One of the fun activities during GC2012 was the gathering of a group via Google+ and Google Hangouts to talk in real-time about the happenings of the General Conference while watching the live stream. I confess that I haven’t been much of a Google+ fan, but I’m becoming more interested with the recent redesign, and dedicated Google+ users seem to believe that the conversation features are significantly better than conversation on Facebook. I’m not arguing for trying to get folks to switch (first rule of the church — go where the people already are!). However if you have a Google+ account, would you be interested in some MethoConversation in that space? Also, if we were to schedule a weekly hangout to talk about faith and our church each week, would you be interested in participating. Name your preferred day of the week and time to hangout in the comments, and we will see what we can work out.

Well GC2012 is over and we are still evaluating a General Conference that was a total mess by the end of the week, but the most documented and reported General Conference of all time. Certainly folks have been talking about the influence of Twitter on the conference, and that certainly can’t be denied. Yet, the MethoBlog has had our own influence, both through the little that we did here, but mostly through our partnership with the United Methodist News Service and the GC2012Conversations.com site. Here are a few statistics from the past two weeks:

Methoblog–

• 6000+ unique visitors in the past two weeks, serving up some 25,000 page views.

GC2012Conversations.com–

• 79,000+ unique visitors
• 450,000+ page views

I’ve also been told that the umc.org site served up well over a million page views in the past couple of weeks. That is more page views than they normally serve in a year.

We are in conversations with United Methodist News Service about continuing the partnership beyond the General Conference at some level, as they were very happy at the response.

What we all — you and I — have to determine is whether or not this level of obsession was helpful or harmful to the process of conferencing. The genie is out of the bottle, and I would argue that it would be impossible to ever go back to the way things were before, but how do our structures need to change to reflect the reality of a more actively involved and interested membership?

From a media standpoint, it was a great General Conference. I only wish those charged with carrying out the business of our church could feel as positive about their efforts.