There’s no shortage of people bashing Facebook specifically and social media in general as contributors to narcissism, time-wasting, gossip, inappropriate relationships and more. So, it’s nice to see posts such as the one posted by Josh Riley on worship.com earlier this week that speak to the positive impact social media can have on ones spiritual life.

Josh highlights 5 specific benefits:

1. Accountability
2. Heart Analysis
3. Encouragement
4. Evangelism
5. Discernment

You can read more about each of these in Josh’s full post.

I would add at least 2 others to the list:

1. Learning/Ideas – Social media gives us the opportunity to learn new things about God and creative new ways to do ministry.
2. Collaboration – Social media enables us to connect with others who share a passion for a particular cause or project and work together to accomplish things we could never accomplish on our own.

What do you think about these 7 ways social media can have a positive impact on a person’s spiritual life?  Are there others you can think of?

I’m looking forward to speaking and participating in the 2013 Biola Digital Conference next week.  One aspect of the conference I’m particularly looking forward to is connecting with the other speakers (and participants).  Here’s a list of all the speakers with a link to their Twitter profile, plus Biola Digital.

• Biola Digital
• Michael Hyatt
• Scott Hamm
• Jason Caston
• John Edmiston
• John Mark Reynolds
• Paul Steinbrueck
• Neil Perlin
• Carolyn Kim
• Ryan Bolger
• Rebecca Hong
• Ron Hannaford – unknown
• Georgia Joseph
• Dan Saugstad – unknown
• Beau Aguon
• Eric Brown
• David Rogers – unknown

If you’d like to follow the whole list with one click, I created a public Biola Digital 2013 Twitter list.

You can also join the conversation by watching and using the #bioladigital hashtag.

If you’re on Google+, comment on this G+ post so we can connect there.

The Huffington Post published a fascinating article about social media of Joel Osteen, senior pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston, the largest church in the U.S.

Here are some of my thoughts on it…

1) Great addition to the conversation. It’s encouraging to see such a large media outlet talking about social media and the church. The article is mostly positive about the potential for churches connect, engage, share the gospel with people and do ministry online.

2) God is big… online. Two of the top 5 most active Facebook fan pages are Jesus Daily and God. 3.6 million people have “liked” the Joel Osteen Ministries (JOM) page. While that’s big, what’s even bigger is that posts to the page average 160,000 interactions, 4x Rihanna (the most liked page on FB), 3x Justin Bieber and 16x the White House. That’s a lot of engagement!

3) Joel Osteen takes social media seriously. Joel Osteen Ministries hired a social media consulting firm. For the “Night of Hope” stadium event, the social media staff included 10 consultants from MCP, a team of 11 marketing & developers to ensure everything ran properly, and 7 staff & volunteers from Lakewood Church to pray with people online & on the phone. This is a big investment and tells me they want to do social media well. They aren’t willing to wait around or risk bungling opportunities while they figure it out themselves.

4) It leaves spiritual and authenticity questions. The biggest concern that I have after reading the article is with all the consultants speaking on behalf of Osteen. Consultants do all of his tweeting and posting to the Joel Osteen Ministries Facebook page. Consultants even reply as if they were Osteen.

“I eat, breathe and sleep Joel at times,” says [consultant, Kelly] Vo. “I speak Joel now … You pick up the voice and it’s like, ‘Oh, God bless you’ and ‘Would love to pray for you.’”

Really???

Questions come to mind… Do these consultants actually pray for these folks? Do they even follow Jesus? Do the people realize Joel himself is not responding to them. And I’ve gotta say I cringe a bit when I hear some of these cliché responses like “We stand with you in prayer.”

It’s a difficult challenge. When God gives someone the opportunity to minister to millions of people, the leader can’t engage personally with everyone. They have to scale the ministry and delegate a lot of the prayer and ministering to other people. I get that.

But real prayer and real encouragement by real people is essential.  How is that best done with both effectiveness and authenticity?

I encourage you to read the full article: Click ‘Pray’ to Pray: How Evangelical Megapastor Joel Osteen Is Saving Souls With Facebook

Thoughts?

I realize that Joel Osteen is a very polarizing figure.  I don’t want to get into a debate about his ministry or message.  Let’s focus the conversation on his use of social media.

Click to share this image on Facebook or Google+

“People with real influence don’t talk about it; they do things.” (tweet that if you like)

I love that brilliant bit of insight which Linda Bernsteinof, aka @WordWhacker tweeted in a recent #GetRealChat tweet chat.

It’s a great reminder that real influence is not a matter of how many friends or followers or shares you get in social media.  Real influence is doing things – taking initiative, leading, organizing, and inspiring others – that have a positive impact on people’s lives.

What are you doing – online or offline – that’s having a real influence?

Don’t be shy or humble. Share your excitement! Give God the glory for what he is enabling you to do!

Today (Tuesday, April 23, 2013) at 2 PM, I’ll be joining host DJ Chuang for a Social Media Church Google Plus hangout on air, and I invite you to join us here.

We’ll be discussing…

• What keeps churches from using social media more effectively?
• How do I manage your time with social media so it doesn’t consume you 24/7?
• What can the average pastor do with limited time on social media?
• Where are the biggest opportunity for churches that are just getting started with social media? (aka low hanging fruit)

If you’re not familiar with the Google Plus Hangout On Air feature, it will be like DJ and I are doing a video conference which is broadcast live on G+ and YouTube.  So, you’ll be able to watch live as DJ and I talk. Plus you’ll be able to chat and submit questions.

Got any social media church questions you’d like to see discussed?

Hope to see you there!

You know him, you’ve seen him – but interestingly you notice him, less and less. He is still there but he has just become noise in your life and you tune him out. He is scripture tweeting guy – he makes you feel tiny in your own personal devotion, he seems to read 1,000 words a second, and he isn’t afraid to Tweet about it!

Recently my son closed the door to our home office and my wife’s laptop (which routinely has 2 or 3 instances of quick books open and 27+ internet explorer tabs open) was silenced. I could feel the pressure of that poor abused laptop’s fan released from its duty of pressing against my ear drums. The amazing thing is that if you would have asked me prior to his closing the office door I would not have noticed that the laptop is freakishly loud, I’d simply tuned it out.

I know a guy on Twitter who is very similar to my wife’s laptop a constant and pressing source of noise. He has noble purposes and each morning he posts about 30 individual tweets that are snippets from the Bible. On the surface, this sounds like a great idea, doesn’t it (Isaiah 55:11)?  But the problem is, people stop listening to him, they just simply ignore him. Especially someone who does not hold the Bible in reverence, who doesn’t necessarily believe it, to that person you’re a nagging annoying noise and you’re in effective at your original purpose (assuming they were to reach people for Jesus).

I’m not saying don’t post scripture. Post scripture – but remember, you’re in a social media channel, be social. A one way regurgitation isn’t social.  It’s a Public Service Announcement at best and people aren’t on Twitter for those. They’re there to interact, to be informed of current events, and to learn what is new (at my Church we say Twitter is Areopagus, Acts 17:21).

When you share scripture try to maintain a ratio that keeps a healthy relationship between human posts that you write or RT of others to scripture quotes. When sharing scripture consider also sharing a story that gives personal relevance of the scripture, tell why that verses is meaningful to you and give a link to the scripture for people to read themselves .

Church we need to relate to people online. Jesus walked and talked with people, he could have hovered over their heads and trumpeted truth – he didn’t, he walked with them, and talked with them, he gave parables and stories from their culture, he related to  them.

Don’t be that guy – don’t be my wife’s laptop fan talk to people and not at them – engage and share from your life. Tweet on Tweeps, Tweet on!

Online marketing is great and getting high rankings is always nice, but how would you like to absolutely dominate your field? How would you like to be known as the go-to person/organization for your niche either in your local area or nationally? You can.

Dominating your niche isn’t just about getting high rankings in the search engines, though that’s certainly part of it. Dominating your niche is about making it so wherever people go; they just keep running into you. When you dominate your niche, you can even start to transcend the need the high rankings as people become familiar with your name/brand and simply go to your website because you are the main source in your niche. This isn’t just a business thing. Churches, schools, ministries, people, who/whatever can all dominate their niche. So, how can you dominate your niche?

It Starts and Ends with Your Website:
Your website is the heart of your online presence. A heart pumps blood out to your organs, but then draws the blood back from those organs. Similarly, your website the source of much of the content you will produce. You will send that content out to other places (social media, blogs, search etc.), but all those places will send traffic back to your site. So, your website needs to have a good design and quality content. It will be very difficult to dominate your niche if people are turned off by your website and even if you are still able to dominate, you will lose conversions if your website isn’t good.

Search Engine Optimization:
Search is still the primary way people find things. So, it’s important that you optimize your website for the search engines and target as many relevant keywords as you can. When you are starting off, you probably won’t rank well for all of your keywords. You may only rank well for a few, but by getting your site optimized, as you start to grow your online presence in other ways, your rankings will improve as well.

Authorship:
Authorship is quickly becoming very important for a variety of reasons. It’s helpful for search rankings in Google (and possibly other search engines), which is great, but when you want to dominate your niche authorship has another even more important role. It establishes who you are. You and your organization can become known in your niche. People can see you on Google+ and your name and picture will be displayed right alongside your search results. This is extremely powerful. If you’re not yet familiar with authorship, check out, “Don’t Think You’re an Author? Well, You are Now?”

Blog:
Quality content is key. Not only do you need to have quality content on the main pages of your website, but you need to be regularly producing new, quality, original content. A blog is the perfect way to do that. A quick tip for creating your blog…Your blog really should be on your site. As easy as it is to install WordPress these days, there’s no reason to have some blogger.com blog somewhere off your website.

Video:
I can’t say enough about the power of video for establishing yourself in your niche. For now, however, let’s look at four great benefits to video.

1. Video creates a connection audio and print just can’t. You can see a person and get a sense of their personality. Video is like having a conversion with someone. Don’t underestimate the power of the feeling of connecting which video can create.
2. All the major search engines display videos in their search results. So, they can get you showing up in the results for keywords your website can’t.
3. There are several video sharing sites that are very popular (can anyone say Youtube?). So, videos give people more places to find you which is key to dominating your niche.
4. People tend to be attracted to video. People who otherwise wouldn’t click to read an article, may be willing to watch a short video.

And don’t think that video is too expensive or too difficult. You can get a great HD webcam for under $100 and videos don’t need TV quality editing. As long as you are engaging and have interesting, quality content, a simple webcam video can do very well.

Social Media:
So, you’re producing great videos and blog posts, now you need to let people know about this quality content. So, you have to post that content to where the people are. Facebook has about a billion users, so that’s a good place to start. Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, even Pinterest. You need to be in these places and don’t just use them to push your content. Social media is about connecting people with people. So, engage and connect.

Other People’s Blogs:
What’s a better endorsement than someone giving you their platform (their blog) to talk to their audience. That’s exactly what guest blogging is. The more you can guest blog, the more audiences you can reach and the more people there are endorsing you. Start by connecting with other bloggers in your niche. Comment on their posts and reference their posts in your posts. Once you’ve formed that connection, offer them some unique, quality content you’ve produced for their blog.

Everything Else:
These are just some of the more important ways you can start to dominate your niche. There are other places you can be participating to further establish yourself in your niche. Find important forums where you can engage people and answer questions. Answer question on question sites like Yahoo Questions and Quora. Encourage members and customers of your organization to post reviews about you. Write up press releases or be a source in new articles. In general, just look for places online that are important to your niche and be there.

The Secret Sauce:
This all sounds like a lot doesn’t it?  It is…and it isn’t.  If you do all of the above yourself manually, it will be too much.  So, the three secrets to being able to dominate your niche are…

1. For everything you do, you need to create an efficient process.  Take the time in the beginning to develop the process.  It will save you tons of time in the end.
2. Only do what you have to do, outsource and automate the rest.  The great content of the a video will probably require you in the video, but you don’t have to edit the video, transcribe it, or post it to Youtube.
3. Leverage everything.  A video can be uploaded to Youtube, posted on Facebook and posted on your blog.  That’s 3 uses for something you created once.  A couple of blog posts can become a whitepaper.  A forum post response can become a blog article.  I’m not suggesting you become overly repetitive, but usually a piece of content can be used in a few different contexts with little to no overlap.

Start Dominating!
There are really three key aspects to dominating your niche:

1. Produce interesting, useful, quality, original content.
2. Be everywhere. Whenever someone looks for something related to your niche, they should come across you.
3. Create a unified identity across the web and connect with people. Don’t have a different username on every website. Don’t use different pseudonyms/personas on different platforms. Don’t use impersonal avatars. Use your name, use an image or video of you, have one username for all the sites, and reference your organization consistently.

By consistently doing these three things, you can establish yourself and dominate your niche.

Share Your Thoughts:

• Do you want to dominate your niche?
• What else would you add that could help to dominate your niche?

Most of us don’t think of ourselves as authors.  Authors are people who write books and get published.  They’re people like Tom Clancy, James Dobson, or J. K. Rowling.  Well, no longer.  According to Google, you and I and every other website owner  are now authors…and it’s very important that you realize this now.

Why Would Google Care if I’m an Author?
Google has a problem.  They want to rank high quality content at the top of the rankings for every search.  Unfortunately, there’s a lot of garbage out there.  Between innocent people who don’t know what they’re talking about to “evil” spammers, there’s just a lot of low quality content sift out.  To make things worse, enough people have figured out how to get a page to rank well with tricks and dirty schemes that they’ve been able to make a lot of poor content appear good to Google.  So, Google needed to figure out a way to know who to trust.

Enter Google+
Google launched their social networking platform, Google+ in the Summer of 2011.  A lot of people rolled their eyes and laughed.  This was Google’s 5th or 6th attempt at getting into the social game. (Does anyone remember Google Buzz or Orkut?  I didn’t think so.)  Additionally, Facebook and Twitter were already dominating and Google+ seemed to wanting to get the same audience.  The question was legitimately asked, why would people leave a social network where they already have friends to go to one in which none of their friends are?

Perhaps it truly was Google’s dream to sink Facebook and Twitter, but it definitely was their goal to get their hands on social data for use in their search engine and advertising services.  After a little over a year and a half, Google+ boasts over 340 million users.  It’s an impressive number, enough to make them the second largest social network.  However, many people have said that Google+ is a ghost town.  They basically forced all people who had an account with any of Google’s products (Google, Gmail, Youtube, etc.) into a Google+ account, even if they had no intent of using it.  But all that has started to change because of authorship.

The Solution – Authorship

“Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.” – Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google

Did you get that?  Google is going to rank the web pages from verified authors higher than other pages.  This isn’t a theory.  This isn’t speculation.  They are going to do this and I’ve seen tests that indicate they are already doing it.  Authorship is a key way Google is going to verify content is written by a real person and determine the trust they can place in that person.

Right now authorship is still relatively new.  That’s good news for you.  If you become a verified author and start establishing yourself within your niche, you will probably be ahead of most of your competition.  Of course, this also means that if you don’t establish yourself as an author, eventually you will start loosing out to your competition.

So, how do you become a Google verified author?
Here are six simple steps to becoming a Google verified author:

• Create a Google+ account.
• On your blog and your website’s pages, add a link to your Google+ profile page and, in the link code, use the attribute, “rel=author”.

• In your Google+ profile, add your website to your “Contributor to” section.  You can find the “Contributor to” by going to your profile, clicking the “About” tab, scrolling down to the “Links” section, and clicking “Edit”.
• Add a faceshot picture as your profile photo.  If you use a picture of your face, your image will likely show up in search results next to your listings.
• Start sharing some of your posts/pages to your profile.

Note: If you contribute to websites/blogs other than your own (like guest blogging) you should add those websites to your Contributed To section and have a link to your Google+ profile on those posts as well.

It’s also a good idea to set your organization up as a publisher.  You can do this much the same way as setting up your personal authorship.

• Create a Google+ page for your organization.
• Add a link to your organization’s Google+ page on all the pages of your website and use the rel=”publisher” attribute in the link (this is often done by adding a G+ Icon).
• In your Google+ page, add a link to your organization’s website.
• Start sharing some of your posts/pages to your profile.

Quality and Authority Are Key
Now that you have setup your authorship, it’s time to start producing some content.  Keep in mind that in Google’s eyes the whole point of all this is to determine what pages are good, quality, authoritative pages so they can rank them higher.  They determine this by looking at who has you in their Google+ circles, how many +1 shares your pages are getting, if other people on Google+ are sharing your content, etc.  They want other people, especially people in your niche, to tell them whether your pages are authoritative and high quality content and therefore worthy of higher rankings.  So, it’s not enough to just setup your authorship, you have to produce original high quality content, share that content, and get others to add you to their circles and +1 or share your content.

Authorship isn’t the end all be all of ranking well in Google+, nothing is.  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and inbound links are still critical and there are a couple hundred other signals Google looks at.  That said, authorship can affect your rankings and I believe it’s going to become one of the most important signals Google looks at, right along side SEO and inbound links.

So, it’s time to get out your quill and ink well.  Your about to become an author.  Take a few minutes today and set yourself up as an author and set your organization up as a publisher.  Then start connecting with people on Google+ and start thinking about how you can start producing some great, original content.  You can do it.  Charles Dickens aint got nothin’ on you.

Share your thoughts:

• Do you have any questions about authorship?
• Will Google giving priority to verified authors get you to start using Google+
• If you do start using Google+ will you actually try to connect and interact with people or just use it to share your content?

Have you heard?  Facebook has now launched a new search engine.  It’s called “Graph Search”.

If you haven’t seen it yet, you’re not alone.  You have to request access to it and, even then, you may have to wait in line.  If you want to access Graph Search, I’ll include a link at the bottom of the post.

What is Facebook Graph Search and How Does It work?

Graph Search is more than what you are used to on Facebook.  Previously, the Facebook search feature only let you search for people or organizations with pages/groups.  With Graph Search, Facebook is hoping to change the way you search for things.  Instead of going to a search engine, like Google, which chooses what to show you based on things like the words used in content of the site, the links going to site, and the quality of the content on the site, Graph Search looks at things like “Likes”, shares, and check-ins.

Is this the end of Google?

So, with Graph Search making it’s debut, how will this change things?  Will everyone all the sudden stop using Google and switch to Graph Search?  Not likely, at least not right away.  Facebook has a lot of things to work out with Graph Search, including how to interpret all those millions of likes which have a nebulous meaning.  After all, did I like something because I liked it, because they offered me something, or because I wanted to do something with it and Facebook only gave me one option, to like it.  And, hey, what if my friends are all idiots? Okay, maybe they aren’t idiots (well, most of them), but do they really know more than some expert with whom I am not friends?  These are all challenges Facebook faces, but it’s not all challenges for Graph Search.

Graph Search gets the incalculable benefit of starting on Facebook, which has over 1 billion users.  With a base like that, I almost thing Facebook would have to actively try to fail with Graph Search for it not be successful.  Also, the truth is that we do tend to trust our friend’s opinions on things, and when you search in Graph Search you can see which friends liked what?  And, if you’re not sure why your friend liked something, you can always ask them.

Backed By Bing
At this point Graph search isn’t able to handle all searches.  It’s pretty good at helping you find people with certain interests of histories and it’s good at letting you know what things and places people have liked, but it’s not extremely robust.  Good thing Facebook teamed up with Bing a while back.  Bing has been integrating Facebook features and signals into their search results for over a year now and now we’re seeing this appears to be a true partnership and Graph Search uses Bing data to fill out it’s search capabilities, whether it’s adding to the results or just plain giving you a Bing search results page.

What Lies Ahead?
Are people ready to give up Google?  I doubt it.  After all, Google is literally synonymous with search.  If you don’t know what synonymous means, Google it .  That said, I could certainly see Facebook taking some of the search market away from Google.  For somethings it will just make sense to use a social search engine (find a new restaurant, choose a movie to see, find people who like macrame, etc.)

Still not sure about Graph Search?  Here’s a little intro video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD951tHz38g

Here’s a link to try Facebook Graph Search.

Give it a try and then let us know what you think.

• What do you think of Facebook Graph Search?
• Would you switch to using Graph Search?
• What do you think are the strengths and weaknesses of Graph Search?

Rejected stamp image from webdesign-guru.co.uk.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sodfRQuvA6E

In the past month there have been some significant changes that happened.

• There was another Panda refresh which affected about 1.2% of all English-based searches.
• Google+ Local updated their guidelines again and now have stated that local organizations with distinct departments can have separate Google+ Local listings for these departments.
• Google+ Local also updated their guidelines to indicate the practitioners with multiple offices can have multiple Google+ Local listings.
• Google updated their image search to open full sized images directly in Google instead of taking you to the site hosting the image.

Here’s the big one…!

• Facebook launched their own search engine called “Graph Search”.  Facebook has now entered the search game.

If you prefer, you can read the full February, 2013 SEO Update here.

How is your site ranking in Google and Bing?

We are in the internet age. So, you need to stay strong in the search engines and use the internet to achieve your mission online.