Church Marketing Sucks recently posted an article on doing outreach using My Space. The author (guest blogger, Joe Suh) is the co-founder of MyChurch.org, a My Space lookalike that seems to be designed for building community among Christians. The article also touts MyChurch.org as being a vehicle for reaching out to non-Christians, although as one commenter named Matt states, "It seems to me that MyChurch.org is about as effective for outreach as a church advertising on Christian Radio."The article is worth taking a look at. It's actually sparked a pretty intense debate regarding the validity of using My Space for outreach purposes. That debate alone makes this something worth reading. Check out this article and the debate that continues to rage here.
P.S. Take a closer look at the picture at the front of this post. Did you notice what's so cool about it?
4 comments:
I can't tell you how hard I tried to do that with my computer when I was in Santa Fe! It is very difficult to get the lighting just right with the camera picture...heh...anyway...yeah that stuff is cool! I remember one guy who mounted his computer screen to the wall about his desk and then made the desktop look just like a window to his back yard...and had several made for the time of day and season...very funny!
Hi Markus, what I was trying to convey in my guest post on CMS and in the comments was that MyChurch will be a platform on which to drive your church's content out to other platforms. We're not trying to make MyChurch a walled garden - yes we are encouraging Christian community, but we're also making it very easy for people to send their church events/pictures/sermons out to places like Myspace where the unchurched live.
Feel free to get in touch: joe at mychurch.org
Is your church in our database at MyChurch.org?
BTW, the picture is cool :)
Thanks for your clarification, Joe! I guess I'm kind of unclear how exactly a church's content gets driven out to other platforms through MyChurch.
I must confess we haven't released all the features to do this yet - I use the excuse that we're still in beta :) But say someone uploads their pastor's sermon to their MyChurch library - anyone that comes across this sermon and appreciates it can auto-send it to their friends on myspace. (when I say auto-send, I really do mean with one click, sending a link to all their myspace friends without having to go to myspace.com) Later we can even auto-stream it over to your myspace profile so that it plays whenever anyone loads up your profile - just like all those annoying songs that already start playing automatically when you load up myspace profiles :)
Lots of little widgets and badges like this are in the works. We know outreach won't happen inside mychurch. Just like in the real world, we have to take things like sermons and events outside the church walls. We'll make it as easy as possible to automatically send, share, and syndicate.
Do you think non-believers visit StretchyChurch? If so, you'll eventually be able to put a little MyChurch calendar widget on your blog here that shows all the upcoming events from your church. Or how about we take all the pictures from your church photo gallery and make a slideshow that you can stick on your myspace profile, er blog :)
As you can see, we have lots of ideas that we're playing around with now. And I'm open to more. If we're not resourced to handle everything, we'll just open MyChurch to an API to let other developers take our content and make some of these little widgets.
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