Six months into my employment I found myself at a tipping point. I knew just enough about the product to understand the overall business strategy, but I was still fresh/naive/new enough to be able to spot the problems with that strategy. It was then that I first came upon an idea;

Church is social – let’s build on that!
– Church is Social™

Eery new business launches with a vision. It might be an idea of how to better solve an existing problem, or it might be that we should start doing things differently because of what they see happening in the future. Personally, I saw that no one was taking responsibility for helping churches to realise the huge potential that social technologies present.

Over the last year I have crafted a social web application tailored to the needs of churches and their members. Along the way I have had the opportunity to sit down and demonstrate exactly how powerful such a platform can be when it is applied to specific functions. More often than not, those church leaders have come away with a better understanding (or at least less fear) of social media and enterprise-grade collaborative tools.

For as long as I have been trying to sell my church community and communication web application, the single biggest obstacle that I have encountered is lack of awareness. This will not come as a huge surprise to anyone who has ever worked in, or for, a church. Churches are grand-masters of making do and getting by. And while they have their heads down, just focusing on muddling through, they have little reason to believe that there are better tools or methods available to them.

So, it has taken me a little over a year to arrive at a rather counter-intuitive conclusion. That is, that I should not be selling a product at all; instead I should be selling the problem.

By the time you get to work you will already have a good idea of whether they had a good weekend, whether the birthday party was a success and also know that their kids’ bicycle stabilizers came off for the first time.

So, what is left to talk about at the water-cooler?

The mere act of publishing those trivial, anecdotal snippets means that you eliminate a whole swathe of small talk. In doing so our once distant friends and relatives can now effortlessly follow your nights out and enjoy front-row seats to your achievements. The point I am trying to make is that we all share a much more intimate relationship with those we follow and who follow us via social media. This particular phenomenon has become known as ‘ambient intimacy’.

In answer to my opening question, this ‘ambient intimacy’ allows us to forgo the usual small talk. Instead we can cut straight to the chase and talk in more relevant and meaningful ways. Those photos and tweets of the hotel they stayed in provide a shared baseline of common knowledge. It means that you can start your conversation by asking if they could recommend it for your own upcoming anniversary. You can mention that you stayed in a hotel in the same chain on you last holiday and that you noticed the identical breakfast spread in one of the pictures.

When it is viewed completely dispassionately, you could almost call this a conversational efficiency gain. In return for sacrificing just a little of your privacy, you benefit from the improved conversations that ‘ambient intimacy’ facilitate.

Is that too extreme? A little too cynical? Or missing the point entirely? Let me know in the comments below.

“With every e-mail and video and blog post and tweet and status update, we add to the real-time documentary of our lives.”
- Gary Vaynerchuk

Half of my family reads extraordinarily fast, while the other half reads at (what I assume to be) a regular pace. Of the two, I fall into the second category. That said, I do read for at least half-an-hour every night. This time is usually divided equally between a non-fiction book (Dan Ariely, Seth Godin, etc.) and some “trashy” fiction book (Chris Ryan, Colin Forbes, etc.) The end result is that I still work my way through about two books a month.

My decision to buy a Kindle was based mainly on the fact that every month I end up with two more books to try and put somewhere on my shelves. The business book will usually be kept for reference, but the fiction book becomes dead weight and I will most likely never be read again. My thought was that at least with a Kindle the fiction book could actually be deleted without any waste.

Of course, an extension of this argument soon led me to realise that I could actually claw back some shelf space simply by substituting Kindle editions for the books I already own.  It was while I was following this idea through to its logical conclusion that I stumbled upon an opportunity, which I wanted to explore in this post.

Does Amazon offer a simple back-ordering service, whereby a Kindle edition of every physical book I have ever bought from Amazon is automatically made available to me through my Kindle? After all, Amazon loudly proclaims the “Buy Once, Read Anywhere” ethos behind its Kindles. They, of course, are referring to the ability to read Kindle books on many devices simultaneously. But my idea is a valid one.

I am a realist and could imagine such a feature landing Amazon in a perilous quagmire of royalties and licensing disputes. However, the convenience of a bulk, back-ordering function would even be something I’d be willing to dip into my pocket for.

So far the lead contenders have been “a blogging/social media group” (my idea) and “organising a quarterly church service” (our leader’s idea). To be perfectly honest, both ideas cover a lot of the same ground, including brainstorming, planning, discussions, editing and execution. As I sat in our latest meeting it slowly dawned on me that the difference was simply one of scale.

Our leader’s argument was that a Twenties-run church service would raise the profile of the group within the church. It would serve as a vehicle to feedback to the church and let them see us being active members of the community. For what it is worth, these are both sound arguments. From my perspective, however, they simply lack ambition. Limiting ourselves to the rest of our church just seems unnecessarily restrictive. Especially when there is a real opportunity to connect with thousands of other twenty-somethings around the world.

Through my work for Church is Social™ I deal with churches who have learnt and embraced the potential that the Internet has to offer them. They are no longer confined merely to their parish boundaries. They can effortlessly reach a global audience with a single worship service and sermon message.

Sat there in the Twenties meeting it took me a while to put my finger on why the church service idea irked me so much. Like I said, we’d be doing the same types of things on a weekly basis. This means it is not the scope of the idea I was objecting too, rather it was the scale.

As a twenty-something, running a dotcom company that has social media as its lifeblood, am I simply wired differently? Is the raw ambition, unprecedented access to knowledge and the confidence to use the tools available to us a blessing of my generation?