Church Technology, bring the people in or take ministry to the people?

I was having a conversation with a childhood friend (who is now a pastor) about Church and Technology and we came to a crossroads about how we thought churches should utilize technology. We both agree that churches should use technology to reach people and expand the outreach of the ministry, but he asked me how often does technology result in additional people in the sanctuary.

My approach to technology and the entire premise of The iChurch Method was to use technology to take the ministry to the people. I developed a strategy that would inform your local congregation and give them a way to connect with the ministry online, increase your online audience that is not local by providing them online tools to connect and providing information for future church supporters by positioning the ministry to be accessible in numerous ways via technology.

It never occurred to me that there was a focus by pastors to utilize technology to get people into the sanctuary OVER building an online audience and increasing the supporters that may never set foot inside the church. It appears easy for pastors to understand tv ministries and using TBN or The Church Channel to broadcast their churches to millions around the world and look for donations from their tv supporters, whom may never step foot into the sanctuary. But there seems to be a disconnect by these same pastors when it comes to building an online ministry using video, social media, mobile devices and streaming to build an online audience that they may never see but will still support the ministry via online donations.

Therefore, I believe that churches, ministries, pastors and Christianity in general will need to embrace technology, invest in online ministries, websites, mobile solutions and social media. Churches will need to continue to take the ministry to the people and make sure whatever device a person picks up, their ministry is accessible from it and accept the fact that online audiences will continue to grow and the church will have supporters that they see every weekend for services and supporters that they don’t see but still embrace the church as well. What are your thoughts on Churches embracing technology?

http://ichurchmethod.com/church-technology-2/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=church-technology-2

Mobile Websites vs. Mobile Apps

Most recently at a conference I was asked which mobile option should a church take, a mobile website or a mobile app? This question seemed to quickly get the attention of all the attendees at the conference because a strange hush came over the room in anticipation of my answer. Thus, I took a deep breath and said with all confidence, “Both…now let me explain”.

I am a proponent of mobile apps, I thoroughly love my iphone and ipad and the numerous (128) apps that I have installed. I also have an Android phone with apps installed as well. The apps and their native integration into the operating system of the phone makes their usage much easier than a mobile website. Unfortunately, apps are phone specific and each app is limited to the phones that have that operating system, while mobile websites can be programmed for numerous phone because all of the latest smartphones have HTML5 Webkit enabled updated mobile web browsers.

A mobile website is the first step in a mobile web strategy therefore prior to a church investing in mobile apps, they should create a mobile website. One mobile website can encompass numerous mobile smartphones and that should be the focus of the mobile website, to reach as many mobile devices as possible. Initially, I used to say to only create a HTML Webkit enabled mobile website that will work with the latest mobile browsers but after attending the Biola Digital Ministry Conference, I learned that an even more scaled down mobile website should be created by the church to reach people in developing countries with limited mobile access. People in developing countries most often can only access the internet from mobile devices that have slow connections and therefore your church mobile website for this audience should load very quickly and not have too much going on. Remember, in order to do this you need to create a high level mobile website and a low level mobile website and program it to load either site depending on the connection and mobile device the user is on.

Therefore, let’s recap, if you are creating a mobile strategy for your church you first want to create a mobile website that can reach numerous mobile devices. Next, you want to create mobile apps for the iphone/ipad, next android, and finally windows mobile devices since those seem to be gaining attention as of the last few months. What’s your mobile strategy for your church or business?

http://ichurchmethod.com/mobile-websites-mobile-apps/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mobile-websites-mobile-apps

What is Klout? Klout.com that is..

My great aunt asked me a question on facebook a few weeks ago that made me really think for a second, she asked “I don’t understand Klout, can someone please explain it to me”. I have been on Klout for almost a year and I have a general understanding of Klout with a score of 61 but personally I still don’t totally understand the algorithm or how to easily make my score go up or down. I don’t expect them to explain their algorithm in full because just like Google’s search or Facebook’s newsfeed, that is proprietary information, but I do expect them to release more information on how to enhance and utilize Klout so that more people and organizations will embrace it.

According to Klout.com:
“Klout measures influence online using data from your social networks. Anywhere you have an online presence, you have the opportunity to influence people by creating or sharing content that inspires actions such as likes, retweets, comments and more. The more engagement your posts receive, the more influential you are. Klout uses this information to provide you a Klout Score that measures your overall influence.”

Initially I thought Klout was just another software out there that you can sign up for and hopefully it becomes more useful in the future but now I am starting to see the benefits of Klout as my score continues to increase. I have connected Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Youtube, Linkedin, Foursquare, and Instagram accounts and therefore as I interact normally with social media than my score increases. I can see how this could help a ministry or business because you can sign up as an individual influencer or a brand influencer and connect your social media accounts. One glaring thing that’s missing from Klout is Pinterest, there is no way to connect your Pinterest account to Klout and that needs to change in the near future.

Finally, as more organizations use Klout and take the scores of influencers into consideration, people will continue to take steps to increase their score. Here is a great article from Wired about Klout – http://www.wired.com/business/2012/04/ff_klout/all/ and I think this will give a great explanation on the benefits and drawbacks of it. In my short time on Klout I have found that the more I post (which I use bufferapp.com to post continuously) the more my score rises.

http://ichurchmethod.com/what-klout-klout-com-is/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=what-klout-klout-com-is

Google Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Facebook Newsfeed Optimization

According to Wikipedia, Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s “natural,” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”), search results. For quite a few years I have been familiar with SEO and the benefits of appearing higher in search engine results, specifically Google. As I have continued to help websites with their SEO, I have dealt with Google changing the search engine algorithm and thus making my strategy obsolete as I have had to relearn the new steps to improve search engine results. It’s not the easiest thing to do but it has been quite a task for ministry and business websites.

While reading http://allfacebook.com/news-feed-optimization-seo-facebook_b92006 last week I was introduced to a new term, Facebook Newsfeed Optimization. This is the approach to get stories and posts on facebook into as many people’s newsfeeds as possible. Facebook uses the EdgeRank formula to sort newsfeeds, the EdgeRank formula is based on how Facebook judges the closeness of two people (or a person and a brand), how valuable an activity is (sharing a photo is better than clicking “like,” for instance), and how long ago it took place. Precisely how these factors are measured is not revealed, and, like Google, Facebook is constantly making tweaks.

Therefore, when you are developing your online strategy, as you have your webmaster make sure your website is search engine optimized, make sure you have your social media manager make sure your facebook strategy is newsfeed optimized to your audience. To do this you need to go to edgerankchecker.com and connect via facebook and let them check your fanpage and analyze your audience, this will give you important data such as when to posts, what posts are most impactful and what the audience likes best.

http://ichurchmethod.com/google-search-engine-optimization-seo-facebook-newsfeed-optimization/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=google-search-engine-optimization-seo-facebook-newsfeed-optimization

Amazon Cloud Computing Outage? Cause for Concern?

I was just reading Managing risk in the wake of Amazon’s cloud outage and it discussed the outage that occurred last week where the cloud servers at Amazon went down. The issues were said to occur due to bugs in the code or inclement weather, depending on which source you read. With that being stated, here are my thoughts on the dependability of cloud computing.

In the early 2000s I was working in corporate america for a variety of companies because I was a web developer consultant. I had the opportunity to see a variety of organizations IT structure and how they reacted to the monthly and even weekly server issues that occurred within the company. Microsoft Outlook email would go down, Intranet server would go down, Internet connectivity would go down and every time a vital service went down, no one panicked or questioned the use of the service, they just waited until it was resolved. Yes, millions of dollars was being lost in man hours due to the lack of productivity during this downtime but there was never a mention of removing the Microsoft office servers or any other servers as our solutions.

Now, since the cloud is a viable solution to help small businesses compete with larger corporations and grow from a one man website into a fortune 500 company, it appears to come under attack more often than not. The cloud, and more specifically Amazon cloud solutions and even Google’s cloud solutions have a very successful uptime rate that is upwards of 95% – 98%, that’s extremely higher than what we dealt with in the early 2000s and for a fraction of the costs. When Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest went down last week, it wasn’t the cloud that we were upset with, it was the fact that these services that we depended on went down and someone had to take the blame. When in reality, we could’ve all been patient and waited a few hours or a day for Amazon to fix the issue and we go back to life as normal.

Companies need to make sure they have redundancy plans in place and backup sites available but the best lesson for working in the cloud was the title of this article – How to deal with cloud failure: Live, learn, fix, repeat.

http://ichurchmethod.com/amazon-cloud-computing-outage-cause-for-concern/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=amazon-cloud-computing-outage-cause-for-concern