iDEA NATION is a social network designed to link believers together who have a passion for creating new innovative and creative strategies for ministry endeavor.  iDEA NATION, built on Ning, is the brainchild of Josh Webb and is designed to be a space where ministry ideas are shared, explored, collaborated on, etc.

iDEA NATION invites new concepts and ideas so whether your ministry projects are tested or have never been used before, all are welcome to contribute.  Obviously, you’ve got to join to participate.

The site looks good and it’s primary drawback, at this point, seems to be lack of content & membership.  It appears that around 90 people have signed up.  Likely, since it’s a new network, membership will grow and resources accumulate.

Whether you’re a seasoned ministry leader with innovative ideas to share or a novice looking for resources, you can check out iDEA NATION at: http://www.goideanation.org.

I’m always excited to get a new edition of COLLIDE Magazine. I also like to watch them experiment and try new things like the COLLIDE Show.  Just days ago, COLLIDE spotlighted a ministry I love, New Hope Christian Fellowship in Hawaii.   I was happy to see New Hope spotlighted because it has a special place in my heart for three reasons:

1) We love attending there whenever we are vacationing (I even blog it)

2) New Hope is affiliated with the Foursquare Denomination of which I am also a part and

3) They have just been through a demanding season while Pastor Wayne Cordeiro recovered from his recent open heart surgery.

You can read the spotlight on New Hope’s media here.

I’ve just received an email from COLLIDE and their year-end “best of 2008″ nominations are in.   All your favorites are on the list including….. Church Marketing Sucks, Church Video Ideas, Swerve and yes, yours truly, The Digital Sanctuary.

Vote for the best media/culture book, best media producer, best blogging platform, best sermon podcast, etc.

Here’s the link to vote for 2008’s Reader’s Choice awards.

I’m intrigued by the data and information from Forrester Research so I love reading the blog of Jeremiah Owyang.  So many of the concepts explored in the world of social media seem to me, (am I the only one?)  to be directly tied to all the changes in business models, political strategies, economic developments (vis-a-vis digital divisions), and communication/mass media practices.

Over the summer, Jeremiah posted this:  Trends, Corporate Adoption of Social Media: Tire, Tower and the Hub and Spoke.  It’s come up in so many discussions, at conferences, etc. I thought readers might be interested in the details.

Using three basic metaphors, a tire, a tower and a hub and spoke, Jeremiah identifies three social media adoption styles.  Here’s an excerpt:

The Tire
Common to grassroots movements within corporations, adoption happens at the lowest levels at the company, rather than from a centralized group. You’ll see individual business units define their own strategy, pick their own tools, engage their own vendors, and communicate with the market on their own terms.

Common to companies that haven’t put a strategy in place, depending on culture, this could be detrimental as resources are not used efficiently, data is spread on multiple systems, and the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing.

The Tower
Common in organizations where power is centralized, we may see a central team formed to organize social media. This team defines the policy, best practices, vendors, and tools. This team which will commonly found in corporate communications and supported by PR will often dictate the direction of social media. Expect a dedicated role or sub-group to appear either experiential marketing, new media, or interactive media to eventually be born out of the group, where social media is centralized.

Social media is a grassroots movement, so common dangers can be gagging the natural voice of conversations of product experts with customers using these tools, so a centralized team needs to be more of a support organization to the enterprise, not a controller.

The Hub and Spoke
This coordinated model has a central organizational unit that provides best practices, sets policy, supports infrastructure but encourages conversations at the edges of the company. More about empowering business groups to partake in natural social media discussions without hindering, this group will be more of a coordinator, and less of a controller. Expect to see this model to occur as social media infiltrates every nook and cranny of a business, and at a certain point, a company as an enterprise can’t ignore the raging groundswell.

Cautions to this model, as overly coordinated programs will be difficult to achieve, and may be ineffective to different unique markets that a large company may have. Like the tower, having a centralized group at a large enterprise is always going to slow down natural conversations so focus on empowerment, rather than control.

Can you identify your church’s leadership style?  If so, you’ll be able to determine it’s strengths, weaknesses and the value social media may play within your staff and congregation.

Image: WikiCommons

As more and more leaders and influencers explore the benefits of the relationship economy by participating in social networks, services like LinkedIn increase in value.

Advertising Age, for example, has just released data offering clearer definition about who uses LinkedIn and what they’re using the service to accomplish.  Although it was originally designed as a professionals’ network, LinkedIn is now gaining credibility across all networks.   Advertising Age reports it has at least 30 million subscribers.  Since many times, LinkedIn connections seem business related, it could be that Christians miss seeing how their LinkedIn rolodex has any ministry value.

But as participatory media evolves we, as Christian leaders, are broadening our understanding of the value of contacts, connections and colleagues.  Spheres of influences branch out and link us together with often fewer and fewer degrees of separation (see: 6 degrees of separation).

More importantly, others view our connections as a measure of credibility and accountability.  They see our contacts as a means of authenticating our lives.  This trend towards a relationship-based economy (placing value on relationships) is what gives social media it’s value add.

For example, if I have a friend who is asking if I know of a good ministry in Dallas, Texas, I would be far more likely to recommend a LinkedIn contact in that area than anything else.  Furthermore, if I recommend a pastor in Dallas to my friend, that recommendation is greatly enhanced if that pastor has other connections shared in common via social networking sites with the person looking for a church.

Social networking will grow in value as “advertising” gives way to personal recommendations.  You can research this trend online. (i.e. - See Online Advertising is Now Dead by Dave Winer)

If you need to know more about LinkedIn, you can receive online training via webinar at sites like Integrated Alliances. (They also offer Facebook training.)  If we know one another you can add me: you’ll find my LinkedIn profile here.

LifeChurch.tv has been in active development of a brand new internet campus tool to run their online experiences. Today, they roll out the first live version.  Online Community Pastor, Tony Steward, while testing Google video out with me, reminded me that today, Sunday, November 14th, 1pm Central Time, is the launch.

Since they haven’t gotten a chance to get real universal feedback yet or to test out how it handles with a large number of participants, they’d like to invite us to beta test it.  Let’s invite our blog readers, twitter followers, etc. to be in the first group of people outside of LifeChurch.tv staff to interact with the new tool.  Our feedback before launch will be important.  Here’s how you can help:

1. Write a blog post asking your readers come and participate in this beta test of the new internet campus tool, and include a link to the new internet campus tool.
2. Twitter about the test on over the next couple of days with the link to the new internet campus we will provide below.
3. Send an email or other communication (Facebook, etc.) to your fellow church staff or personal network of pastors to have them come and help to evaluate the tool.
4. Come yourself and participate in the experience and offer up feedback as you notice things. (all feedback can be sent to http://getsatisfaction.com/lifechurchtv Sam Duregger, who is the Digerati Drago (Project Manager).)
   

If you have any questions, observations or comments, today will be the time to let ‘em know.
Here is the link to view the experience and to send people to:

http://new.icampus.lifechurch.tv

Since Christian leaders, especially pastors, are often “wired” for serving others, it’s not really a surprise that online communication technologies can sometimes trick us, tempting us to serve them rather than serving us.

No matter which technologies you and your staff elect to use, from Google docs to Yammer, we can probably all agree, the most common and far-reaching culprit in our technological clutter is our out of control email.

Contrary to what many of our tech-savvy congregation members might think, it’s often pastors who have the least time to learn basic email processing techniques.  And to aggravate the condition, the more staff support, the more likely we may be to handing off the basics, creating a knowledge & training gap.  Pastors can easily end up as underdogs when it comes to out muscling the email avalanche.

Mastering your email is absolutely essential for freeing your time for other things.  Furthermore, several fundamental principles provide a simple way to get ahead of your inbox and stay “in control” of your email.

Whether you subscribe to Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero style or some other form of ordered system, you will never like your computer the way you could with your email lording over you.

Michael Hyatt, President & CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, has blogged extensively on email techniques on his blog From Where I Sit (see: Yes, You Can Stay on Top of Email).  He processes about 100 emails an hour and still has ample time to Twitter.  Think that’s not possible?

Check out some of his system (like not touching the mouse!)….

1. Empty your inbox everyday.
2. Don’t get bogged down, keep moving.
   • Do—take action on the task now. I follow David Allen’s two-minute rule. If I can do what is being requested in less than two minutes, I do it immediately. This gets stuff off your to-do list before it ever gets on it. This has the added advantage of making you look responsive.
   • Delegate—pass the task along to someone else. I’m not talking about “passing the buck.” But oftentimes someone else is better equipped to fulfill the sender’s request. Dawson Trotman once said, “I purposed never to do anything others could or would do when there was so much of importance to be done that others could or would not do.” In other words, try to focus on where you add value and offload everything else.
   • Defer—consciously decide you will do the task later. This only applies to asks you cannot complete in two minutes or less or can’t delegate to someone else. You can either add the task to your to-do list or schedule an appointment with yourself to complete it. Fortunately, in Entourage, I convert an email message to a task or an event (i.e., appointment) with a single keystroke.
   • Delete—determine if you might need the information later. If not, delete it. My own assumption is that if it’s really important, someone, somewhere else in the world, has a copy of it.
   • File—if you think you might need the information, file it. But do not create an elaborate set of file folders. This is the single most important piece of advice I can give you. Just file everything in one folder called “Processed Mail.” If it is more complicated than this, it will lead to procrastination. Trust me on this. You will have to decide, Should I file this under Tami because it is from her or under Max because it is about him? And then what happens if the email covers more than one subject? Do you make copies of the email and put one copy under each folder? Things can get complicated fast.Forget all of that. File your email in one folder and let your email or system software (e.g., “Spotlight”) find it when you need it. The search capabilities of almost every modern email program will enable you to put your hands on any message whenever it is necessary. It may take you a few minutes longer to find the message using this method, but this is offset by the hours you waste trying to figure out how to file your messages.
3. Use keyboard shortcuts and avoid the mouse.
4. Let email rules filter the low-priority stuff.

Like Michael, I also have a Bacn folder for email newsletters, receipts, and other automatically-generated reading material including almost every notice I get from Facebook!  “Spam” is unsolicited bulk email.  “Bacn” is solicited bulk email.  This simple trick (thank you Tony Steward) gives me control over incoming and thus saves me valuable processing steps (read: time).

My Willow Creek Group Life Conference 2008 session “Leveraging Technology to Support Community” is now available on SlideShare.

WFX will be a premier event for church executives, facilities overseers and tech teams looking to enhance and grow their ministries through the strategic use of their facilities and technical production.

WFX will answer questions like:

• What are the latest trends for successful church designs?
• How can my team prepare to successfully manage a building project, small or large?
• How will the new economic conditions affect your church’s budgets?
• How can your church maximize its facilities and AV equipment to stretch your dollars further?
• How can creation care and ‘greening’ my church save money and the environment?
• What are tech production tips and techniques that can take my services to the next level?

There will be nearly 400 exhibiting companies and you can attend sessions to learn more about: finance and fundraising strategies; architectural design and innovative, cost-saving construction methods; energy management and green building designs; plus a wide range of cutting-edge, audio, video and lighting equipment and successful production strategies.

TechCrunch reports today:

“Facebook blew past MySpace in visitors from across the world back in April, but the global gap continues to widen.  According to the latest figures from comScore, Facebook attracted 161.1 million unique visitors worldwide in September, compared 117.9 million for MySpace. For Facebook, that number was up from 4.7 percent from the 153.9 million people who visited the social network in August.  Visitors to MySpace declined 1.6 percent globally from 119.8 million.

The global gap between the two is now 43.2 million visitors.  To put that in perspective that is a tad more than the number of people who visit Facebook in the U.S. alone, which in September was 41.4 million. Facebook still dominates in the U.S., with 73.0 million visitors in September.”

Besides these two golliaths, I can’t pass up an opportunity to mention LinkedIn (used primarily by business professionals) which has a reported user base of 29 million and the microblogging darling, Twitter, which has, according to a brand new Wikipedia update, has a mere 3.2 million.

Oh yeah and all the rest, Plaxo, ROOV, Friendfeed,  Nexopia (mostly in Canada); Bebo, Hi5, Tagged & Skyrock in parts of Europe; Orkut in Central & South America & Friendster, Orkut, Xiaonei and Cyworld in Asia and the Pacific Islands.