When I saw these statistics it made me reflect on a church community web site that is going to launch this week. It left me wondering with the connectivity in social networking how are, and can church web sites reflect their true flavor. A flavor that is dynamic, true, raw, and real. A web site that has a balance of information for regular activities and the raw life it’s community is wrestling with that engages. Ultimately “raw life” plays out in the physical relationships with others.

• Do you agree or disagree that the church should engage more in social media?
• What would balance if information and “raw life” look like in a church web site?

I came across sentenc.es on a couple retweets on Twitter.

Simply put, It is a challenge to avoid extra words that we often put in messages and streamline it.

Between a text message and a status update on facebook or Twitter.

Think about the time saved by condensing it all down to four sentences just like this post.

One huge marketing and tool found on the web now is video. For the average non-profit or small business, it would be wise to partner with branded video players like, Vimeo than to spend time and resources on developing or purchasing a video player to play video content. A major reason to partner with them is because they have already worked out many of the plug and play bugs and functions. Even with purchased video media players the setup of, storage of, and rendering of the movie files would have to be managed and that often gets missed. Even when it comes to my anablepomedia flash site. Looking back on the amount of time that went into creating a flash video player, it took a lot of time. Personally I plowed through trying to learn how to create custom video players through flash so that I could evaluate it and for a school project.

A major buzzword of the web is social networks! There are companies that provide a closed “social network” to ensure privacy and create a “close network”. Why go through the trouble of creating a individual social network when there are tools like facebook that already have a large network of people. The great thing about facebook is that you can promote networking of people inside & outside of your own organization/company. You can create a group (private or public) to represent your organization and network within that group. Events for that group can be created, the group page can be used as bulletin board postings, etc…

Just about every organization large or small has a calendar. There are many services that provide online calendars for a monthly or yearly fee. Google has a calendar that is free and can be applied to many various web applications. It also allows multiple users to administrate the calendar’s events. Calendar’s can be public to everyone or be private for a select group/organization.

The key with any white-label technology is to find out what it offer’s, any limitation’s, etc… As with anything there are pluses and minuses. Then it’s a matter of creating and utilizing the tools for the best interests and marketability of your organization/company. For the majority of non-profits and small businesses to create their own brand of video players or social networks will not result in the best bang for the buck. There are however circumstances when it would be best to branch from facebook into a low cost alternative social networking like Ning. One must consider the trade off of losing the existing community found through YouTube, Vimeo, facebook to creating one’s own brand.