Social Media has become seen by organizations as a rich channel for them to connect with their markets. As I ready this article ’21 Rules for Social Media Engagement’ by Brian Solis I was struck by a few things.

1. Social media engagement is the ‘in’ thing to do be doing at the moment. Churches and Christian organizations are flocking to Twitter and Facebook in there droves, to engage better with there people.

2. Brian points a few key things that Church could consider before it engages with this medium. Firstly he says its ‘the intentions that motivate engagement’, if we motivated to engage just because everyone else is then social media becomes pointless and we won’t grasp the rich value that this engagement can have. Secondly he says ‘It’s a simple investment in visibility or presence’, this has been the issue in the church for way too long. We have not invested in getting out there and being involved in the great life that takes place in our communities. Social media doesn’t give complete this part of our calling it

only enbables to have a platform to being a deeper engagment with the culture and communities we all seek to bring the good news too.

more thoughts to come…

I saw this today on Mashable and loved it. Wonder if we truly realize what impact Facebook has had on communication and on the way we do community.

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal,political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty—psychic or physical. The wheel is an extension of the foot. The book is an extension of the eye, clothing an extension of the skin, electric circuitry an extension of the central nervous system. Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act—the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change.

Two of the main things I plucked out of yesterdays wonderful seminar is Collaboration and the otherness of people. These two things leaped right out of seminar and slapped in the face. Both I believe are key to negotiating the winding path of the fluid new Digital Environment. Firstly collaboration, is a the centre of God’s plan for reconciliation. We see God throughout the Biblical narrative use partnership to complete is wider goals. The digital environment take the big fish, small fish mentality has been blown right out the water by a vast number f stories like the emergence of Facebook. It is now about who can swim to the idea faster not about how big you are. It’s a return to innovation and creativity. It’s a return to the thinkers and dreamers. In that worldview collaboration is a central linchpin that allows us all to work with each other rather than compete against each other.
Secondly, the otherness of people. In a Digital Environment  with many people from many places connecting over a form of a time and space. One thing it lost is the otherness of a person. This is just important to note as we move into an age of avatars and such like.

Here is a list of quotes and comments from yesterday (from my notes)…

• Community of character
• Networked Individualism
• Person becomes the hub
• Bizarreness of having wifi and now water
• Life in the slow lane
• COLLABORATION- The future of the digital age
• Cynical self solving problem
• conflict v conformity
• Space occurs in two different plains at the same time
• Time is always on
• Godwin’s Law