The Values Behind What We Value

As mentioned, I attended the Dynamic Church Conference yesterday to hear my friend Cynthia Ware speak. The title of her session was “10 New Media Values”, which if you didn’t know what to expect, you could have been completely lost (and I think that a few folks were). I also received my copy of Collide Magazine in the mail yesterday in which Cynthia has an article related to the same ideas, so I’m going to be commenting on both the article and teaching session.

The idea behind the talk was that New Media is less about the technology that is pushing it forward and more about the values shift that is happening in communication. These values include things like Interactivity,Transparency, Mobility, etc. There is a bit of semantic drift happening here, so let me clarify that “Values” here indicate “principles or standards of behavior.

I haven’t had a lot of time to process our discussion, so I’ll just give you a few concepts that stuck with me.

• We don’t just have the ability to reply, we feel a responsibility to respond (blog comments, product reviews, etc.)
• Viral - don’t try and pull people, be out there communicating your message and interested parties will come.
• “Relationship Economy”
• Church is no longer the center of the community, therefore, we need new methods for creating community within the church and for unifying the community apart from the church.

So here’s the big question that I’m pondering today:

How has the way I communicate online changed the way that I communicate offline?

Note: I was planning on going back today to hear Joe Suh from MyChurch.org speak, but personal events have come up that will keep me from being there.

 

Heads Up!

Today (right this minute, actually) and tomorrow I will be attending workshops at the Dynamic Church Conference. If you’re a tech professional-type who happens to be reading and are turned off by the conference title, please give it a chance. I’ll be debriefing on the two session that I am attending which are both specifically dealing with technology and social media issues. Stay tuned for more.

 

Proliferation of Knowledge

Last night I watched this interesting video.

The speaker talks about how we are sharing knowledge more openly today and one of the main venues for that is the internet - specifically, through things such as wikipedia.

This started me thinking about the proliferation of free online applications and information sources. I remember when I first started using the internet the amount of free content was very limited. Anything of real value had a price tag attached. Imagine all that is available from just one site, Google, for example. 10 years ago you wouldn’t have been able to have access to things like Google Docs, GMail, Google Calendar, etc. without paying a dime. And these are not applications that have a small subset of users - these are the next wave of business productivity.

So, this idea is not completely new, remember a thing called television? (you probably have one in your living room where you watch American Idol - don’t lie, you know you watch it) Broadcast television doesn’t charge you a fee to access their content, so long as you have a set to decode their signal. How do the do it? The same way that the web is learning to - advertising revenue. The great thing about it, though, is that television has so numbed us to advertising that (at least for me) I can ignore the advertising and enjoy the content on my favorite sites.

Along with advertising revenue funding the spread of knowledge, the decrease in the cost to get in the door (lower computer prices, free wi-fi, etc.) has brought more people into the game.

All that to say, we’re living at an amazing time in history when the information that you want (and a lot that you don’t want) is at your fingertips. I don’t think that we’ve even begun to skim the surface of the cultural impact that this will have over the course of the next generation. We just have to make sure that the information that we’re gaining is more valuable than David Archuleta’s shoe size.

 

Out of Sight

I had a good conversation with Julian Baldwin yesterday regarding social media.

What really came from it, though, had little to do with media and more to do with leadership. I believe that leaders have to consistently have vision for the organization and communicate that vision as often as possible. One of the difficulties of being a visionary leader, however, is that you often run too far out in front of your team.

The flipside of this would be the “nuts and bolts” leader who is arm-in-arm with his team members but never takes the time to dream and develop a vision that can move the organization forward.

Then there is a guy like me who runs way out in front, realizes no one is around, runs back to pep everyone up and gets caught up in the details until I can break free again. (Note: this has nothing to do with the teams I’ve worked with and everything to do with how I function.)

So, this was the conclusion that I came to: A leader must be out in front leading the charge for the team, but he can never be out of sight or out of earshot.

Where are you? Are you so far out in front that your team has forgotten what you look like? Are you arm-in-arm standing still? Are you wearing yourself out running back and forth between the two? Or are you well-paced, leading the charge?

 

 

 

More leadership hints (heavy sarcasm)

 

It’s the Message, not the Medium

As you may know, over the past two months I’ve been learning more and more about online social networking and new media. And it has been a very fruitful time of deepening relationships and developing new relationships. But today I’ve had a revelation and to those who have been at this for a while it’s probably nothing new. So here it is:

It’ the MESSAGE, not the MEDIUM.

How the message is delivered is only relevant if the message is significant. Once you have a viable message, then you can figure out how to get it out.

All this time I’ve been learning about media and spending little time developing my message.

So, here’s my challenge to myself: don’t write for the sake of writing, or email for the sake of emailing, or blog for the sake of blogging, ad infinitum. If I’m going to speak, I had better have something to say.

 

Monday Morning List

Happy late Mother’s Day

Because I can’t get it to work from my phone or sync with Facebook I’m quitting twitter for now.

Survivor was shocking all the way down to the very last vote.

Excited about attending a couple of sessions at Dynamic Church Conference this week.

I started watching LOST from the beginning.

Listening to the new Counting Crows record.

Started reading Chasing Daylight by McManus.

 

1 Thought

We all know that people love hero stories. Certainly this has a lot to do with the battle of good vs. evil and the spectacle of it all. But maybe it’s also because they get to see people fully living out their strengths. Maybe we would all feel like heroes if we discover our strengths and use them more often.

 

Resource of the Week

I’ve been reading the book Church Marketing 101.

So far it has been nothing like what I had expected and has actually surpassed my expectations. I would recommend it for - literally - anyone involved in church life from volunteers to church leaders.
There is a great discussion in it of making your church relevant to the environment in which it is located.
Recently I’ve heard that argument that “The church is, always has been, and always will be relevant.” True… and ignorant. Paul says that the Gospel is “foolishness” to unbelievers. Perception is reality and if the unchurched see the church as irrelevant, then for all intents and purposes, it is.

From what I’ve read thus far, this book does a great job of helping churches bridge that relevance gap.

 

Creating Culture

Last week Cynthia posted an article about 10 new media values and asked people to guess what they were.

I’d like to piggyback on that idea and ask:

What are the key elements of culture?

This could apply to nations, people groups, businesses, churches, etc. What are the defining characteristics of culture? Here’s one to start with - shared language.

Let me know what you think, I’ll offer some more suggestions later.

 

Own it! Part 2

A while ago I wrote about “owning it.“

Waltz says that when the people start saying “yours” or “their” in reference to the organization that they are personally a part of, it is a warning sign. (for instance, Employee to Boss: “I’m just trying to make your store what it needs to be.”) He says that this indicates a lack of ownership and I totally agree.

The language of ownership is the language of leadership. That is, plural pronouns “we” and “our”.

Further, I think that an employee can only have as much ownership as his supervisor. Some can run on their own energy for a while, but when the boss doesn’t own it, then it’s hard for anyone else to.

So,

• How do your people refer to the organization? Is it ours or yours?
• Do you feel like team member ownership is dropping? Check yourself and see how much ownership you are taking - and demonstrating in front of your people.