Preaching to the Wired

Via this post at ChurchMarketingSucks.com:

Rick Klau is the Vice President of Business Development for Feedburner. He recently spoke at the ELCA Communicator’s Conference in Chicago on August 4, 2006. His topic was “Preaching to the Wired” – about how churches can and should use modern communication mechanisms to communicate and reach out. The total lengh is approximately 75 minutes, but it is well worth it. I’ve listened to it completely once, listened to parts of it several times, and I’ll probably listen to it several more times to make sure I absorb all he has to say. The link to the RealAudio streaming file can be found here. It is listed under August 4.

These are some of the quick notes I made during my first pass at listening to it while writing code at work:

Points to frame the discussion:

If you’re on the internet, and you’re not on MySpace, you’re not on the Internet.

If your evangelizing, and you’re not evangelizing through the use of blogs, podcasts, video blogs, or Second Life, then you aren’t fully evangelizing.

—

Not just about communicating to young people – The fastest growing demographic of people with internet access is retirees. They are often consuming the most amount of information online due to the amount of free time they have during the day. This is not just “how to reach the young people”.

For anyone under the age of 20, more than 2/3 of the messages they send or receive are via IM.

Weblogs are just websites that are arranged chronologically in reverse chronological order. Weblogs are Google’s “drug of choice”.

Typical church website:
Service hours
Map of location
Driving directions
List of staff

How likely are people to link to that? Not very likely. Must have original, relevant content to be linked to.