinous and offensive to most narcissists. (guess I’m preaching to the choir)
The biggest way you can not suck is be humble and teachable. Duh.
If you’re not willing to take criticism (constructive criticism of course) then to everyone around you, you basically suck. There is also a fine line you walk between taking everything with a grain of salt and taking everything to heart. If you act like you care, nod your head accordingly and never absorb even a fraction of what is being said, it shows. If everything offends you then people eventually stop trying to help.
Be a constant learner!
Be the bigger man. Apologize when necessary and even when it’s not.
Be a team player, and jump in to help with other projects when you can.
So suck it up and don’t.
Social Media: I demand that you read it, have a nice day.
Buzz words are a real buzz kill because most things that end up with buzz words, die, and they are really great. Myspace at one time was great, then everyone flocked to myspace like a vulture to a dead carcass and viola instant dead social media platform. Facebook is headed in the same direction, blogging was another platform for social media that at least in a “general public usage” has died, blogger, xanga, live journal etc. are all jokes of the past.
Social media…it’s supposed to be a place with open forums for ideas, connection and conversation. In many ways it greatly facilitates this. I connect with hundreds of people a day through conversations on twitter and blogs. I keep up with friendships all of the time through facebook and twitter. A quick poll, @tpaulding & @pacomontoya basically said the same thing, social networking is a place to connect whether to friends or other professionals.
With this conversation has come a lot of negatives. A few mentioned were that these forms of interaction have a huge potential for distraction, and or, become addictive and time consuming. Something else that comes with this huge push toward social networking is a forced media agenda. This can be a semi-positive but also a huge negative. Way back when, you had select venues to receive information. Word of mouth, the newspaper, the radio, then further down the road came the TV. The radio and TV were instant information inside your homes. The only thing was, it was selective, and it came with time restraints. With the prevalence of the internet came the 24 hour in your home access to information from anywhere about anything. It was a smorgasbord of information all for you to choose.
Enter twitter onto the scene. This limited character update with the propensity for social networking, quick conversation, story telling, micro blogging etc. gave a quick way for people to get information and to pass it along.
Welcome to the force fed agenda age. Not only do I have one tweet sitting in my feed about the death of a famous person that I don’t care about, I have 50 of similar content. I hop onto facebook and find another 25+ statuses with the same information mourning the loss of someone that they did not personally know. Articles have been dug (on digg) and show up on RSS feeds in any abundance of feed readers. All 2,000 articles just to tell you that the star of Dirty Dancing died yesterday. Now when you go home, you’re going to get it from the news channels too, but not just once, you’ll get it a couple times every half an hour. You’re also then driven to their web site with internet exclusive articles on the subject, and given their twitter address so you can follow them and get the same information your 65 best friends just sent out.
It’s easy to send people into a tizzy when they trust any given tidbit of information sent their way. A friend of mine made the comment that social networking is “low quality management and fact checking” -Bret. Wikipedia is another piece of social media, that can end up being not entirely factual. They’re doing their best, but when you open up a conversation to everyone something is bound to get miss communicated, miss directed, miss fired or just plain missed.
Now for the real problem. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some twitter. The death notices of every person on earth gets a bit old after a while (Michael Jackson’s especially) but they’re tolerable. What scares me is the forcing of a particular agenda through certain media outlets. You’re already seeing a government that is just scraping the surface of being media savvy. It’s one thing to keep the country apprised of what is going on. It is another thing to go into the schools and begin sticking your foot in the door, trying and run agenda to the kids (im speaking of web, streaming and content usage). I don’t think we’ve seen even the beginning of things to come, but I do think we’re starting to see the day where social media begins to force feed you an agenda. When you insert your opinion opposite the mass flow you get belittled or plain out squashed.
Gone are the days of pick and choose, come are the days of chosen for us.
So in keeping with the conversation. What do you think? Do you use social media as a conversation? Is social media becoming a forced agenda?
