Blog

Throughout its history, the people behind Twitter have been good at catering to what their community of users find useful.  I was recen­tly listening to an interview with Biz Stone, one of Twitter’s founders, when I was reminded that some of Twitter’s most popular features are ones that weren’t conceived by the company.  For example, two popular features, @replies and hashtags, were started by the community of users.  And in the response to the popularity of the features, Twitter integrated them into the Twitter platform and made them easier to use. 

 I wonder what it would be like if more churches where so in tune with the community around them.  What if churches knew what was an important need for their community and then did something to address it?  Instead of always talking about authenticity, wouldn’t they then communicate a real sense of being relevant to the community they’re in? 

I think back to a story I once heard Scott Wilson, the Senior Pastor of The Oaks Fellowship in Red Oak, Texas, tell.  He was told by the mayor that his church had a bad reputation.  People thought of them as a big church doing their own thing and not helping the community.  They were too busy doing things for the community and they weren’t actually a part of it and working toward the community’s goals.

The church, which thought they were doing a good job at serving the community, changed the way they operated because of that.  They dedicated a person to go meet with community leaders, school boards, etc., on a regular basis.  The Oaks Fellowship had a day at the church for all the service organizations in the area to come to the church so church members could meet them and volunteer with them.  Finally, they aligned the church calendar with the community calendar.  As a result, instead of doing their own Fall festival, the church took ownership of the city’s Fall event.  All of these efforts made them far more focused on the real needs in their city and helped them built a reputation for caring.

During the interview with Biz Stone, he was asked what he thought about all of the third party companies, like HootSuite and Twitpic, making a name for themselves by using Twitter.  Specifically, he talked about Twitpic. He said that in the beginning Twitter didn’t do a good job of making it easy for someone to share a picture.  Twitpic did and that helped Twitter.  Now the company itself has photo sharing as part of its apps, but Twitpic helped fill a void where Twitter wasn’t doing a good job.  Again I think about churches.  There are so many churches trying to be everything to everyone.  And in the process they’re not doing much as well as they potentially could if there was some focus.  What if more churches were okay with saying: “Here’s what we’re good at doing to help our community. Other churches or organizations do different things better and we’ll support them, but we won’t compete with them.”

So whether you like Twitter or not, they’ve historically been good about knowing their community. And that is something we all can be better at doing.