Benchmarking My Virtual Self
Like a lot of people who got into the Internet later in life, I spent years admiring and using the sites of others while feeling that an net presence of my own was somehow out of reach. My seminary had a faculty page for me, but that’s not quite the same as having your own electronic home.
Today, I have this personal site that includes blogs, articles, and podcasts. None of this happened by accident. And I suspect that my net journey reflects developmental phases that a lot of older leaders go through. They look something like this:
1. I need for lots of help from much younger people: With my first primitive Xanga blog set up, my twentysomething friend Valerie volunteered to make the thing look great while designing the first version of www.earlcreps.com
Tim Bednar took the original site design and pushed it to the next level, along the way helping me to realize that selling audio CD’s on the site was hopelessly outdated in the iPod era. Who knew? Of course, the fact that no one bought any of the CD’s made the decision to dump them easy. (I now have hundreds of them sitting in my basement looking for a purpose in life.)
Tim, whom I have never met face to face, is one of the sharpest Internet strategy people around anywhere. He is also half my age.
2. I feel just glad to be here. The net made my thoughts global with one click, so I was delighted when my site went online and my first blog was posted (in the early days I wrote a lot about 24). Like a mediocre sports team making the playoffs for the first time I was just happy to have made it into this strange, new venue. It never occurred to me that being one tiny tree in a very large electronic forest was also a form of virtual obscurity.
3. I see the need for measurement. My first clues about measuring the performance of my website emerged from connecting my Xanga blog to Site Meter. Soon, I was deluged with statistics on “visits,” “page views,” etc. Tim connected earlcreps.com with Google Analytics to give me a read on what kind of traffic we were attracting. I am an infomaniac, so I loved the numbers, but had no idea how to interpret them.
4. I rethink performance assessment as a cycle of measurement, evaluation, and action. Currently, Tim is walking me through the draft of Spectrum, a new product he’s developing that evaluates the traffic on your site in ways you can actually do something about. In other words, it provides a simple way to revise your Internet ministry based on the goals you want to accomplish, rather than just on ramping up the number of “hits.”
5. I realize that I am more careful with my site than with my life. This one hurt. Spectrum and Google Analytics provide tools for the virtual me far beyond anything I do to assess the performance of the real me. I jokingly posed this issue to Tim, who directed me to Twitter, a site on which you report what you’re dong at the moment. I went there and browsed some comments. At least these people were paying attention. What am I doing?
So my question is: what would a set of assessment tools for our ministries look like? I don’t mean our attendance, or sales, or “hits,” but our own lives as leaders? What should be evaluated and how could those evaluations be turned into an opportunity for God to shape our lives?
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I’m a self-confessed infoholic too, and the more charts the better!
I find weblogging itself to be a form of spiritual discipline, helping me hone my thinking and be consistent in writing. I view my visitors like I think I would view a church, with the handful of people who come by to comment and read from time to time, I try to honor their time and provide something worthwhile, edifying, informative, maybe fun sometimes, too!
Twitter’s an interesting idea, but not compelling to me. On the other hand, I believe in transparency. I’ve always enjoyed journaling, but I hate writing. I do enjoy typing though (it’s so much more efficient!) and so one way to converge the two is to set up a weblog that is password-protected and invitation-only. Then use that private blog to journal your life progress, your personal goals, your frustrations, questions, and things to investigate for later. Open it up to your wife, your pastor, your mentor, and anyone you’re mentoring as well. Invite them to follow along with your transparency experiment, but don’t write for them. Write for God and you.
Another perhaps simpler and slightly more secure way to accomplish something similar is to use email. You could either set up a private email distribution list (listserv) or you could simply set up a new Gmail account and email that Gmail account whenever you want to update your “blog.”
And you can still invite others to follow along with you via Gmail by giving them access to your Gmail feed. (Given them the userid and password and point them to https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom )
A similar solution is to set up a dodgeit.com url, which you can then email to in the form of whatever@dodgeit.com. That creates a one-way email address you can send to and everything you send gets added to a custom feed URL.
Later, if you want to make your personal progress more public, you can refeed the Gmail feed via your public blog.
The nice thing about these kinds of options is you start archiving, in a semi-permanent way stuff that you care about and need to remember (like setting up milestones) and it’s far more easily portable than a stack of journals.
Good food for thought!
Rich
BlogRodent
Earl,
I suppose the blog is as much for us who write it as it is for those who may stop by to read it. Personally my blog consists of devotional thoughts which I also email to folks at our church. The nice thing about the bolg is it does give the opportunity for others to comment – although few do. I don’t know if I have ever had a visitor just drop in. You’re right. I may have a place on the web, but I’m virtually obscure in that world. I’m thankful for the real world friends God has blessed me with.
Blessings,
Greg