What's the Best Use for a Website?
Ever since doing the MMM Mobile Experiment Report (PDF), I've had this uneasy feeling about continuing a website here. Don't get me wrong, in terms of a place for people to see MMM in its most unfiltered manner, a website is probably one of the best tools for this. As a person though, I'm mobile - very mobile - therefore the idea of a website being tied to a person, and therfore becoming more than a website has been something that has just kind of sat on the edge of those things I experiment with, its something that I'm just personally trying to pull off. I do wonder often because of this experience though if I really need a website.
Now, for most ministries, the question isn't so much do they need a website, but rather what's the best use for their website? If you will, how does the website accurately and easily point the way to connecting and understanding the purpose of your organization. And I think that's where the question about MMM's website really comes from.
Sure, there's editorial-like content here; and, this is good for a website to have. But what about those other, connecting. aspects of that interesection of mobile and minsitry. A website doesn't serve as solid a purpose as IM, SMS, picture galleries, and voice. How a ministry/organization is able to use all of these social connecting components to be whom they are - along with the website - is that key point of strategy that I think is missing, or not well executed.
Many of the changes that have happened here lately have been in the idea that MMM might not be a website as much as part of one's social graph to which the website is one of many spokes that can be connected to. And then in this social graph, MMM becomes whatever is needed to those persons and groups that would benefit from the knowledge and connections here.
In light of where we are, and where we want to go, this is one of those questions that sit pretty high. Because MMM is not necessarly trying to go where the trends are, but where they will be in mobile/web/context/etc. Does your ministry/org have the same views towards their website and other outreaches, and if not, maybe that's something of a question to carry throughout the new year.
Labels: innovation, social networking, social objects
posted by Antoine @ 12/29/2009 10:00:00 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
I think that if you treat the web site as a hub for every thing, that you may find it not only useful, but essential. For instance, I read the site via Google Reader. I think the real issue is _how_ to make it the hub of the various aspects of mobile ministry.
The key seems to me, to be to integrate all of them into the MMM web site, so not only we can access it, but you too. Granted, I'm not exactly sure how to go about that part myself, but that's the challenge. ;-)
-Jon
In every epoch, physical and philosophical structures used by one culture/religion are usurped by another when the tides of dominance changes. Making a website the central hub of mobile ministry's ideals would endear it to the same fate.
On the other hand, when those structures are a part of supporting the cultural and behaviorial structures of a group, an identity is able to remain for several generations because the temple inside of us is much harder to build on top of without literally stomping out the people themselves - a feat that some cultures only resort to as a last ditch effort to subgigate others - but leaves very few followers until the new rulers' natives take firm room.
MMM as a site is one part meant just to keep in the context of thought that every mobile interaction provokes some kind of faith response (directly or indirectly). Whether the site remains central to that is a good argument and part of the site's analysis that has been going on for sometime.
Better yet is that MMM provokes people to think about their behavior in the mist of a web/mobile culture. Learning and becoming lamps in respective communities because of this is something that a website should never attain to in my opinion. But, it should continually spark new lamps to shine, and older ones to remain visible.
Thanks to comments and insights folks like yourself Jon, I think MMM does this well, but can always be improved.
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