Video Transcript: Social Media

All right, we are in the class, effective communication Communication 101. And I want to talk to you about social media. 20 years ago, I never heard of such a  thing, social media. I didn't know. There was no such thing as Facebook. I  remember when email came out as like, what's this? How does it work and  computers getting my first computer and now we have smartphones. And I don't  know where you are in the world. But you're probably taking this class on your  phone, which is amazing. And social media changes all the time. And one's  expertise on it can change and evolve. Don't ignore it. You might be part of the  older crowd like me, so you weren't raised with it. And now you're trying to catch  up to it. You really can't ignore it anymore. So I'm going to do just a little fly by  it's part of communication. I just want to talk about types of social media.  Number one, we have social networks. That's like Facebook and Twitter. And  LinkedIn is for business. But it's all about connecting with people and sharing  information. And really about creating a network of people, a group of people  that somehow come together, social networks, help people in organizations  connect online and to share information and ideas. I'm probably most familiar  with Facebook, Christian leaders Institute has a Facebook page and people can  chime in, and there's stuff to learn. You can learn about a church, a lot of people  that come to our church for the first time first check us out on Facebook, and  there's videos there. And there's people saying things and pictures and you can  tell a lot about an organization just looking at some of these things. Number two, media sharing networks, social networks, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube. My  kids love YouTube. It's the new university. These days, people want to find out  about something they just YouTube it. And it's so fascinating. I did that. I did that  last week. I was looking up some pastors thing and the next thing you know, I'm  looking at these Telly evangelists. And one of them. His nephew just wrote a  book about the hotel of evangelist thing and how it's all about the money. And  then I went from one thing to the next thing and it's like YouTube surfing. And  you can start off looking for you know how to fix your washing machine. And 30  minutes later, you're looking at some beach in Cancun, Mexico and thinking  about your next vacation or something that one thing can lead to another. It's  amazing. media sharing networks give people a place to find and share media  online, including photos, video, and even live video. Bookmarking networks,  Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Pinterest, Flipboard bookmarking networks help people discover, save, share, discuss new and trending content and media. My  wife is big time into Pinterest. You find something you like you pin it on your  board and other people can follow you. People decorate with Pinterest. They do  everything under the sun with Pinterest and helps you organize all the ideas that you find on the internet. It's an amazing thing the internet used to have to go to  the library and find books and page through books. Now you can just find you  can find stuff on a topic or you can find someone who knows a lot about a topic  and just look at what they found. And it goes number four consumer review 

networks Yelp, Zomato Trip Advisor consumer review networks give people a  place to review brands, businesses, product services, travel sports, just about  anything else. If you want to find out if any, something legitimate. For example,  Christian leaders Institute Is this legitimate? Is can education really be free? Oh, you know, what's the catch? Well you can Google it. You can look Is this  legitimate or isn't it? And you can let other people that that have experienced it  tell you what they think. And that's the way it was almost everything you can find out whether our site is legitimate products, the prices of things. It's an incredible  consumer review Opportunity. All right. Number five, blogging and publishing  networks, Wordpress, CreateSpace, Amazon, I've written several books,  probably 20 different books. And it's very easy to do. You just go to Create  Space in your book, get the title and get the picture and bing bada boom, and I  don't care who you are, you can easily do this. To get a 200 page book with a  full color cover is like $2.50. If you want one, it's $2.50. If you want 10 is $2.50, if you want 100 Doesn't matter. So every one of you could be writing a book, and  we have a new directory that's coming out, and you'll be able to sell your book in our place. So, blogging, publishing, writing things, consumer review networks,  give people a place to review brands, business product service. Okay. Next one, sharing economy networks. It's not W Airbnb, it's Airbnb, Uber, Uber, the new  taxi thing, ordinary people, if you're somewhere you have the app, you can just,  you know, have someone pick you up. And all the money is done through Uber,  it's very easy. Airbnb, and people are renting out their houses or renting out a  room in their house. My brother and I rehabbed an old cottage, so we do that all  summer. It's very simple. It's ordinary people being able to sell ordinary stuff is  things like eBay. Craigslist, here in the United States, where ordinary people are  selling their stuff to other ordinary people, it's like you can become a little  businessman without all the baggage without all the overhead. These days, you  can just try something out. You don't have to be an expert. Advantages of social  media and communication, it's relatively inexpensive. If you can get on the  internet, some of you are on the internet, just because of a smartphone. You're  in some country around the world. And people don't have computers, but they  have smartphones, and you get on the World Wide Web and look for anything,  you can start selling things. And if you don't need to start a whole business, you  don't need a whole building that you have to maintain. You can just start small  right where you're at. Potentially expanded audience you can sell to the whole  world. It's deep and wide. You can you can sell some crazy thing that no one in  the world hardly knows about. But there's a small niche of people that know  about. So I have a certain shell, in the deep waters of the Philippines. And not  not that many people collect it. The one I bought is like I bought it for $100. It's  now worth $300. Well, most people don't know what this is. But there's a bunch  of people worldwide that do. So I can get into this one thing. I just finished  making a guitar. I started it 18 years ago, and I finished it last week finally. And 

there's a whole world of people that do this. The most people are not interested,  they don't care. But you can go as deep as you want into a field of of interest  that you're in. Rich and poor alike can be heard. You can start a company. And  people don't know how big you are. They don't know how many sales you have,  if it's something that people need or want, and it catches on. You know, a lot of  people have made it just because they had a unique product. You don't have to  be well connected, instant feedback on how well you're doing. You don't need  this in a whole year to figure out if your business is going to work. Maybe you  need a week. It's adaptive. You can change the colors wrong, you can change it  tomorrow. Everything on the web is easily interchangeable and you don't have to if you're if what you're trying to sell doesn't work if the cost is too high, you can  just change it immediately. Disadvantages of social social media and  communication because anyone can do it. There's a lot of competition, for ears  and eyes. So yeah, you can put something on the internet, along with the other  billion people putting something on the internet. So how are the people that  need what you have going to find it? So that's the disadvantages. Yes, you can  do it. Yes, it's relatively inexpensive, but how are you going to get attention?  Though your message or product may be unique to your area, it may, it may be  common worldwide. So you have this great idea. And you're, you're in the place  where you live doesn't have it, but it's common everywhere else. Though you  might be a great communicator locally, you might be average worldwide. So you  have this great ministry, you church is growing like crazy, you think you're gonna get on the internet, the whole world is gonna listen to you. But if you get on the  internet, there's all kinds of people just as good as you that you're, you're a  small fish in a big disadvantages number four, because people are bombarded  with something new on the web all the time, they don't stick with anything for  very long. Ie whatever program you're trying to get people to engage with. So  you have this great idea of this Bible, this bookstore, this Bible study, this way of  doing church, whatever it is that you're really hopped up about, and you get  people interested, and they're interested for a week, until they get interested in  something else. People have a short time connection to things. So it's hard to  build loyalty to something to engage them over a long period of time. Number  five, you must constantly update your content, if you want to be noticed. So just  getting on the internet making a website, it really will accomplish nothing. How  are you going to get people? How are you going to keep people it's, it's still  there's no cheating way to do it. Everything involves a lot of work. Basic uses of  social media for communication, Facebook, personal, church, business pages,  groups, you can set up groups. In our church, we have a group for this group for that. And so it's an easy place for all the groups to have a place. A website,  WordPress is the easiest, one of the most popular ways to do it. Again, it's you  know, limited value, it's maybe a place where people can find out more about  you find more about your business, find out more about what it is that you're 

trying to do. Blogs, another way where you're writing about a particular topic,  and you're just sort of putting it out there and people searching for that topic will  find your blog, and then your blog can lead to your website. So a lot of people  are using a blog, where you write about a particular topic, or whatever it might  be, you know, church or whatever, you know, leadership or something like that.  And then when people read it, they can go to the place where you sell your Bible study. YouTube, video content for Facebook websites and blogs. It's a free thing  you can put up your, you know, you want to use, like our sermons, we put up our sermons on the YouTube. So we fill or we videotape our sermons. And then it's  free to put up your stuff on YouTube. And then people can download it, they can  look at it. So anyway, these are just some things, I'm not an expert on this. We  either do or we're going to have a whole course on social media. Christian  leaders Institute is sort of heavily into it how to maybe this is how you found out  about Christian leaders Institute, it's a great way to get your message out, it's a  great way to till the soil of the people that are involved in whatever your  message is, our church uses it. It's a great place for people. For example, the  new thing we started at our church we call a micro fellowship events. Micro  fellowship event is an event in our church where you come up with an event that you want to do, then you have to get two or three other people to agree to be a  part of this event. And then you can post it on our micro fellowship group,  Facebook page, inviting everyone else, or however, however many people you  want to join in that group. So if we're all going to go to a movie, I first have to get two or three people by asking them the old fashioned way. But once we're going  I can post it on our micro fellowship page, inviting whoever else wants to come,  we're going to seven o'clock we're gonna meet we're gonna go to dinner first  and then we're going to we're going to go to this movie, whatever it might be. So it's a way that we're trying to get people inviting and and think about doing  something and you're doing something. Why don't you invite a couple people  and once you invite a couple people you can let everyone else know. So, so our  church is mixing it up. We didn't want people to just put it on the Facebook page  without inviting people personally otherwise people get lazy, right? It's like the  bulletin, we're just going to invite everyone to everything and soon no one goes  to anything. So it has to have that personal touch. But once it has the personal  touch, and it becomes the thing, then this is a way that we can expand our  network and try to get new people involved. So it's social media. It does what it  says it is. It's about social, it's about getting people together. And the more ways  you can get people together, the more community kinds of things that you can  do. So whether that's business, whether that's church, whether it's any  organization that you're trying to do, so the more you can learn about how it  works. If you make mistakes, you just learn from your mistakes. That's the one  thing that's nice about social media that instantly you will know whether you're  doing the right thing or not so far for us. The micro fellowship events are working

really well. So that might be something that you can try in your church. So  anyway, that's our message on social media. Thanks for listening