At conferences and in conversations I bring up the concept of shelf life a lot in terms of content. I’m talking about how long a piece of content can have a life after it is first published. Content that is based around current events tends to not have a very long shelf life where as content that is art first often has a very long shelf life.

I bring this up because we have a wonderful example of this happening right now before our eyes.

A video, ‘Wooden Heart‘ by the ‘talk music’ artists Listener that was posted on Vimeo in December of 2010 has, as of right now, 2,681 views of which 2102 have come in the last two days.

In Listener’s defense the same video on YouTube has garnered 12K views to date since YouTube is a significantly larger site than Vimeo.

Why did it take 7 months for the video to finally get this attention? After all it is an awesome piece of art.

A quick search in Google News and we can trace where and when it was posted on blogs.

Monday morning it was submitted by a user to a site we manage, OneFifty.me and also appeared here and here.

Tuesday it was posted here and here.

It continues to grow through this network of blogs and Twitter that are all connected in the Christian content camp.

Granted, this isn’t a massive case of going Viral, it is just a couple thousand at this point.

The video has the right elements to give it the shelf life to survive at least until it was given the large platforms of OneFifty.me and Ragamuffinsoul.com.

When we are going to put a lot of resources (this is relative) into a piece of content, like a short film, it is a good idea to design it with shelf life in mind because there is no telling when it may get put on a bigger platform than we might immediately have access to.

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The official launch is on Monday June 13th at www.ContextandVoice.com.

For the launch only the Ebook will be available with the paper back coming available in July.

If you are a blogger you can be a part of the and I’ll get you a copy of the book and blow up your blog for a day. .

I’d planned on launching it today but the short week last week derailed some of the business details associated with that so we bumped it a week.

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The New York Times reported some key census data  relating to marriage and family make up that fly in the face of how most churches do ministry in America.

Are you currently married and have kids? You probably don’t feel like it when you are hanging around church people but the fact is that you represent only 20 percent of the population of this country. This is the demographic that the local church has always targeted and done well to minister too.

But what about the rest?

Speaking from personal experience this is what I have seen:

Singles?
We make them feel like they aren’t fully a part of our community until they get married.

DINKs (Dual Income No Kids)?
The slow moving culture of Church has no place in their active lifestyles.

Divorced and Still Single?
We ostracize them from community and all too often force them into another relationship doomed to fail.

Single Parents?
We don’t invite them to be a part of our families (it takes a village).

Seniors?
We leave them to populate dying churches rather then find a way to let them belong to our community.

It’s easy to sit back and raise questions but what are the answers? What is next for the Church in this reality?

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As you may know, I have written a book of sorts on the topic of content creation in our new media culture. It’s called context and voice and in the spirit of what the book is about, this is a self published effort and so is the marketing side of it. I hesitate to say marketing because I’m not looking to make a bunch of money off of the project, I’m more interested in spreading ideas and stimulating conversations.

I’m asking you, the readers of Nikao, to help me with my ‘book tour’. I’m planning a blog tour that will run every week day from June 13 to July 8. So I need a least 20 bloggers to pull it off.

Who’s it for?

The book is targeted at content creators (pastors & creatives) and content curators (communications teams) in church space. If you have a blog that fits in there somewhere hit me up and I’ll add you to the tour.

What does it look like?

A tour post can be anything that fits the style and community of your blog but here are some ideas to get you started:

Q & A // shoot me some questions and I will answer them in line and boom…a blog post is born

Specific Thought // have an issue or question that requires deeper insight and conversation? I love tackling the big ones.

Interview // video or audio. I have some plugins to record Skype so I can do the work if you want to do an interview.

Review the book // I’ll be getting a copy to all the blog tour blog owners so if that’s your thing…go for it.

What’s in it for me?

Naturally I’ll give you a copy of the book, it’s an e-book at first and right now it looks like we have all the major formats covered for iPad/iPhone, Android, Kindle and Nook. The paperback edition is printed on demand so for the first week I won’t even have one.

Each day of the tour I will tweet out your post at annoying volumes and post here on my blog directing people to it. I’ll also get knee deep in the comments for the post.

Fill out this handy form to get in on all the radness:

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In an effort to keep clutter out of my life I give my books away after I read them. The thing is I don’t have enough people near me doing the same thing so I thought I would hit up the bloggers out there to see who wants to swap.

Here’s what I’m unloading right now:

Jesus Wants to Save Christians | Rob Bell
Pretty solid book on empires and how the Church is effected by them through history and currently.

The Ransomed Heart | John Eldridge
I’m not sure where I got this or what it’s about…I’m not much of a John Eldridge fan. I never understood the Wild at Heart situation.

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years | Donald Miller
Great read on story telling

Want to read on of these? Let me know what book you have to swap and we can mail them to each other.

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I’m reading Cognitive Surplus for the third time…I have recommended it so many times in the last month that I figured I should take my own advice again.

I’ll say this about Cognitive Surplus: If you lead an organization that creates and distributes content to be consumed and you are not ready for the cognitive surplus reality than you and your organization have a bleak future. In short; if you have a career because you control a channel of communication to a given audience your days could be numbered if you don’t figure out how to make it participatory.

“…media is like a triathlon with three difference events: people like to consume, but they also like to produce, and to share.”

Think about how that effects you at a personal level as a leader or communicator.

If you do too much of anyone of those three things without enough of the other two you will marginalize yourself.

Too much content producing and you become a broadcaster. The newspaper industry is going through this discovery right before our eyes…we are now seeing it effect churches.

Too much content consuming and you simply aren’t in the game and are useless. Think spammer.

Too much content sharing and you are an irritant to your community and they will tune you out. People want fresh ideas not regurgitated thoughts.

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Eric Bryant came on staff here at Gateway Church Austin at the beginning of the year and I do have to say; his disc golf game is really coming along.

Once a month he does a teleseminar with various leaders and innovators in ministry type spaces and he has invited me to contribute to that conversation this month. This is going down tomorrow at 1:00 PM central time.

Go here and offer Eric your first born and your email address to join in on the seminar.

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In the last few months in my conversations with various churches doing or preparring to do internet campuses, online church and/or what ever you want to call it, I have formed the hypothesis that all of them fall into one of three buckets.

Billboard or Sample Church

The internet campus primarily is a vehicle for people not attending the church to get a feel for what it’s like before they show up at a physical church.

Church Online

This is a full functioning church existing on the web. Worship, small groups, pastoral care, communion and everything that would traditionally take place at a physical church happens online. Multisite churches may view this as simply another one of their campuses.

Network Model

The internet campus is a content creator and distributor for local communities (read: house church). This is our model at Gateway Church Austin.

I see that these are targets for the voice and strategy of a church’s online ministry presence and, as with any target, there is some collateral effect. Anyone of these models will also see some of the other two happening along side.

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