Tonight I’m thinking a lot about Kansas State University’s “Digital Ethnography” program and the light it sheds on our Internet Campus strategy. If you haven’t see them, check out these videos:

• Information R/evolution
• The Machine is Us/ing Us
• A Vision of Students Today

Chris Fowler, president of Church Community Builder, responded to my concerns this evening as follows:

I wanted to let you know that after speaking with multiple people yesterday and today about this issue, I heard lots of differing opinions – some saying we were doing smart optimizations, other saying some of what we intended to be optimization for search engines could be considered “borderline”. After praying about it and getting that counsel, what I decided to do was to be “above reproach”. I appreciate the fact that you were willing to communicate with me through these channels one on one. Thank you for being “iron sharpening iron”. Changes have already been made at this point for the home page, but we will also be making changes to the footer over the next 24 hours or so on the non-home pages.

My wife’s church is in the market for a web-based ChMS, so I thought I’d check out Church Community Builder. Imagine my surprise to discover questionable search engine optimization (SEO) on their home page.

First, notice the obvious keyword stuffing on the right side of the page. Then, look in the barely-readable footer and notice more keyword stuffing.

Second, turn off CSS and notice that the keywords are enclosed in h1 tags. Those aren’t titles at all and they’re being obscured by clever use of CSS. In my view, it’s a form of cloaking to put h1 tags around things that aren’t titles, making them appear huge and important to search engine crawlers, while using CSS to make those things appear small and unimportant to humans. This is the most concerning thing I see on the page.

Finally, while it’s not a bad SEO technique per se, I have a negative impression of any company or organization that tries to optimize for competitors’ company names and product names. This is certainly something we wouldn’t engage in ourselves. That is, we wouldn’t try to optimize our site to capture people searching for another church down the street by name. Similarly, we wouldn’t buy search engine advertising related to another church or its programs. Instead, we’d focus on trying to help people find us who are looking for us. If they’re looking for another church by name, we’d want them to find that church, not us.

Two days ago I sent an e-mail to Chris Fowler, the president of the company about this. He vigorously defended his company and their SEO practices while saying that he would be open to my point of view. I explained my concern and how to fix it. So far he hasn’t responded further or changed the home page.

What do you think? Does it give you a negative impression of the company? How would you advise Chris in this situation?

We have completed the first stage of our evaluation of the companies and products on our ChMS short list using the high-level criteria I posted a couple of days ago. Based on that evaluation, we have narrowed our choices to Fellowship One and Shelby Arena. Fellowship Technologies will be here Wednesday and Shelby Systems will be here Thursday to demo their products to our Evaluation Team.

Blackbaud took themselves out by not responding to our requests for information in a timely way. We’re on a tight schedule and they simply didn’t respond fast enough for us to evaluate them.

My visit to ACS was spectacular. They are a great company top to bottom, but their products aren’t able to meet our needs right now. Based on a brief conversation with them, I’m pretty sure they would agree with that. If you’re looking for a ChMS, you should definitely check them out. You won’t find a more capable yet humble and gracious company. I’m grateful to have met Hal, Ben, Pattie, and others at ACS and to be able to call them friends, not to mention uber RoundTable buddy, Dean (you rock!).

I love Microsoft CRM as a platform. As with all Microsoft products, there’s always a new version (4.0 in this case) just around the corner which always promises to be even better than what they have now. In all seriousness, it does appear that this is going to become a better and better option for churches in the coming years. The question for us is: what kind of solution can we actually buy and implement now?

The MSCRM platform has two competing church-specific solutions: Proclaim CRM from Ministry Management Solutions and ProVision CRM from The ACTS Group. We didn’t have time to look closely at both products, so we started with ProVision. After a refreshingly candid conversation about our requirements and our time line, The ACTS Group withdrew from consideration. Some of the functionality we need is still in development, so they can’t yet demonstrate a complete working solution for us. A year from now it would be a completely different situation, but we need to make our decision now based on functionality they can actually deliver now. Keep an eye on this because with Tony involved, you know it’s going to be good.

As I said, we haven’t taken a close look at Proclaim mainly because there are only so many hours in the day and you have to draw the line somewhere. If perchance we don’t fall in love with Arena or Fellowship One, Bill Walker is just a phone call away.

And then there were two.

Two more things caught my eye in the last few days regarding social networking and the church.

First, Joe Suh of Digital Leadnet offered some thoughtful comments about how APIs for social networking sites will allow people to use many of them simultaneously. I’ve spoken about his previously, citing the thinking of Dave Winer that Twitter could become the de facto standard for sharing personal identity. (Remember when Microsoft tried to do this with Passport?)

Second, Robert Scoble did a video demo of Zude. The way the demo unfolds requires you to have a lot of patience. If you hang in there, after 10-15 minutes the power of Zude will start to become apparent. Zude is a social network like Facebook, etc. but it has a very powerful way for non-programmers to create, layout, and dress up their pages. More importantly, the demo shows how it allows for an extreme level of interoperability with other social networking systems. Also interesting is the fact that Zude is built on a web application framework and stack called Open5G that seems vaguely competitive with the much-heralded Ruby on Rails.

In the marketing section of my feed reader, along with Church Marketing Sucks, Kem Meyer, Seth Godin, and others, I have recently added Katya Andresen’s blog, “Getting to the Point“. Great stuff. For example, check out her recent post on Millennials and their social conscience. More food for thought about the Internet Campus.

As promised, here is Eric Busby’s presentation from last Thursday morning at the RoundTable. It includes links to all of the sites he mentioned.

We didn’t have much time to process or discuss Eric’s ideas last week. Perhaps we could do that here in the comments. What is your reaction to Eric’s talk? How has it influenced your thinking?

digital.leadnet.org is a valuable new resource. I find myself bookmarking several things a week. Check out:
Saving a Generation through MySpace
Technology Shaping Culture – the “Thumb Generation”
Reaching the Post-Congregational Christian
Teens Search Faith Online

I have been drawn to each of these posts as food for our thinking about a new Internet Campus at Resurrection.

Rather than having a paper evaluation form at the end of the RoundTable, we decided to take a cue from Tony and solicit your feedback right here on the blog for everyone to see.

Some of you have already given feedback on your own blogs. That’s cool. It would be good to comment here too so Terrell (and Terry?) can read everything in one place.

If you were here in any capacity or for any portion of the event, please share your thoughts: good, bad, or indifferent. I have a thick skin, so don’t spare my feelings. Better yet, make a specific, actionable suggestion to our next hosts.

If you don’t feel comfortable posting here for everyone to see, e-mail me at clif.guy at cor.org.

I definitely benefited from all of the comments after the Sugar Creek RoundTable. Amy and I did everything possible in our planning to take that feedback into account. Let’s give the same benefit to our next hosts.