Perth and Sydney diocese using the internet to reach out.
By Anthony Barich
Perth’s Catholic Marriage Education Services Director is reaching hundreds of thousands of people outside the Church by posting blogs on social networking site Twitter under the identity ‘Marriage Man.’
CMES director Derek Boylen started Marriage Man in April, posting questions, quotes and useful anecdotes every two hours between 8pm and 5am, when traffic on the website is at its peak.
He writes a month’s worth at a time and the website enables him to post automatically at specific times. He then checks the Twitter site each morning and after work and responds to any queries or answers.
Twitter services that grade how effective Twitters are in connecting to the people who are ‘following’ them show that Marriage Man is in the 98th percentile, putting him near the top of people who are being engaged with.
This reflects that Marriage Man is influencing among the largest amount of people, as his followers send his content on to others.
His following is getting so big that in a fortnight he will need to produce a separate blog with potentially a YouTube video – a website designed specifically for dialogue that is seen by anyone who logs on.
While most traffic on Twitter is people selling or spruiking products, including real estate, he says even these people check responses of those who are ‘following’ their posts, and as many are in a relationship themselves, they find Boylen’s quotes and anecdotes interesting or even helpful.
A facility on the site that analyses how well ‘Twitters’ engage with their ‘followers’ has revealed that Marriage Man has over 10,000 ‘followers’, and up to 550,000 followers of his followers. He said that while many of his questions like “what do you think it takes to build a life-long marriage” earn typical responses like “communication, honesty, trust, etc”, up to 30 per cent say that God or Christ is the most important thing in their relationship.
This is because the people he tries to identify as potential ‘followers’ are those already Twitting about marriage, partner or fiancé, or about faith in some way, he said. “They’re more in tune with relationships in their life, he added.
Each day Boylen posts something personal about himself, like “my son kicked a goal in junior football yesterday. I’m very proud of him”. He also posts a life-affirming quote from the Bible, a marriage researcher, saint or other positive sources about marriage or love.
He then posts an advice-based thought for the day and asks a question to engage his ‘followers’ with the subject matter.
He also posts a link to a helpful website at times, and can track how many of his ‘followers’ actually go to that link on the internet, and he usually gets between 60 to 100 each time.
Sometimes his ‘followers’ will Tweet him with a website.
Boylen says that internet research shows that with ‘social’ media like facebook and Twitter, users tend to be broken down into three categories, and it applies, he says, to his Twitter page: about 90 per cent are just ‘lurkers’ who just read the page and don’t engage with people. Ten per cent merely respond to existing content but don’t generate new content. Only one per cent actually engage with new content and contribute ideas.
He recently received queries about ‘post-wedding day blues’ by brides, particularly if they’re cohabiting, who fear that their big day will result in an anti-climax when they go back to their regular lives. This does not seem to happen among people who don’t co-habit before marriage, he says, as these people return from their wedding day to the exciting challenge of building a life together.
Some people reveal intimate traumas like their spouses having left them, and even ask Marriage Man to pray for them.
“It took me a while to get a handle on the value of Twitter,” Boylen said, as so much content is random, relatively useless information. But working with countless couples at the Archdiocesan Catholic Marriage Education Services led him to think of ways to expose others outside this framework to “think about their marriage every day, how to keep their marriage alive and keep it life giving”.
“The main impact is to try to help people to have a better marriage, as the reason Christ elevated marriage to a sacrament is because marriage is good for the world, for the people in it and for the children in that family. It’s good to see mum and dad hug, speak respectfully to each other… it’s a good education for them, but its also good for everyone.”
It even helps Marriage Man be a better husband and father.
Sydney Church converting hearts with Twitter
Sydney’s Life, Marriage and Family Centre uses the internet to reach out.
By Anthony Barich
Sydney’s Life, Marriage and Family Centre has utilised all the latest popular social networking, video sharing and podcasting sites to provide spiritual and practical support to that which is often left abandoned – the family.
In doing so, the Centre is also responding to Pope Benedict XVI’s call to employ new technologies to make the Gospel known. In his message for the 43rd World Day of Communications on May 24the Pontiff acknowledged the way in which new digital technologies have brought about “fundamental shifts in patterns of communication and human relationships”.
He called on people to “employ these new technologies to make the Gospel known, so that the Good News of God’s infinite love for all people, will resound in new ways across our increasingly technological world.”
The Centre, established in 2007 to extend the research, policy, educational and pastoral activities the Church undertakes with respect to life, marriage and family issues, has developed ways to reach people online who would not normally read such materials or attend Mass regularly.
“All peoples, practicing or not, and beyond, deserve to hear first hand what the Catholic teaches about issues that touch so deeply and intimately upon their lives,” Life, Marriage and Family Centre education officer Bernard Tatuanji said.
The Church wants to offer a hand of support and encouragement to mothers, fathers and families, he said, as these groups are often neglected and left without support.
“To be a parent, to live in a family, these are beautiful realities, God himself is a family, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and so the Church acknowledges this beautiful vocation,” he said.
At the start of 2009 the Centre began a monthly e-newsletter, LMF News, made up of timely online articles short videos, podcasts, free e-books and upcoming events hosted by the Centre and other Catholic groups, is now sent out to over 1500 people in Sydney, nationally and globally.
LMF News has already covered issues many ‘controversial’ Catholic moral issues including contraception, homosexuality, IVF, AIDS and condoms, plus death, overpopulation, fatherhood and marriage.
The most popular articles, Mr Tatuanji says, are those on relationships and finding ‘Mr or Mrs Right’.
Newsletter subscriptions continue to rise and more people forward it on to friends, but the Centre wants each parish to promote the newsletter, as “people want to know that the Church is there for them every day of the week, there to give them hope and to lead them to Christ”.
The Centre also has a YouTube channel with a growing selection of videos, a group on the social networking sites Facebook and Xt3 (the official social networking site for World Youth Day) and most recently a Twitter account with which it posts regular inspirational quotes on life, marriage and the family. “The Church has been speaking for 2000 years; it would be a shame to forget some of those powerful phrases,” Mr Tatuanji said. “Twitter allows us to offer bite size chunks of wisdom to anyone who wishes to receive them.”
The centre publishes colour brochures that reveal “the beauty and depth of the Church’s vision of the human person, sexuality and life issues” annually. These are sent to parishes to help commemorate Respect Life Sunday and Marriage Sunday, and are also requested as resources for school students.
To subscribe to the Centre’s free monthly e-newsletter – LMF News – go to their website, www.lifemarriagefamily.org.au and enter your email address.
You can follow them on Twitter at https://twitter.com/lifemarriagefam, or view their YouTube videos at http://www.youtube.com/user/LifeMarriageFamily.