Further Explanation on Using Twitter for Attending a Conference
Over the last few years I have enjoyed attending and speaking at conferences. Yet staying on mission for me means having to miss some. Now with twitter, you can have an entirely new experience of attending a conference virtually. In fact I have found a new reality that twitter creates, enabling a preferred experience to watching a conference on DVD. I call this new reality an Emotional Resonance Spectrum (ERS). Right now I am attending Willow Creek’s Leadership Summit virtually using the hashtag #TLS09. If you are not familiar with twitter click here.
So why do I call it an ERS? If thousands of people attend a conference, then hundreds will be tweeting. This stream creates an entirely new snapshot and experience of the conference. (I am not saying “more” or “better” but definitely new.) Imagine that every minute you receive from 5 to 30 short responses from people that include:
- Favorite quotes
- Bursts of emotion (good and bad)
- Questions
- Humor
- Web links to related content
- Links to typed summaries on blogs
- Side commentary from notable leaders
- Gateways to side conversations about content
Here are some huge benefits that emerge from watching a conference using a tweet stream. (It kinda reminds me of looking at “reality” through the vertical streams of random green digits in the movie The Matrix.)
Absorb the conference while multi-tasking: It’s easy to keep a tweet stream up while working at the computer on something else (i.e. I can attend the Leadership Summit 2009 now while I type.) Or, you can check what’s happening on your phone at a stoplight while running an errand.
Enlarge your perspective on the teaching: Every person or team that attends a conference has built-in biases. Watching the comments of hundreds provides radically different perspectives that enlarge my own.
Feel the collective soul of the conference: I am a quote junkie, so certain phrases will always get to me. BUT, I love watching what touches the heart of the collective soul of the conference. Some quotes are repeated and retweeted scores of times, while others are a single burst. This learning enables a unique discernment as I serve the wider body of Christ through my consulting. What is striking a chord with attendees of #TLS09 right now? Dave Gibbons is speaking and he just said, “Your failure is your platform to humanity.”
Follow up on the content that most interests you: Last night as the conference ended, I looked for summaries of all of the talks via blogs referenced in the tweet stream. I saw two that I followed up with- Tony Morgan’s and Dave Ferguson’s. Keep in mind there are two kinds of summaries, aggregators and specialists. An aggregator (like Tony Morgan) are masters at building info hubs and they do it fast. A specialist, like Dave Ferguson (in this case a senior pastor), summarizes the conference from his point of view. By the way, I plan on following up on one of the speakers (Gary Mamel) and will purchase his book today on my kindle.
Build relationships and extend your influence: I traffic in the arena of clarity and vision. Several people yesterday attending the conference tweeted references to me and my work. For example a guy named Kevin tweeted, “Jessica Jackley just nailed the clarity and uniqueness quotient for Kiva. @WillMancini would be proud. #tls09″ How cool is it that I get to have a conversation with Kevin, even though I am not at the conference. Another example is that Bill Donahue and I, a staff guy and Willow, were able to comment and critique publicly on one of the speakers quotes (again while I was typing this).
When it’s all said and done, I am somewhat hooked on attending conferences via twitter. Sure, it may not replace being there, but this is a learning strategy I will engage for now.
I would love to hear your thoughts.
Excerpt from Andy Crouch’s Culture Making
Form the chapter “Gestures and Postures,” Crouch clarifies how the Gospel writers worked to contextualize their message about Jesus Christ to the culture.
Christians related to the vast and complex enterprise of culture? The answers are as varied as the times
and places where Christians have lived.
When Christians arrive in a new cultural setting, whether a village in
the highlands of Thailand or a Thai fusion restaurant in the East Village, they
encounter an already-rich heritage of world making. One of the remarkable things about culture, as we observed
in chapter four, is that it is never thin or incomplete. Culture is always full. Human beings need culture too
much—language, food, clothing, stories, art, meaning—to endure its
absence. So from its first years
taking root in Palestine to its astonishing dispersion into nations around the
world, Christian faith has always had to contend with well-developed and,
usually, stable and satisfying cultural systems.
What have
Christians made of the world?
Consider the four Gospels of the Bible, each one a cultural product
designed to introduce the good news in a culturally relevant way. Matthew begins his Gospel this
way: “An account of the genealogy
of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Mt 1:1). His story finds its place in the
meaning-making system of Jewish symbolism and textual interpretation. Matthew’s Jesus correlates closely with
major figures of Jewish history—Moses on the mountain, David the
King—recapitulating familiar stories and fulfilling long-held
expectations. Mark, while just as
aware of Jesus’ Jewish heritage, seems much more engaged with the cultural
heritage of Rome. He begins: “The beginning of the good news of
Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mk 1:1).
The Greek word euangelion, here translated “good news” but commonly translated
“gospel” (making Mark the only Gospel writer to actually call his work a
“gospel”), referred to an official proclamation of good news, in particular the
Roman practice of sending out heralds to declare victory of Rome’s foes. But this euangelion is about a very different kind of
victory, one that is paradoxically won at the very moment of apparent defeat by
Rome itself. Mark’s story, in
distinction to Matthew’s, is not about fulfilled expectations but confounded
ones.
Luke,
meanwhile, takes on the mantle of a Greek historian, beginning his stately and
rhythmic account with the epistolary preface that Greek readers expected,
addressing his reader, “most excellent Theophilus” (Lk 1:3). He is careful to note that he has
consulted a wide variety of sources and pays close attention, in both his
Gospel and its sequel, Acts, to details of medicine, business, politics and
geography. John takes up the
Jewish philosophical tradition of a thinker like Philo, blending in the first
sentence of his Gospel the Hebrew creation story (“In the beginning…”) with the
rarified vocabulary of Greek metaphysics (“…was the logos”).
And in the
end each Gospel writer also adopts a different attitude toward the prevailing
culture. Luke is broadly positive
toward the righteous Gentiles who were probably his primary audience. He traces the apostle Paul’s journey to
Rome, the center of the dominant culture, with evident hope that this journey
would spread the gospel to the ends of the earth. Matthew, Mark and John each seem less certain that the
cultures they engage will be welcome homes for the message they are
bringing. The world that “God so
loved” in John 3:16 is by John 15:18 the world that “hated me before it hated
you.” The Jewish tradition that
Matthew so reveres is also the source of the Pharisaism that his Jesus excoriates. The euangelion of Mark is an upside-down good
news, in which the King goes willingly to defeat rather than bravely to
victory, overturning the expectations of friend and foe alike.
So already
in the four initial, inspired retellings of the story of Jesus, we start to see
divergent approaches to culture.
Welcome to Your Journey: Slogan or Story? Part 3
When Gateway Community Church relocated and changed their name, they worked with Auxano to clarify their vision and to build a compelling brand. After their Vision Frame was developed, the team collaborated to determine a brand promise of "Authentic Excitement." This promise reflected the strength of their collective soul, and the pattern of how God used them to effect lives with the gospel. The question then became, how do we reflect this promise in all of the church communications. After hours of tagline brainstorming and weeks of reflection, the team developed the idea of "Welcome to Your Journey." This phrase not only captures the essence of the brand promise, but sets the stage for real life stories, like the teasers in the top right of this "buzz-site" (a landing page used for guests, with the tagline as the URL put to use in external marketing.) Watch the stories rotate through.
Live for a Change: Slogan or Story? Part 2
In reflecting on yesterday's post, several great church marketing campaigns come to mind. One is Sugar Creek Baptist Church's "Live for a Change" initiative. When Auxano navigated the Vision Pathway with this church, they also contracted with us to build their brand, including logo, graphic identity, ministry sub-brands and messaging. The roll out included actual life testimonies of their people that were two sentences long with the exclamation point of "Live for a Change" They even put these testimonies on outdoor billboards (as part of an external ad blitz) in addition to saturating their internal media. Here are a few snippets and a link to some of the stories. Notice the consistent photographic styling and use of the logo as a"bug" to reinforce the brand in these raw and intriguing banners.
Attention Whiteboard Addicts!
This book by Dan Roam is a fascinating read- in several hours he stretched my thinking about how people think and communicate. With a practical bent and witty style, Roam walks through how we digest the world visually and how this understanding can transform communication- from problem solving to boiling down complex ideas. The best part of the book is how Roam models the concept on each page with helpful and inspiring pictures all the way through.
I highly recommend this book to any leader or teacher, and especially anyone addicted to whiteboard like me. I have a notebook full of whiteboard drawings I use when I consult. This book messed with my mind by forcing me to reevaluate each one. Here is an example:
On page 211 of Church Unique, I show the “attunement grid”. This tool is designed to help leaders identify four kinds of people in church based on a person’s ability to see the vision and their willingness to contribute. Its uses a voyage metaphor yielding the four types as stowaways, passengers, crew, and pirates. I have always drawn this grid with words, but Roam would prefer I use picture. What do you think?
Abby, my nine year old is a wonderful drawing consultant!
