Susanne Goldstone Rosenhouse
Social Media Coordinator
National Jewish Outreach Program

Of course not every Tweet or blog post or Facebook status update is of vital importance to innovation and the Jewish future. But use of these tools is part of the relationship-building process in the electronic age, a way to be there in thought and word even when you are absent in body. It’s a way to poll the world on any issue, from tech support to the very nature of innovation, from celebrity gossip to commentary on world events. It’s making your support and presence known and felt, from across miles and oceans or from across town.

If members of the ROI Community Tweet at each other, that’s great, because it represents a desire to connect - that desire to connect, to make an impact on someone else through your words and thoughts, is what guides the success of social media and can lead to collaborative innovation.

Great to meet you at NTEN!  What a thoughtful post!  I look forward to seeing you at NTEN next year ...

Your ending - next year at nten—reminds of a little video I made at the NTEN conference in 2007 in DC - it’s called “Next Year in New Orleans”—there’s even some hebrew in it ..
http://kanter.blip.tv/file/195987/

Susanne Goldstone Rosenhouse
NJOP’s Social Media Coordinator

To paraphrase John Dewey from over 100 years ago: we can’t bring the Jew kicking and screaming to the synagogue, we have to bring the synagogue to where the Jew is. Right now, cyberland is covering a lot of the Jew’s personal space.

I am not convinced that Web 2.0 is the only way to reach them. The life of a synagogue is still essential. But we ignore the technology at our (and the synagogue’s) peril.

Thank you for bringing NTEN to us. I am not sure we will make aliya there, but I look forward to you and others bringing the message from that mountain so we can create the Rashi together!

Ira Wise
http://nextleveljewisheducation.blogspot.com/

Speaking only for my own organization, it is true that we can be found on Facebook and Twitter (@jwaonline), and that we have an excellent blog (http://jwablog.jwa.org). We also have deep content for those interesting in learning more, ranging from lesson plans for educators to our new Encyclopedia (http://jwa.org/encyclopedia) which went online March 1, the beginning of Women’s History Month.

It isn’t enough to post provocative thoughts--it is critical that our thinking be guided by actual knowledge, and that we use Web 2.0 tools--the ability for site visitors to comment and update material so that it remains current, and so that new resources are noted. This guided the design of our Encyclopedia, and our weekly email/daily tweet/web database, “This Week in History.”

How well does this work? According to Google there are almost 15,000 links to over 500 separate pages on our website. Monthly readership continues to rise, and we are gratified to note that scholars and readers =do= seem to be using the discuss and update features on the website. We are busy adding these tools to older content.

I suspect that we are not the only ones using these tools, and that others will soon add more information.

Am I missing something? While social media is indeed an important frontier, your article would appear to be self adulation. What constitutes an effective online community? Is it a bunch of people that met at ROI twittering back and forth.

Where is there exciting Jewish content on the web? A few years ago there were a lot of interesting blogs. But, they have all seemed to close down. Jewsweek and 3 or 4 similar outlets are no longer functioning. Jewcy is a shadow of its former self and Present tense - the paradigm that you give as being effective, hasn’t updated their magazine since January.

Also, I don’t understand how you could neglect to mention Chabad and Aish. They have been on the web for ages. Chabad was on back when there wasn’t an internet and people dialed in to BB systems. At least their content is updated all the time.

If I am missing something please point it out. Otherwise it appears that a small group of people keeps congratulating themselves for things that they do.

Props though to the Fundermentalist The JTA blogs are about the best thing going right now.

I am a bit leery of saying that all we need to do is get everyone to the next NTEN conference. The Jewish world needs more than introduction to the tools (although that’s a start) - it needs to learn this new way of being in community. One conference will simply overwhelm those who don’t understand the medium and that we don’t have the choice of whether or not to use them.

The Jewish world, including (and maybe most importantly) synagogues need to learn a new way of thinking. Now that would be a powerful conference!

Thanks for posting your thoughts from the NTEN conference. I look forward to reconvening at next year’s conference with a larger group of Jewish organizations represented! And - to Truthiness’ comment - I hope we will have more concrete examples at that time; the more examples of how this has worked, the more likely traditional organizations will embrace these new tools.

But t-he reality is that people are already using these tools to engage and discuss our organizations online; it is important that organizations at least listen online to find out what is being said. The next step is to consider your overall outreach and communications strategy and determine where each of these new channels fits in.

You can find more information about effectively using these tools at our website at http://gijptech.org. Feel free to check it out and sign up for our free monthly eNewsletter and Webinars.

I am not convinced that any of those initiatives are reaching “hard-to-reach Jews” and would like to see some proof.  Aren’t PresenTense’s offices in Jerusalem?  Are the young Jews already living in Israel that hard to reach?! 

I want a definition of “hard-to-reach Jews.” If you reach ANY Jews ages 15-35, does that mean you’re automatically reaching “hard-to-reach Jews” because those are the traditional drop-out years from organized Jewish life?  Or do these folks actually have to be at risk of losing their Judaism.  If it’s the latter definition, I bet there are very few Jews participating in ROI that the Jewish community was ever at risk of losing.  They may not have been doing a thing about being Jewish before joining ROI, and that may be “proof” enough for the funders (who of course are entitled to do whatever they want with their money).  But where are the pre- and post-evaluations?  Do many of those participants answer “no” to the question “Do you feel it is important that your future children be raised Jewish?” And now that they’re participating in PresenTense they answer “yes”?

There has been so much talk about how this is different than business-as-usual but so few concrete examples.  Can you provide some?

Beyond learning the actual tools, synagogues and Jewish organizations will have to shift their thinking to accept some loss of control as a part of the trade off for interacting with a larger community. And that, I think, is one of the major challenges they will have to overcome. I’m also writing about this issues at http://www.toolsforshuls.com.

Rabbi Herring

Those organizations that recognize this shift and work to align themselves with it will be positioned for success in the coming years.  Those who are interested in learning more can read more on Darim’s blog, http://www.JewPoint0.org, and start at NTEN (http://www.nten.org) by joining the online affinity group for Jewish organizations - The Tribe.