Pastors, social media and the customer service medium, (Photo by Christophe Kiciak. Used under a Creative Commons license. http://flic.kr/p/8puVZq)

If we consider the Internet as a customer service medium, it provides a unique opportunity for priests, and especially pastors, to create meaningful relationships with parishioners. Rather than just another time sink, social media and websites can be a way for pastors to connect in a personal way in the midst of a busy world in which they are pulled in more directions than ever.

Let’s first explore what it means for the Internet to be a customer service medium, and then we can see how that connects with parish and priestly ministry.

Paul Ford writes in an essay on his website that The Web Is a Customer Service Medium, in which he contrasts the Internet as a medium against old media like print, radio, television, and movies. Ford says you can define a medium by the question it answers. Movies answer the question, “How can I entertain myself outside the house?” TV answers the question, “How do I enterain myself at home?” Radio: “How can I be entertained and informed while I’m doing something that keeps me otherwise busy?” Newspaper: “How can I find out what’s going on locally and in the world, at length?” Magazine: “The same, but in-depth and longer.” You get the idea. And each medium doesn’t have to answer only one question, of course. So what is the Internet’s question?

Ford claims that the Internet is the response to “Why wasn’t I consulted?” What he means by that is that the Internet allows real participation by the audience, not just after the fact as feedback, but as a true contribution to the creation of content. Ford spends a lot of time on how that takes form on various websites, but he concludes by saying thagt unlike the old media, the web is not a publishing medium, but is a customer service medium. He advises publishing companies, in particular, to throw out their old expectations and create a service experience around what they publish and sell. Passive readers become active members.

Whatever “customer service” means when it comes to books and authors, figure it out and do it. Do it in partnership with your readers. Turn your readers into members. Not visitors, not subscribers; you want members. And then don’t just consult them, but give them tools to consult amongst themselves. These things are cheap and easy now if you hire one or two smart people instead of a large consultancy. Define what the boundaries are in your community and punish transgressors without fear of losing a sale. Then, if your product is good, you’ll sell things.

So how does this apply to pastors and their parishes? Similar principles apply for parish websites and social media. Some pastors have said to me that they’ve spent a lot of time and sometimes money on a new website only to see it get very little traffic. Why? In many cases it’s because it doesn’t foster a conversation that builds community. Providing Mass times and downloadable copies of the bulletin will always provide some traffic and be a real service, but in order to see the parish website become a major part of your parish’s communications strategy, it has to provide a reason to come back and participate. Let parishioners, visitors, and seekers talk to one another in a forum related to your parish, building up that parish identity. Let them talk to you and give you much needed feedback while also helping you get buy-in from them on your priorities.

Likewise with social media. Often priests will wonder what they will say on Twitter or Facebook, especially when they have so much else to occupy their time. But that’s misunderstanding the medium, I think.

A pastor on social media should almost be listening more than talking. It’s nearly impossible for a pastor to get to know his people in 10 minutes after Mass, as he greets them in 30-second conversations on the way out of church, and that’s just the ones who stop to talk at all. But if he follows his parishioners on Twitter and Facebook and other social media during the week, he’ll learn more than he ever did before: Who’s having a baby? Who lost a job? Who’s struggling with questions of faith? What’s on the mind of people in his community? And that’s even without saying anything himself on the social networks. Imagine what he could learn when the conversation starts, a real dialogue begins.

If we were to compare social media to another activity that priests and pastors engage in, we could say social media is less like a homily than it is like confession. In a homily, the priest speaks at length about a topic that he thinks is current and relevant to the congregation. But in confession the good confessor does a lot of listening and then speaks to what the penitent is saying. Likewise, in ministry in social media, it’s important to listen more than talk. It’s not that the priest can’t write about what interest him and other topics. In fact, he should so that he’s a full participant in the medium. He needs to have an authentic voice in social media and not give the impression that he’s just there to listen in.

Of course, as I said before, some priests will respond legitimately they don’t have the time for all this social media following and tweeting and updating. But then pastors don’t have time for a lot of elements of evangelization in general because they’re spread so thin and they’re so busy with administration and sacraments. But that’s a more a problem of priestly ministry in the 21st century in general than with social media in particular. However, a priest may get more bang for his buck with an investment of time in social media.[1] After all, knocking on all those doors and making home visits is even more time consuming than reading and writing tweets and status updates. (Although that face-to-face interaction is in most cases to be preferred where possible.)

If a priest wants to find a means to engage in meaningful conversation and build relationships and community at a modest cost in time and attention, turning to the the “customer service medium” with an open mind and an open ear can pay big dividends.

The new "schedule updates" button

Facebook seems committed to an ongoing series of updates to its Pages for businesses and organizations to improve their utility in several ways. They recently rolled out a new iPhone app called Facebook Pages Manager, which we wrote about revently, and which lets you access all your administrator functions even when you’re not at your computer.

Now Facebook has added a few more refinements, including scheduling posts, an option to pay to promote your posts, and finer grained controls for having multiple administrators with varying levels of access. They’ve also added post-level analytics and insights.

Scheduling Posts

Schedule updates to post on a particular date and time

When you look at your status update box at the top of your page, you’ll see a new icon on the left of an analog clock. When you click on it, you’ll be able to enter the year, month, day, hour and a 10-minute increment within the hour. When I tested the function on June 4, 2012, I was only able to schedule as far out as December 1, 2012. I don’t know if that’s a moving date (incrementing one day per day) or if it’s a limit that will move forward arbitrarily.

You can also date items in the past, using the Timeline as an historical record. For your parish, you could put dates ike the parish’s founding or when the pastor was assigned, for example. When posting on an historical date, you have the option to hide from News Feed, so the historical updates don’t clutter your followers’ news feeds.

In the past, you could only get such scheduling functions from third-party tools, like [Hootsuite](http://www.hootsuite.com] or [Buffer](http://www.bufferapp.com], and while you still needs those kinds of tools to schedule updates that post to multiple social networks and accounts at once, this is a nice feature if you’re concentrating on just a parish or ministry Facebook Page, for example.

See scheduled posts in the Activity Log

You can see your scheduled posts by clicking on “Manage” in the Admin Panel for your Page, then Activity Log. There you will see scheduled posts and be able to change the date and time for posting, tell it to publish now, or cancel the post.

Scheduled post

Promoting Posts

You also now have the option to pray to promote an update if your parish or ministry Page has 400 or more followers/likes. The most important thing to note here is that it is completely optional. If you ignore this feature, your posts will still appear within your followers’ news feeds at the same rate and frequency as before. What you’re doing here is essentially making an update into an advertisement that will get slightly better placement.

Promote your posts

Facebook will give an option of one or two dollar amounts and tell you how many people the post will potentially reach. Again, these are people who already follow you, not new Facebook users who don’t. Facebook explains it all in great detail. The short story is that we should recall that Facebook doesn’t put every activity by your friends’ and liked Pages in your news feed in chronological order. (Whether they should or not is a different story.) Instead, they try to use algorithms to determine the most relevant information for you based onmany criteria, some of which they don’t disclose. What Promoted Posts does is give much greater weight to your promoted posts in the news feeds of a select number of your followers. It doesn’t necessaerily mean they will click on it, however.

Promote your post options

Is it worth it? It depends on what you want to accomplish. If it’s worth say, $10 to make sure your update appears prominently in the news feeds of 500 or 1,000 of your followers, then by all means give it a try. On the other hand if you want to reach people within a certain demographic (e.g. all self-identified Catholics who live in your town and surrounding towns) who are not yet followers of your Facebook Page, then a regular ad would be more effective.

Administrator Levels

You’ve always had the opportunity to have multiple Facebook users as administrators of your Page and at Pilot New Media, we’ve always suggested that you have two administrators at minimum on all Pages for what we call the “hit by a bus” contingency. Now with the new administrator permissions levels, there may be more good reasons for have two or even many more administrators.

The various permissions given to different administrator levels

As you can see from the chart, you can now assign others to assist you in administering your Page without worrying about training on some of the more advanced functions or being concerned at giving too much control.

The three levels you’ll probably be most concerned with are Manager, Content Creator, and Moderator. We’ll still recommend you have at least two Managers, yourself and another person who could take over all functions if necessary. The Moderator would be very useful especially if you need help reading, responding to, and deleting comments, if necessary.

Other Changes

The other recent update to your Facebook Page is that it now shows Insights, i.e. statistics on how people see and react to your updates. Keep in mind, that apparently it only works with posts you make on the Facebook website itself, not posts that come from third-party tools like Hootsuite or RSS Graffiti.

You get two different metrics. One is the total of people reached, broken down into Organic (“The number of people who saw your Page post in News Feed or ticker, or on your Page’s Wall.”) and Viral (“The number of people who saw your Page post in a story from a friend.”) Viral can be important because it refers to people who have not liked your Page and so this is your opportunity to reach beyond those who already know your ministry or parish to those who will potentially like your Page and become regular readers of your content.

Insights per post: people reached

The other metric is a percentage that refers to the percentage of people who like your Page who saw this post. If you paid to promote the Page, it will give you a percentage for those who saw it through promotion as well.

These can be useful indicators of how well you’re using your Facebook Page to communicate what’s going on in your parish or ministry, but don’t obsess over them, especially in the early days of your Facebook presence. They’re only numbers and since you’re not a business for whom sales is not the ultimate measurement of success, they’re less important than reachign the right audience.

Undoubtedly, we’ll be seeing more updates and changes to Facebook Pages in the future and we’ll try to keep up and chronicle them for you as they appear. Keep in mind that any changes usually roll out over time and don’t just show up for everyone at once, so if you hear about a new feature that you don’t see yet on your Page, be patient. It will be probably show up in the near future.

Insights per post: Percentage of followers reached

Facebook Pages ManagerFacebook Pages Manager

Facebook has released a new app for your iPhone or iPad called Facebook Pages Manager for, well, managing your Facebook Pages.

In the past, it’s been nearly impossible to do any significant administration of your Facebook Pages with the regular Facebook app or with the Facebook website on your iPhone. (The website on the iPad has been a little better because it doesn’t serve you the crippled mobile version by default.)

The Facebook Pages Manager lets you see all your notifications and fans, shows you the “insights” (statistics on how your Page is being used), and lets you manage all your Pages. You can post updates and photos to your Page, filter the posts to see only your updates or only those of your fans, and you can see the admins. (There was a weird bug with the admins: When I tapped on one, it tried to open an image editing app, but then crashed both apps. Not sure what it was intending to do.)

Keep in mind this is intended to be an iPhone app, and shows up as a doubled-up app on your iPad and can only be used in Portrait mode there. Here are some screenshots of the app on my iPad.

Several months ago, Facebook introduced the new Timeline for personal profiles. Among the big changes were the very large cover photo at the top and a re-ordering of how your content shows up below. The idea, they said, was to make your Facebook profile more a chronicle of your life, and even suggested that you add historical happenings, like the day you were married or the day you moved to your new home. (This may not be advisable, given that the more personal information you have online, the easier you make it for identity thieves.)

The reception to the Timeline has been mixed, which is understandable given that many don’t like any changes whatsoever. But there are also legitimate complaints that it could make information harder to find. Well, we hope you one of those who were happy with the new Timeline because now it’s coming to your Pages.

You may have noticed by now a message from Facebook on your own Facebook Page that on March 30, 2012, all Pages will switch to the new Timeline format. They also allow you to preview how the Timeline will look on your page, take a tour of the new features, rearrange your content before the new Timeline is mandatory, or change to the new format now.

The tour is useful, so we suggest that you take it now. If you click the image we’ve included in this post, you can see how the Boston Catholic Page will look after the change. Some best practices to keep in mind: The profile photo is what others will see in their news feed so be sure to keep it distinctive and recognizable at a glance so that it doesn’t get lost in the clutter of the typical newsfeed. If you aren’t using a photo of your church as your profile photo, the cover photo might be a good place to do so. On the other hand, the size and prominence of the cover photo is an excellent opportunity to highlight the communal aspect of your parish: The congregation celebrating Mass, people at a social event, children at First Communion (keeping in mind the sensitivity of using photos of children). The possibilities are endless.

Because of the format that Facebook has chosen, your cover photo should be at least 399 pixels wide. The space itself is 851 pixels wide and 315 pixels high. We also suggest that you use a landscape orientation photo (wider than it is tall) instead of portrait. If parishes of the Archdiocese of Boston need help choosing or editing their cover photo, Pilot New Media can help. Just drop us a line through our Contact form.

Whether you like the new Timeline or not, we have to recognize the inevitability of being beholden to a third-party like Facebook and make the best of it. And after some time, you may find you like it so much that you don’t want the next change Facebook decides to implement some way down the road.

The new and upcoming and cutting-edge social network out there now is Google+. It’s in beta test mode right now and people have been signing up since mid-July. Now, as of November 7, businesses, organizations, and brands can now sign up for pages as well.

And since it’s our hope to bring the Gospel to the people wherever they are, we are creating a number of brand pages, including:

• Archdiocese of Boston
• Pilot New Media
• Pilot Bulletins
• Pilot Printing
• The Good Catholic Life

We’re sure that in coming months other Boston ministries and parishes will be setting up their own space on Google+ as well. On the internet, it’s an open question whether any particular service or website will survive and thrive, like Facebook, or crash and burn, like countless others (remember Pownce?), or shine for a time and crash, like MySpace, but it’s worth trying them out as they come because there’s no way to tell which ones will be the next Facebook or Twitter.