Are you on a frantic pace to start and maintain blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and more?

I listen to The Advertising Show podcast with Brad Forsythe and Ray Schilens and want to draw your attention to their June 18, 2010 edition for an interesting analysis of the social media landscape in 2010.

The podcast featured an interview with Jonathan Salem Baskin, who manages Futurelab and blogs at Dim Bulb. He offered a view of social media that would probably cause the marketing “experts” on the Web to say “How dare you!” That’s probably why it struck me so much. Anything to bug the “experts.”

To me, Baskin makes perfect sense in a sea of so much do-this and do-that advice offered on a minute-by-minute basis online.

Baskin summed up social media in 2010 this way:

“I think social media generally is an amazing technology in search of meaning an purpose and I’m not certain we’ve really cracked the code yet on it. I think we’ve found a lot of fun ways to occupy people’s time and do entertaining things with it but ultimately the major drivers of social media usage have nothing to do with marketing or the messages that we marketers and brand folks want people to consume.”

Would the expert that your company hired to consult with your marketing and PR team say that?

Maybe not, or maybe.

Another excerpt from the podcast, regarding efforts at using humor and online video caught my ear as well.

“I don’t think the world needs another dancing elf,” Baskin said. “Men and women have proven their capacity to pleasantly waste people’s time. I think that’s great. I’ve elfed myself and elfed my friends. And as I’m talking to you right now I can’t tell you the brand name attached to that campaign… What are we trying to accomplish? Because if the answer is pleasantly waste people’s time, there are many very creative ways to do that.”

Baskin says the strategy for any marketing campaign should be “How the hell do I sell stuff?”

I do think most reasonable people advising businesses on social media matters understand that this is all very much a work-in-progress period. And I am a fan of trying things out, learning-by-doing, and seeing what the real return on social media is, whether you’re in marketing or PR.

Back to his first point about social media, Baskin did go on to say that he does think “there is an immense opportunity to crack the code, I just don’t think anybody knows how.”

Which means we’ve all still got a lot of learning to do, don’t we?

I’m talking about The Message of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI for the 44th World Communications Day. In it, he writes:

The world of digital communication, with its almost limitless expressive capacity, makes us appreciate all the more Saint Paul’s exclamation: “Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel” (1 Cor 9:16) The increased availability of the new technologies demands greater responsibility on the part of those called to proclaim the Word, but it also requires them to become become more focused, efficient and compelling in their efforts. Priests stand at the threshold of a new era: as new technologies create deeper forms of relationship across greater distances, they are called to respond pastorally by putting the media ever more effectively at the service of the Word.

He continues, saying that priests should exercise their proper role as leaders of communities which increasingly express themselves with the different “voices” provided by the digital marketplace. Priests are thus challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources (images, videos, animated features, blogs, websites) which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelization and catechesis.

Pope Benedict and the Vatican have set the example for the Catholic Church, with a YouTube channel among several places to find information from the Vatican.

In a news conference about Benedict’s message, Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, said the Pope wants priests “to enhance their pastoral work by reaching out to others through digital technology” and that the message is for all Catholics to “use the Web to create a space of dialogue where Christians, believers of other religions and non-believers can encounter each other in a respectful search for truth and wisdom.”

It’s no secret there are many ministers and pastors of churches of all denominations blogging and connecting with their congregations – and people around the world for that matter. Many of whom have been doing it for a long time, in Web terms.

Yes, perhaps it’s the more “modern” churches who have set the social media and church marketing agenda. But it appears even the Pope would say that they’re doing what they should be doing… reaching out to the masses through the new media methods of reaching out.

Why not?

Mark Batterson of National Community Church in Washington, D.C., whose blog is just one place to find him and his church in the world of social media, puts it this way, which I think applies here:

…we can’t afford to do church the way it’s always been done. Our incarnational tactics must change. Don’t get me wrong: the message is sacred. But methods are not. And the moment we anoint our methods as sacred, we stop creating the future and start repeating the past. We stop doing ministry out of imagination and start doing ministry out of memory.

Blogs not only help spread the scared message, in simple terms they also help a minister connect to the people in and out of their community about the work of their churches.