M2LIVE is a grassroots effort allowing believers of all backgrounds to share and learn from one another.  As a series of web-based and live hands-on workshops, M2LIVE is designed for church leaders and volunteers interested in enhancing their ministry using the latest in web and social media technology.

The M2LIVE webinar showcases insights from many of today’s brightest church web evangelists. While presenters have opportunity to share their message, the format allows ample time for asking questions and interacting with the presenter. Today’s free M2LIVE webinar features a discussion of some of the values embedded in the new media and why some folks resist participation.

Join me for the discussion today. To access the webinar, visit http://www.M2LIVE.org/live at 11:30am EDT / 8:30am PST.

Creating products that actually serve the church is not easy, especially when it comes to technology.  The interwebs are littered with Christian ghettos, static dead-end websites and social networking tools that promised they were designed to serve the church but somehow really didn’t.

Why a product or application fails is hard to say.   Some apps end up as walled gardens, others accidentally fell into broadcast mode, offering no community appeal, and so died off, and still others never got over their clunky user interface issues or high bar fees.

Nevertheless, there are those courageous individuals who press forward always straining to develop services that really do foster richer communication opportunities for churches.

Recently, I was asked to check out a start up called SoChurch and I found myself curious….

Here’s what I learned:

SoChurch is being built with the church in mind.

SoChurch is a work in progress, with developers getting plenty of input early on to make sure the product release is stellar.

SoChurch wants to change the way ministries and churches leverage web technology for church communication.

SoChurch is a communication platform for community development both within and beyond the church walls.

SoChurch is going to be scalable, dynamic, and culturally flexible – and I can’t wait to see what that means!

John Saddington, a SoChurch advisor & evangelist said this recently, “Organizations who are weak in terms of communication end up with frustrated programs, initiatives, and burnt out personnel.”  So true!!   So bring it SoChurch, help us communicate.

You can expect to hear a lot more in the near future and follow SoChurch on Twitter to get daily status updates.

Disclaimer: I am on the advisory board for SoChurch.

Yes, I know it’s the middle of “iPhone Church Service week” but I’ll be responding to fb messages, dm’s & gmails all week if I don’t put up the slides from the Echo Conference breakout that I got to do with Dawn Nicole Baldwin last Thursday in Dallas.

Working with Dawn is always refreshing and I really respect her professional opinions.  I’ve had an opportunity to interface/work with her several times in the last couple of years in a variety of situations.  Due to her extensive church consulting background, she’s just really able to see the big picture for ministry professionals.

Of course, participants were able to text in questions [courtesy of Jarbyco] & we had a some excellent feedback afterwards.   If you need notes, Dawn recommends Tim Schraeder’s recap.  (Good heavens, I sat with Tim in Drew Goodmanson’s breakout on Church Website Data and his keyboard was smokin’ – I think he types about 130 words per min).

Here’s the downloadable slide package (thank you Dawn!) if that’s what you’re looking for…..

Download Echo_social_media_SLIDES_09

Brilliant overview of the future evolution of the Social Web by Forrester Reseacher, Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) plus John McCrea & Joseph Smarr.

Every church leader can easily understand the future of social communities and their potential value by investing in this in depth analysis of where we are in the evolution of the Social Web.  Understanding participatory media, albeit currently in it’s infancy, is a critical skill in future communication strategies for faith based communities.

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.

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.

There’s so much exciting news in the world of the socially networked church right now, it’s hard to keep it all straight.  One of the most important pieces of information I got this week is the one above.

Check out the wording “not a ROOV Facebook app”.  Sounds more significant than just another app, huh?  Maybe like a marriage proposal.  Or at least an engagement…

Pay attention to ROOV; this is the beginning of something big as social media allow the global Church to network itself in new ways based on connections between individuals with shared passions…..

Faith communities are responding to the social media revolution.  Churches are leveraging online technology and attracting the attention of even the most seasoned participatory media veterans and experts. (i.e. Chris Brogan on Social Media Pastor)

As Christian leaders grow increasingly well-educated about opportunities for both intra-congregational communications and missional/outreach connections, certain options stand out.  Unifyer is just such an empowerment resource.

Unifyer is a powerful web-based tool that allows leaders to deliver important information to church members with the click of a button.   It’s also a place where individual church ministries can communicate with their participants and with each other, all without requiring centralized oversight.  Decentralized conversations are the driving force behind participatory media.  No surprise to Christians who have observed the gospel message spread virally person to person ever since the New Testament church was established.

Unifyer taps into the micro-communities blooming everywhere online and fertilizes them by allowing the rich connections and conversations that encourage growth and produce fruit.   Unifyer allows real-time, two-way conversations that foster intimacy, build group affinity, and grow online communities.

Although it might seem like Unifyer is a website, a database or an online social network, it’s really a powerful combination of key elements of each of these.  It’s a beautiful concept assembled in an elegant package and I intend to highlight it often.

I’ll use future posts to share with you some of the feedback from the early adopters who’ve already realized Unifyer is available.  I’m also looking forward to telling you about my visit to their offices and how Unifyer will be used to support the community developing around the upcoming Church 2.0 book on innovation in the Church.

Unifyer is brought to you by the Pursuant Group.   If you are interested in learning more about this brand new service, you can always access their badge in my sidebar.

The recent Southern California minor earthquake caused a flurry of tweets in the twitterverse.  This is what it looks like on a Twitter-graph.

Twitter, the micro-blogging or social messaging service (SMS) has been embraced by communication's early adopters but hasn't spread in terms of mainstream acceptability yet.  In fact, according to Wikipedia, Twitter has only 2,200,000 users.

Furthermore, it's proven somewhat (how's that for diplomatic?) unreliable by users.  Thus 'serious updaters' have remained uneasy and investigate other services and options for universal status updates.  (See – Read Write Web's Six Ways to Update Your Status.)

Although Twitter has been talked about frequently at Digital, many unconverted still think of it as a narcissistic, time-wasting, pointless, squandering of words.  They are of the "who cares what I'm doing right now?" camp.  Prudent Christians think carefully about stewardship issues and where we invest our time is important. 

But bear with us over at Digital.  Twitter can be a bit of a surprise.  It has an unexpected way of creating links, forging bonds, developing certain degrees of intimacy and spawning mini-communities.  And when it comes to the Church, that may make micro-messaging hugely important.

Micro-blogging has hidden attributes that we are just now discovering.  Take, for example, the recent Los Angeles' shaker.  When the earthquake hit, I was sitting at my desk with 2 computers up – one on a twitter page. 

I saw a trusted friend in my area of SoCal say in a tweet – earthquake.

I shifted everything I was doing to pay attention and look for a confirming tweet.

I received one within 5 seconds from another friend – about 60 miles away.

I observed multiple confirmations within 10 seconds, all from SoCal locals.

I, myself, began reporting from my location via tweets.

I began checking in with my network of twittering friends since my phone lines were down.

I began answering tweets from worried twitter friends across country.

I realized my network of locals was the most immediate & accessible source of info.

I had 10 people add me as a twitter connection within hours.

I predicted that twitter might be as news-worthy as the earthquake.  

LA Times next day twitter coverage.

You can follow my journey by simply going to my account (http://twitter.com/cynthiaware) and scrolling backwards. 

This incident galvanized my feelings about Twitter – it's not about the news; it's about people.  It's about relationships; it's about who connects to who.  When do those connections happen and when are they the most meaningful.  It seems that in little episodes of micro-connecting, relationships are created. 

Increasingly, as the relationship economy emerges, our networks of trusted "friends" will grow more vital.  The communication tools we use to support them, whether email, cell calls or tweets, have inherent value.  Maybe, as prudent Christians, we will change our view from time spent online to time invested.