Parting Thoughts, and More Resources from Brandglue
(Part 5 of a 5-part series: What I Learned From the Industry Experts on Using Facebook Well: An Interview with Michelle Widman of Brandglue)
A few weeks ago Michelle Widman, the Project/Community Manager at Brandglue.com, agreed to sit for a phone interview with me. Brandglue is a social media firm that call themselves the “News Feed Optimization Agency”, and whose client lists include heavy hitters such as YouTube, Intel, Microsoft. Brandglue works with companies and organizations to help them optimize their customer interactions on Facebook. I’ve summarized what I learned from her and am posting it piece by glorious piece this week.
As we closed out our conversation, Michelle had a few general tips about some practical and theological aspects of using social media.
Once again, set goals
When we talk about adding a new responsibility to our plate as ministers, it’s very hard to justify just adding an indeterminate amount of work onto our already tottering pile of responsibilities. Rather, set goals and limits: for example, you might want to set aside 30 minutes every day for social media. Create one interactive (engaging) status update, and spend the rest of the time replying to people tweeting, and managing anything else like Events and Groups.
If you don’t set aside this time, Michelle says, your older donors will slowly phase out (because that’s what happens in life) and you’ll be left completely disconnected from the younger generation.
“Go try some stuff.”
Despite how much of this conversation has been about how to do things the right way, you can’t do anything if you don’t just step out and try. Even if you can’t set aside 30 minutes a day, pick an amount of time and spend it using social media intentionally.
Social media as incarnational ministry
“My heart,” Michelle said, “is that Christians won’t just stick their heads in the sand and say, ‘it’s too much, there’s too much that could go wrong.'” Rather, “Just get involved! Meet people where they’re at and then start human interactions. We can’t just stay on our side and expect them to jump over; instead we need to go there. We can then ask them to come back into reality a little more, but we just need to meet people there.”
Michelle and Brandglue
Michelle is available for speaking at conferences, and would love to talk to your staff more about using social media well. If you’re interested, send an email to hello@brandglue.com to get in touch.
Also, if you have any donors or alumni who are working in fields that could benefit from social media consultancy, make sure to send them to Brandglue–they’re great people who it’d be great for us to be able to support.
That’s it for my interview with Michelle! I hope you’ve enjoyed the series this week. Feel free to get involved in the comments, and share your experiences and opinions.
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