Sunday’s lesson: Be consistent. Be relevant. Be passionate.
Sitting in church this morning, it occurred to me how many lessons from social media can be applied to the offline world. In both environments, its important to find your niche within the community at large (stop trying to please everyone), be true to yourself, and remain relevant to everyone within you’re targeting.
The small country church that I attend doesn’t do a very good job at that right now. We’ve been focusing so hard making everyone happy that we’ve chased away everyone in the congregation with strong preferences. Everyone that’s left (aside from a core of strong volunteers) seems mostly ambivalent. We’re not attracting new members. We’ve lost existing members. We’re borrowing against the mortgage to cover expenses. It’s not an ideal scenario — but its not an uncommon one.
In a 1937 Gallup poll, three-fourths (73 percent) of Americans said they were church members. The number remained virtually the same through the turn of the century. Since 2000, however, that number has dropped to between 63 and 65 percent. (Wow, that’s a 14 percent decline in membership in just seven years!) And, simply being a “member” of a church is very different than actually attending church. Of the two-thirds who claim church membership, only one-third said they attended once a week; 12 percent they attend “almost every week.”
The same could be said of many websites — where the number of registered members (or subscribers) far exceeds the number of active members.
In order to survive in this economic environment, it’s more important than ever to be relevant to your audience; true to your nature; and provide a consistent quality of experience to visitors.
We can have a thriving contemporary worship service at my church. Or, we can have a thriving traditional worship service at our church. However, it’s difficult to do both and keep anyone satisfied. If we can agree on a common mission and worship style at my church — and pursue that mission passionately and to our heart’s content, I know that we’ll be meeting expenses and growing again in no time.
It’s true for online. It’s true offline. It’s true for most social networks.
The term ‘social network’ was first coined by professor J. A. Barnes in the 1950s, who defined it as a group of 100 to 150 people drawn together by family, work or hobby. Since that time, the size of social networks have grown exponentially with the help of technology. Social networks typically grow and thrive by consistently providing:
- social and emotional support
- social influence
- social engagement
- person-to-person contact, and
- access to resources and material goods.
These characteristics give a social network purposes.
Social networks that provide many of these characteristics are likely to succeed. Social networks without them are likely to fail.
