I had a great conversation last week with a client from a church here in Nashville. Our conversation about promoting an upcoming project turned into a discussion about mySpace.com. He told me that the youth pastor at his church has his own page on mySpace so he can “be where his kids are.”

Turns out it’s been a really good way to stay in touch with his students and more interestingly, it’s created an opportunity for this pastor to see who and what his kids are into. It’s even spurred some conversations both individually and in the group setting. The youth pastor has discovered topics he needed to address that he wouldn’t have known about without spending some time on mySpace.

My brief history with mySpace
I first heard about mySpace a year ago (Spring 2005) as something that a lot of bands were getting into to promote their music. Over the next few months the national media seemed to really catch wind with the massive numbers of teenagers and young adults on mySpace. mySpace made news again last summer when Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. bought them out. Sometime last fall I began to read stories about the “evils” of mySpace and finally this spring it seems like that sentiment has really taken root. It’s almost as if it’s become a very simple equation in people’s minds: mySpace = bad.

The fact of the matter is that mySpace is neither bad nor good just like the Internet is neither bad nor good. mySpace is, however, new, very popular, and has been adopted by millions of teens.

What concerns me is that it has become easier for people to simply think “mySpace = bad” rather than spend some time like the youth pastor I described above did and go where the kids are. In fact, a large Christian publisher here in Nashville just recently decided not to promote a national youth outreach event on mySpace for this very reason. The option was discussed but quickly decided that going where the kids are wasn’t worth the potential uproar they might encounter by creating an event promotion page on mySpace.

I can’t help but wonder what kind of opportunity was lost here. The very kids this publisher would say they hope to reach are the ones on mySpace 10 times a day…and now they may never even find out about it. mySpace is a perfectly viral medium, but it won’t be for this publisher. They blew a business opportunity and a ministry opportunity. Perhaps after this they will reconsider for the future and change the equation to “mySpace = neutral” and then possibly one day, “mySpace = good outreach opportunity.”

I just had a great lunch at Moe’s today with a friend. The Billy Barou (pictured above) with steak has become my favorite menu item. We were talking about blogs and I posed the quetion, “is it better to have really good content but post less frequently than it is to have decent content but post new information all the time?” My friend didn’t know the answer and we thought it would be great if there were a study about this sort of thing. My hunch is that the sheer volume of a blogger can outshine a highly informative source that’s not updated with any frequency. Perhaps this is a case of quantity being better than quality. If that is true, then how much more of an impact could a blog with great insight that also posts regularly make?

Sometimes knowing what not to do is more important than figuring out what you should do. I suggest you place banner ads in the “things I shouldn’t do” category of your brain. Banner ads were a great way for websites to make money several years ago…meaning that both the website hosting the banner ad and the advertiser saw a benefit. In recent years, however, banner ads are generally disregared at best and just plain old annoying at worst. In fact banner ads were a motivating factor for me to drop my long-held Hotmail email account. I was getting sick and tired of flashing mortgage ads everytime I checked my email. Now I use Gmail, but I digress…

In Seth Godin’s book, Purple Cow, he discusses the ineffectiveness of banner ads. He was even blogging about this back in 2003…which should tell you how much further out of date and ineffective banner ads are today. Unfortunately, there are plenty of people still spending money on these, but if you are a church or ministry you undoubtedly have a measure of stewardship for which you are held accountable. If that is the case and you’re currently spending money on banner ads take a hard look at their effectiveness. If you have no doubt that it’s driving people to your site then stick with it…you’re one of the lucky ones. If your tests show that the banner ads really aren’t working then drop them immediately and take the money to pay someone overtime to jumpstart your web 2.0 strategy.

My friends over at realVerse.com have just gotten their vlog (video blog) off the ground in the last few weeks after several months of planning. They serve as a perfect microexplosion case study. When realVerse got started it established itself as a conservative video blog commenting on news, entertainment, religion, and culture. About the same time they were launching a FoxNews commentator, Michelle Malkin, started her own vlog called Hot Air. Seeing the target audience overlap realVerse sprang to action and contacted the producer of Hot Air…and as you’ll see here, it paid off.

Although realVerse hasn’t gotten an on air mention yet, this is a great first step to getting the word out with a little research and determiniation. This is a great example of something that doesn’t cost realVerse anything yet can be an invaluable source of recognition. Seth Godin talked about this in a blog post a few weeks ago. More specifically, the explanation of the long tail will give you insight into a true microexplosion.

In a recent conversation with some friends I mentioned Wikipedia and one of them said, “wiki what?” If you find yourself in the same category as my friend let me introduce you to Wikipedia. It is self described encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Once again, a web 2.0 application that is used by millions every day will allow you to create a space for your own organization. There’s no reason why your church, business, or ministry couldn’t have a wikipedia article online 30 minutes from right now. Be sure to review their suggestions before jumping in…but check out a church and business already on board.

The other thing that happend during the fall of 2005 was the introduction of the video iPod. This single device launched a new era of video. For consumers, this is the next step in progamming that fits our schedules. For corporate broadcasters and microbroadcasters (podcasts) alike this new wave of pocket-programming is yet another opportunity to impact people where right where they are.

With all the new web 2.0 tools out there one that has particularly captured my interest is video blogging. Last fall seemed to be a tipping point in video blogging. One of the big reasons for that was the launch of YouTube.com, a video site that instantly allowed every person with a video camera to post video online for free. Since then there have been a number of other compaines like YouTube launch but this is yet another opportunity for communicating in a medium most people are used to…video.

So what the heck is web 2.0? Well, there are a lot of different phrases being used to describe it. Some people are calling it “social media” or “new media” but you can boil it all down to this: the next wave of technology that incorporates the interactions of individuals. For a more in-depth perspective check out Wikipedia’s definition. If you’re more visually oriented check out this web 2.0 overview.

So why do we need to consider this from a Christian perspective? Well, my hope is that this blog will answer that question in the long term, but for now I can’t help but think about how Christian organizations are notoriously behind the curve technologically. Whether you’re part of a church, ministry or Christian business there are a host of new tools available to you to communicate with people and the best part is that most of them will hardly cost you any money. Ready to see what a few people are doing? Here are a few churches testing the waters.

Have you ever considered that a spark is really a small explosion? We generally don’t regard a spark that way because there’s no flying debris or plume of smoke yet given the right conditions and time a spark can have the same impact as a large explosion. In the same way, the new array of web 2.0 communication tools that seem to be coming out daily are spark creators. They may not make an immediate impact on the group you’re trying to reach like a more traditional means, but in time they can become highly effective for you. This blog is dedicated to people who want to use the tools of web 2.0 to make an impact on the world.

Something to consider: Everything available to you through web 2.0 takes time to get off the ground. Some people will be fine with that, but for those of you with mandates and timelines you’re going to come to a fork in the road of whether you want to do something that people can see soon (old marketing methods) with something that will have an enduring impact (web 2.0 methods). Consider it you own little blue pill vs red pill. One will take you to a world you couldn’t imagine and the other…will keep you right where you are.