I just bailed out of participating in a social media survey. I started out wanting to be helpful, but as page after page after page scrolled on, I not only got irritated with the length, redundancy and poor design of the survey, but also with the implied importance of social media in its content and how the material was going to be used.
I could envision the end results of the survey when it is presented at an upcoming event:
- the oh-so-serious pronouncements of how social media is being used by churches and ministries
- the insightful quotes and comments from the survey
- the audience awe in the face of the implied power of statistics
- the nagging guilt in the audience that their church or ministry isn't doing enough
- conclusions profoundly offered by company who humbly will help your church or ministry be social media effective
We are all deceived by these performances and we shouldn't be.
Problems with the survey itself
I found out about it through a rather irritating person on a social network who talks too much. He occasionally says something useful and I skim his stuff for things that might help church communicators, but I think people who find it necessary to tweet all day long next to a grinning picture (nobody smiles all day long) are missing some sort of internal editor.
That irritation aside, I am assuming that most people who found out about and took the survey did it through a social network. In addition, most of them probably had positive experiences with them or they probably would not have bothered to take the survey. One last comment--the survey was quite long and that fact alone would infer that the person taking the survey either really liked taking surveys, was totally enamored with social media enough to engage with it through the many pages or wanted to be quoted (plenty of space for that).
All of the above issues make the survey extremely biased. When people hear that a "survey" has been taken, there is the unspoken assumption that there is some degree of objectivity, that a variety of people were consulted and surveyed.
This really was not a survey, but a "let's see how wonderful, insightful and cool" we are a collection of social media fans. Sadly I doubt the results will be presented in that way.
The damaging results
The message from the survey will be clear--from the shared quotes and numbers--because only those incredibly positive ones will be shared and because only people already involved in social media will take the survey--that SOCIAL MEDIA IS THE WAY TO COMMUNICATE TODAY.
As a result, lots of churches and ministries will feel guilt. Their church will not measure up statistically. They won't have the "social media strategy" that the survey sharing experts will trumpet.
How quickly we forget
Not long ago, a television broadcast or a radio program was the great communication tool for outreach if your church could afford it and you had a photogenic pastor.
When desktop publishing was first invented (a scant 30 some years ago), all churches felt they absolutely had to have a printed church newsletter. For the first time you could do the layout, typesetting, and printing in the church office. I imagine that most church goers today don't even realize how radical that step was then. Printed newsletters are now looked at such an outdated form of communication.
The internet made every church and ministry realize that they had to have a website. Most churches have them today and most are close to totally ineffective and seldom up to date.
Pod-casting floats around as a cutting-edge technology, but isn't a headliner because there is a certain amount of technology involved that hasn't quite become as easy as it first appeared.
Now its social media. Facebook and Twitter are only the most well-known for the next few days or hours anyway.
In a few months or years it will be something else.
Why it matters
It matters because once again many churches will focus on this new way to communicate and forget that it is only one of many that we need to master in this time of multi-channel communication.
Social media is useful, but it is only one more way to communicate the words of eternal life. The media is never the message, the message is the message. We have the words of eternal life. Our message is that Jesus died, rose, calls us to follow Him and is coming back.
Tragic also,is the intense focus of money and time that the guilt produced by an intense focus latest and greatest often consumes.We are all given limited time on this earth and limited resources. Sadly some resources that should go to feeding the hungry, caring for the poor, fighting human trafficking and sharing the gospel will be spent on consultants and services to make churches social media savvy.
Final advice
Be cautious in advice on social media or any form of communication that claims to be THE way to reach your world today. We must be all things to all people that we might win some.
Be very cautious if you see statistics and survey results about social media--flawed data collection will never produce anything beyond flawed conclusions.
Please share your thoughts, comments, questions!