An Ethic of Social Media - Part 1

I'm a big fan of social media. I use it to connect with people, make new friends, learn about people's struggles so that I can encourage them and pray for them, reestablish relationships with old friends, communicate with people in my community, and just have a lot of fun. I often encourage people who aren't engaged in social media to give it a try and see the incredible world that is out there.

But social media is an incredibly new phenomenon. Think about it, just ten years ago, email or possibly chatrooms were our greatest exposure to personally connecting with other people on the internet. Today, for many people, it's hard to imagine our lives without Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace or a host of others. "Social media" has become one of the fastest-growing phenomena in American culture. Facebook currently boasts over 400 million users logging 500 billion minutes a month on the site. Twitter, the fastest growing social media site, now has over 100 million users and adds 300,000 new users every day.

As a church planter, social media has become an incredible tool for ministry. I strongly encourage all of our people to connect with me, each other, and the ministries of the church through our Facebook and Twitter presences. We may be one of the most social media connected churches out there (I know, that sentence sounds funny, but social media is so new that there aren't even adjectives to describe it yet.). Over ninety percent of our attenders (I'd guess about 99%) have a Facebook account, and approximately 75% of our people are on Twitter.

We use these outlets to communicate about upcoming stuff in the church, to promote our Sunday services, to remind people of the main points of the message during the week, to distribute information specific to our ministries, to do polls about important topics, and to send out invitations to our friends, just to name a few. Twitter and Facebook are a great way to get information out rapidly to a large percentage of our church members in an incredibly rapid manner. Need to change a meeting time? I can do it in a matter of seconds. Someone facing a crisis? People can find out about it and begin praying quickly. Have a need for a particular ministry? Put it out there for all the Twitter and Facebook world to see.

Twitter and Facebook are also incredible ways to "close the back door of the church." If someone attends our services for the first time and I can connect with them through Twitter or Facebook within a week or two, I can almost guarantee they are going to get plugged in and become an active part of our church.

So, I'm a really big fan.

However, like so often in the past, our use of new technology has outpaced our thinking about that technology, particularly the development of an ethic of social media. How should we relate to others on social media? What should we post or not post on social media? Are there dangers we should be aware of related to social media?

I certainly haven't developed a full ethic of social media, but I've developed a few principles for social media with my use of it fairly extensively over the last three years. I'll share those principles in the next few posts.