Five Tips to Stay Current Without Getting Overwhelmed:

1. Survey the landscape. In your free time, find a way to experiment with emerging devices and technologies. You don’t need to camp out overnight in front of an Apple store before the launch of every iPhone – just know what they’re capable of.Observe how your friends and family use technology and social media. That’ll clue you in as to how people are integrating these tools into their lives.“It’s almost like how you used to need to know about the latest pop star to have a decent conversation around the water cooler,” Hosein said. “Now you need to know what people are using, technology-wise, to get a sense of how you need to position your company strategically as well. That fluency is important.”
2. When it comes to social media, ask the right questions. The raw power of social media to unite and engage the masses – whether it be Facebook, Twitter or YouTube – cannot be understated. But increasingly critical to social media proficiency is the ability to gauge how well your strategies are working.According to Hosein, never has more data been available about our behaviors and preferences.Sifting through all of that information to reach any kind of valuable conclusion requires more than good analytics tools: you need to ask the right questions.

   To illustrate this point, Hosein uses the example of Visa. The financial services giant hired an agency to study its social media impact during the Beijing 2008 Olympics. The numbers spiked enormously, leading Visa executives to believe their engagement efforts had paid off.

   In reality, it turns out people weren’t just interested in Visa; many were looking into visas to China for the purpose of attending the Games, according to Hosein.

   “If you don’t ask the right questions, if you don’t put the right terms in, and don’t think about other possibilities as the right answer, you’ll be led down the wrong road,” he said. “It’s like doing a Google search. You need to put the fence around your search so it leads to the right conclusion.”

3. Master the art of storytelling. Technology has given just about everyone a voice. As Hosein puts it: “It’s now your grandmother in her home putting out YouTube videos.”The downside is that the sheer volume of these voices has created an overwhelming din in the digital sphere. In order to break through, Hosein suggests going back to the basics: mastering the timeless practice of storytelling and producing narratives with a beginning, middle and end, along with a compelling, emotional hook.Hosein, author of Storyteller Uprising: Trust & Persuasion in the Digital Age, has counseled corporate leaders from the likes of MasterCard, Microsoft Europe and CVS/pharmacy on creative approaches to thinking about and managing their creative communications.

   “Every individual, every company or organization is now a media creator or media organization, no matter what you’re doing, if you’re an engineer, a lawyer or a business person,” Hosein said. “Companies are beginning to grasp that storytelling is the key. And they’re even creating positions within the organization like ‘storytellers-in-chief’ to actually figure this out.”

4. Learn a little of this and little of that.An important part of storytelling in the digital age is being able to convey ideas across a number of platforms.Hosein believes everyone – even top executives – can benefit from learning to shoot and edit video, capturing audio and familiarizing themselves with code. Only by understanding the power of different forms of storytelling can they grasp how it can be integrated into an organization’s overall strategy.Injecting a bit of the creative process into leadership keeps things fresh, innovative and entrepreneurial, according to Hosein.

   “I mean if kids can do it and teach themselves, you can too, and you absolutely have to,” he said.

5. Find time to power off. Every so often, take some time off and unplug.Even Hosein – a social media buff who heads a high-profile graduate school program and hosts the Four Peaks TV show – allows himself a once-weekly break from the glare of his favorite tech gadgets.“Being connected all the time doesn’t necessarily bring about great ideas,” he explains. “Some of the best ideas come to me when I’m in the shower or on an airplane, where I can’t connect. So it’s really important to do this stuff in moderation.”

Province III of the Episcopal Church have come up with something that is a good starting point for the church.  Building Faith, a blog moderated by Sharon Ely Pearson has a post that I offer as a beginning to that conversation called Social Media: Safe Church.  Check it out.

Obviously, if you see something like this in your inbox, let your friend know his or her email account has been hacked. But don’t send any money.

Lastly, here are some things to do to help protect yourself from being a victim of this type of scam.

1.  Change your password on your email account regularly.
2.  Make sure your password is secure, with numbers and other special characters.
3.  Consider changing your email account if it has been hacked.
4.  Make sure you have anti-virus software on your computer and that it is up to date.  This is especially important with wireless connections.
5.  Don’t give out your email address and password to just anyone.
6.  Review your Facebook settings.  A great deal of information, including email address can be mined from unprotected accounts.
7.  If you are a victim of such an incident, change password immediately and notify the email provider involved.

One of the many complaints that I hear about the Episcopal Church’s worship practices on Sunday morning is that there are so many books to juggle.  Now for us “cradle Episcopalians”, being able to navigate around a prayer book, hymnal and lectionary insert is  part of the right of passage and joy (if I may be so bold) of being Episcopalian.  But the reality is that cradle Episcopalians are a distinct minority.  Many people are coming to the church later in life and many times from either another faith tradition or no tradition at all.  So when a visitor with no background in the church suddenly has to wend their way through bulletin inserts, prayer books, hymnals (sometimes more than one) and anything else….well, the experience could be overwhelming and not in a necessarily good way.

There have been various ways that this issue has been dealt with.  Booklets have been created every Sunday with the BCP service copied out.  Projection screens with Powerpoint presentations have been used.  How-to sheets with page numbers and color coding.  Some work, some don’t.  Unfortunately, unless you recycle a lot of it ends up in a landfill.

I would like to propose that maybe we look into using smartphones as a medium for the service information.  One could create a PDF file with all of the information laid out in the appropriate order.  A person could then either download the file from a website, or cooler yet, use the smartphone to scan a QR barcode linked to the PDF file.  You wouldn’t need to change the barcode that would be scanned since you would be able to create a new PDF every week and associate it with the code.  You would certainly be more eco-friendly since no paper would be needed for printing.

I found an article on this that I think has some merit, at least as a jumping off point for discussion.  Personally, I do not think that being a liturgical church means we can’t use the technology.  At the very least, fewer bulletins and inserts would be needed.  The stigma of using smartphones in meetings as diversions and being disengaged is going away.  Personally, I think it is worth considering.