I think it's safe to recognize that one of the founding events in the Church's push into the social media space occurred at BYU Hawaii. Elder M. Russell Ballard of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles (one of the governing bodies of the church), was speaking at the BYU Hawaii December 2007 Commencement exercises. His talk was titled Using New Media to Support the Work of the Church. In the talk, Elder Ballard spoke of a conversation going on about the Church. At the time a combination of events, including the candidacy of Mitt Romney in the US presidential election, had generated a lot of interest in the church. News stories, blogs, and other media outlets were publishing stories about the church at an unprecedented rate. Within this context, Elder Ballard issued the following invitation:
Now, to you who are graduating today, and all other faithful members of the Church, and as you graduate from this wonderful university, may I ask you to join the conversation by participating on the Internet, particularly the New Media, to share the gospel and explain in simple, clear terms the message of Restoration. Most of you already know that if you have access to the Internet you can start a blog in minutes and begin sharing what you know to be true. You can download videos from the Church and other appropriate sites, including Newsroom at LDS-dot-org, and send them to your friends. You can write to media sites on the Internet that report on the Church, and voice your views as to the accuracy of the reports. This, of course, requires that you, all members of the Church, understand the basic, fundamental principles of the gospel.
We are living in a world saturated with all kinds of voices, because now, more than ever, we have a major responsibility as Latter-day Saints to define ourselves instead of letting others define us. Far too many people have a poor understanding of the Church because most of the information they hear about us is from the news media reports that are often driven by controversies. Too much attention to controversy has a negative impact on peoples' perceptions of what The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints really is.Following that talk, a number of member-driven initiatives arose around the web. But in this post, I'd like to review what the official social media efforts of the church have included.
Social Networks
The Church would go on to develop over thirty official Facebook pages publishing in areas of inspirational messages, news of the Church, family history support, church magazine articles, aids for sharing the gospel, Church history, and much more. These don't include the 100+ Facebook communities created to help people connect and collaborate around family history work in different regions around the world.
The latest addition to these Facebook pages is a set of pages created for the members of The First Presidency and The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the two highest governing bodies of the church. These general authority pages have been recently established (within the last few weeks) so it remains to be seen how actively they will be updated, hopefully frequently.
Although the Church's Facebook presence has been the most extensive, ongoing efforts are underway on additional platforms. The Church established an official Twitter profile https://twitter.com/LDSchurch. Over one dozen official Twitter accounts publish news of the Church, inspirational messages, technology updates, and media resources.
Google+
The Church has a growing presence on Google+ including pages for official, inspirational messages from the Church, news media announcements, multimedia programming from the Mormon Channel, and missionary updates from mormon.org. Unique to the Google+ list of pages is a Church Employment page, which shares general job tips as well as links to Church employment opportunities. Also unique to the Google+ effort is the creation of a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints community, created / administered by the official Google+ LDS Church account. There are probably more active communities of church members on Google+, but I find in interesting that they're experimenting with this as well.
YouTube
Next, we should probably review the official Church efforts on YouTube. The Church has a number of channels on YouTube, but the most popular is arguably the Mormon Channel, featuring content from www.mormonchannel.org. Other popular channels include the mormon.org channel, featuring videos from the I am a Mormon campaign, music from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and family history helps from FamilySearch
One recent addition to the handful of large social networks, at least in English speaking nations, is Pinterest. The Church has a modest official presence on Pinterest, populated largely with images from the lds.org Media Library and videos from the Mormon Channel on YouTube. I have also noticed that the LDS Church Facebook account has started to share poster graphics with linked invitations to "Pin this image to Pinterest."
Perhaps more significantly on Pinterest, the recently called General Young Women's President, Bonnie Oscarson, has a significant presence on Pinterest, with over 2500 pins, 47 boards, and 6,800 followers.
Mormon.org
Recently, the Church has begun to add a social component to the www.mormon.org missionary website as well. In addition to providing standard content and multimedia that parallels the topics featured in the Preach My Gospel missionary lessons, the mormon.org staff now invite all members to create social profiles on mormon.org at www.mormon.org/create. Members can post brief descriptive profile pages of themselves along with their personal answers to frequently asked questions about the church. Their profiles can be searched by investigators and their answers can be read on their profile pages. Selected answers are also embedded in related content across the www.mormon.org website.
lds.org/youth
In addition to these efforts, it appears the Church may be considering the development of more social interaction features among church members as well. The www.lds.org/youth website includes social features in which users with an lds account can "like" content and share their experiences or thoughts about articles and have their comments directly published at www.lds.org/youth.
Blogs
The Church does not have a large official presence on the blogosphere. The official Church Public Affairs site, maintains its own blog (http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/blog/), featuring noteworthy events / activities by church members, messages from Church leaders that may be of interested to watchers of the Church, and occasional commentary. Managing Director of Public Affairs for the Church, Michael Otterson, regularly contributes, in his official capacity, to the OnFaith blog at the Washington Post. Another blog exists at http://tech.lds.org/, featuring updates and commentary about issues relating to Church sponsored efforts with technology. I will review the LDS Tech website in more detail tomorrow in a post discussing the Church's use of wikis, crowdsourcing, etc.
