Why Social Media is Critical to Your Success as a Leader…Right Now

Social media is dominating communication, leadership and marketing right now, if you don’t have a social media presence your influence will begin to shrink, if it isn’t shrinking already. As more and more of communications on the web begin to take hold in real life, almost exclusively because of social media and user-generated content, the sphere of influence that ‘real life only’ leaders have will begin to dwindle or at the very least require more and more resources to keep alive.

Rather than rattle off the statistics on the size and scope of social media, watch this video.

Here’s why social media is critical to your success:

Presence

How many people can you sustain one to one presence with in real life as a leader. For most leaders, that falls somewhere between 30 and 100. These are the people that stop by your office, have coffee with you, you talk on the phone with and you interact with on a personal level. A big misconception about social media is that it is only a medium for mass communication; this may be true, but it isn’t the point and if you view it this way you will fail. People that are active in social media are looking for that one to one interaction. With social media you can have quick but meaningful one to one interactions with people whom you otherwise wouldn’t have a chance to.

Influence

I don’t need to convince leaders that influence is something you need to value. You work hard to build a savings account of influence so that when it’s time to act on vision, you have people to carry out that vision. Influence builds on presence in that you need to have presence to build influence. It takes a lot of resources to have influence in real life, and it is rarely one to one.

Social media will give you influence into more peoples lives in a more personal way. Which is hard to comprehend because we don’t normally associate efficiency with quality relationships.

Networking

I can speak from my own experience. I have ‘people’ in every major city in America, and a few around the world. These are people I have a relationship with and we have presence and influence in each other’s lives. We help each other make decisions, starting small and as our relationships grow the trust does too. I have connections with people in similar leadership roles to mine, some farther along in their career that I learn from and some newer who look to me for advice.

Learning

As a leader you know that you need to never stop learning. Social media interactions will connect you to people and content to learn from that you at the least would be well behind the curve on or at worst, miss all together. The beauty of social networking is that as you develop more relationships and people in your networks get to know you, the content starts to literally find YOU. Daily I receive tweets and other messages from my networks with content that is very specific to my field and my leadership. When it comes to a new resource or book hitting the market, I don’t have to take a chance investing time in it that I might not get back if it turns out to be a dud, I can get a summary from a lot of people who know me before I invest my precious time.

Artists share inspiration, writers share stories, communicators share ideas and technologies, theologians sharpen each other and administrative leaders share techniques and resources.

Current Events and Culture

One hundred years ago when we only had newspapers, news got to the public that was a week or so old and as circulation and printing improved we were getting news that was only a day old. When television came on the scene we were now getting news that happened today. Blogs took news delivery to a whole new level and now we are getting news that is only a few hours old. Taking it even farther, social media delivers news that is happening NOW. Let me give you an example. I lived in Southern California and they have plenty of earthquakes there. When we had one, with in a couple minutes, because of social media, I knew where the quake was, how big it was and if my friends and family were okay. The ‘news cycle’ on social media comes and goes before CNN can even get a camera in front of a reporter.

The Leadership Web Presence Trinity

Twitter | your coffee shop
Twitter is the coffee shop, town center, library, park, water cooler of the web. It is the starting place for relationships. For most of us, this is our biggest network.

Facebook | your living room
Facebook is your living room, you  will most likely only connect with people whom you have already established a relationship with. Whether these are people you know in real life or you first connected with on Twitter or because they read your blog.

Blog | your podium
This is your platform for sharing more in depth content that is very specific to your leadership role and to give people a deeper look into your mind and life.

Now get on it!

Google your name. Do you even exist on the web? If you do, is it content that you control that shows up? If you don’t, you’re missing out on the future of leadership.

Social media revolution

Internet Citizen | a definition

If the internet has jumped the gap from being simply a tool of communication to an actual community, then what do it’s citizens look like?

When we plant a church in a community, it helps to know what the ideal target person looks like so that we can speak into their life and meet their unique needs.

What spaces do they frequent?

What apps do they use?

When are they online?

What pop culture stuff are they into?

What kind of careers do they have?

What’s their education?

What questions should we be asking?

We are live!!!

I was up until 2AM last night pushing the new gatewaychurch.com live. Everything is looking good. Just the usual DNS refresh headaches and some email issues.

So this marks the beginning of a whole new era at Gateway Church. I can’t wait to see what we can accomplish in the next few months!

Rock on!!!

#echo09 | Phil Cooke Notes

A brand is: A compelling story

Choice: The world is a choice

• In a media driven culture, visibility is just as important as ability
• You can’t brand a lie
• Being different is everything
• Stop thinking ‘mass’ and start thinking ‘niche’
• Understand the power of a name
• Speak the language of design
• Lose the lingo
• Culture is more important than vision
• Find the overarching theme for your life and work
• What drives you nuts?

‘Its not just who you are, its how you’re percieved that counts’

Web camp rocked your face off

Web camp was everything I hoped it would be and a great start to this incredible endeavor we are starting. Here’s the notes from the wiki:

9:00 – Introduction and Spiritual Framework – Vince

• http://www.deltronecho.com/2009/07/24/church-on-the-internet-the-vision/

9:30 – Team Generated Discussion #1 – (RC – Targeting Profile | what does an internet citizen look like?)

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007184 – Why people go online

http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=ah8mk6j9scwh_37gxv3mk5m – Internet Citizen presentation

http://www.pewinternet.org/Infographics/Generational-differences-in-online-activities.aspx – Activities online by generation (short verion)

10:00 – Team Generated Discussion #2 – (Betty Blake Churchill – The Voice of Gateway)

• Church resources example – http://open.lifechurch.tv
• Attend | Connect | Serve | Grow | Lead

10:30 – ‘Front Door Spaces’ – Vince

“Front Door Spaces” – places to get people discusing religion online in meaningful ways, and eventually leading them to something deeper that has the same feel, specifically the Gateway Internet campus. Meeting people, engaging in their lives, and getting connected.

• themysteryisthetruth.com
  • Podcasts
  • Movie nights (probably once a month) – community experience (ala 24, American Idol, …)
  • Next steps:  gathering content, needs writers, how do you deal with moderation
• prayerlabyrinth.com
  • Similar to the old style prayer walk, small actions that put significance into a prayer (e.g. throwing pebbles into a pool, adding a note to a bucket, etc)
• twelveeleven.me
  • Developing for Rami as a platform.
• Others
• Servemob – flash mob for serving/giving to people – kiva/micro-loans
• Caringbridge/care calendar/relational tithe – being there to support people who are hurting, healing
• Goodhappened.com – anti-fail blog #goodhappened – photos/videos/updates of social good that happened in your life or around you
  • Cross-linking to to servemob to get folks doing more when needs not 100% met
• How can build community frameworks for Gamers/Guilds/Rockband?
• Confession destruction – collect them (anonymously, like postsecret) and destroy them
• Layer VOIP  on these sites in appropriate places:
  • Group prayer as a station in the prayer labyrinth
  • Mysteryisthetruth – weekly live QA, recorded, streamed, and available 24/7 as a podcast/audio download
• Positive version of F* my life – LMF – quick notes about positive things that happened in their life.

11:30 – Team Generated Discussion #4 – (Karin – Authenticity – What Does That Look Like For Internet Churches)

• Learning to ‘listen’ online

12:00 – Internet Campus Vision, Framework and functionality

• What does it mean to have ‘church’ on the internet?
• Launch schedule
• Leadership Roles
• Spiritual Growth Strategy

1:00 – Lunch

Church on the Internet | the vision

The vision is coming together for the Internet Campus at Gateway Church in Austin, TX. At this point I have a very broad vision for the internet campus as we begin to gather some some people and some momentum.

The Reality
The internet is, for all intents and purposes, not unlike any community that a church planter might consider as a mission field. Yes, there are some obvious differences that often take center stage in the conversation but I would like to start by putting those aside. We all realize that there are some mandates in scripture for the actual physical gathering together of believers that we should not ignore. This is true, but we also have a mandate to take the Gospel to the ends of the Earth. So I say this; lets take this thing as far as we can and see what God can do.

What We’re Not Doing
It also needs to be said that what we are not doing is simply re-broadcasting the worship service from Gateway Church. Just like any Gateway campus we need to take the Gateway Church mission, vision and values and apply them to the community that is being targeted.

Church Planting Basics

Become a Part of the Community
When we plant churches in physical communities the first thing we do is become a part of the community. At its most basic level, we need to move there before we can have a church.

This is the first step for the internet campus too. We need to ‘move’ to the internet first and foremost. So the question is; what does moving to the internet mean?

Pre-Launch
Generally we start with some ‘soft launch’ experiences that give us the opportunity to try out our technology and fine tune our programming before the official grand opening.

Grand Opening
The official launch of the church plant. Marketing and word of mouth are all timed to peak at the grand opening.

Implement Leadership Strategy
Once the church is launch the next thing is to draw leaders out of the crowd that has been gathered.

Spiritual Growth Plan
Once we have some more leaders in place the spiritual growth strategies can be implemented.

More Outreach Efforts
The cycle comes back around again as we move the leaders and members of the new church toward evangelism efforts.

So here are the questions:

1. What does the ‘target’ person look like in the Internet Community?
2. What does a ‘gathering’ look like in the Internet Community?
3. How far are we going to take this?

Twitter + work = get fired? Not anymore, SpreadTweet saves the day

With the massive pile of Twitter clients to choose from, here is yet another and it is genius. SpreadTweet looks just like an open spread sheet in your favorite spreadsheet application. Which is perfect for getting your tweet on at work.

Coming project | everything is spiritual

We are launching a site that will essentially put any and all forms of spiritual/philosophical/metaphysical thought into one place. The site will give a balanced look at any and all belief systems with out being antagonistic to any of them.

The purpose is to build a community that is talking about spiritual things with the intent of injecting Christ into it.

We want you to contribute. We are looking for content contributers.

here’s the application:

RSVP for summer web camp ’09

Its probably a good idea for us to know how many people will be attending so that I can have enough goodies and also make sure the location will work.

So, fill this out. Don’t you love filling out web forms? If you need more details, GO HERE.