Maybe there will be some quiz or lotteries, apply now for biblestudy in your home and you can win all-costs-paid trip to international convention.
CP
Will Embracing the Internet lead to Increased Growth for the Watchtower?
by jwfacts 74 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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exwhyzee
The one thing the Internet won't be able to do is draw people in, out of a sense of guilt or obligation like the door to door work does. A lot of people who were found in the door to door work didn't really buy into what they were hearing at first but were drawn in by a sense of obligation to those nice well meaning people who kept coming back and who they just couldn't say no to. They were drawn in little by little over time and the doctrines were broken to them gently. On the Internet, an interested person will be able to take the information at face value and will be able to look ahead to see what he is getting into before his sensibilities are clouded by a friendly relationship that has been carefully cultivated by a JW studying with him. While he is online, he can click around and do a little investigating of his own before he swallows the program hook line and sinker. If there is a group to join or a program to buy into out there, there will always be someone who will buy into it no matter how ridiculous it may be. It's a numbers game...the more contacts that are made, the higher the chances of finding that someone who will buy into it. The difference is, anyone becoming a JW in the future will not be able to say, as we can, that he didn't have a chance to really know what he was getting into or was kept in the dark about the organization he had joined until he had spent a good part of his life in it.
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diamondiiz
Internet reason is just a diversion from why their magazines are being cut in half. If they didn't use the internet trend excuse and spin their website as a success, the letter regarding wt and awakes would sound very negative. The letter was carefully written, so to make the negative news sound not so bad.
They've been warning witnesses for years regarding the internet and now they're going to tell us it's a great tool to bring people in? Doubt it. Internet is the tool that helps witnesses leave the cult.
The new site will be unified so it's simpler to administer and probably cheaper. Maybe they will make it more appealing to witnesses to keep them glued to their side longer with less time to surf the net and visit those evil apostate site which might wake them up.
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etna
I agree with scenicviewer. I think people, even jws will start to find out their history and maybe get a shock. You site (Jw facts) is excellent because it quotes from the watchtower and gives the referrences so that it can be checked.
Etna
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transhuman68
LOL, the internet will never work for the Watchtower Society. Can you imagine them on Facebook, where people could 'Like' their overlapping generation doctrine? Not!
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smiddy
The only way I could see the JW`s benefitting from the internet is if they used the ploy of " telephone marketers"saturating the internet with unsolicited e-mails ? spam ? or whatever ,however that would surely backfire on them , and I think their are too many sites like this & JW facts for them to make any inroads now , They have left their run too late.
smiddy
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WTWizard
Or, it will do what I now do when using the Internet to buy or research a product advertised in an infomercial. I see a product on TV without the Internet, the only way I can find out if it is worth anything is to buy it. Then, I got a computer. I simply type in the product name on my search engine, and look at the reviews. If it is rubbish, I don't waste my money on it.
Hopefully, it will lead people to do further research online before "buying" the product (with their lives). Get the rag (fewer choices of presentations for the publisher, leading to more awkward presentations) to the householder who will type in the religion name into a search engine instead of going straight to the web site, and with a mouse click, that ruins that call. No more need to send them to another apostate web site to blow calls--rather, the curious householder will simply do the research online before committing. Now, if only I had access to this one-click research back in the late 1980s, I might not have been willing to join the witlesses just to find out what it's about.
At least, with rubbish products (like the Swivel Sweeper, which kept dying after a few seconds of use even with a full battery), I only wasted money.
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besty
400000 visits and 100 bible study requests daily = 0.025% conversion rate
pretty abysmal by most standards - Nigerian 419 scammers aim for 1% - but interesting that the WTS have released a metric - somebody somewhere in bethel has made a business case to invest a few million on a web strategy - something like:
Print as a media is dying
Look at this graph showing our printing costs - what will this look like in 5 years?
Here is the website - see how we can get 100 BS requests <haha> a day with zero investment
Now if we cut x million from print and re-invest this in our website, not only will we save money we will also get more BS requests
So the choice - Praise JAH - is for more BS for less money - what say ye?
<GB members briefly wake up to vote>
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jwfacts
The one thing the Internet won't be able to do is draw people in, out of a sense of guilt or obligation like the door to door work does.
Good point. It is difficult to say no to someone's face, not as difficult when talking to someone on the phone, and yet easier again when it is view sms/email/internet. If an article doesn't grip a person within a few seconds they click away. There is no time for the "foot in the door", or polished "conversation stoppers" responses to keep the person interested.
WTW - At least, with rubbish products (like the Swivel Sweeper, which kept dying after a few seconds of use even with a full battery), I only wasted money.
lol. That is the only thing I have ever bought from an infomercial, and threw it out the next day.
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jwfacts
Besty - 400000 visits and 100 bible study requests daily = 0.025% conversion rate
Interesting figure. It is terribly low, considering making converts is (or should be) the prime goal of their internet preaching activity. 36,500 bible study requests a year is only a small fraction of what they hope to convert each year.
The Watchtower has prided itself on it's huge printing effort and spreading the most religious material each year. I wonder how they will report magazine publishing numbers now. Will they add the printed and downloaded numbers together for each edition? As much as they would like to do that, it really misses the point of the internet. The internet is successful for delivering small pieces of information, rather than long pdf's for people to read. Few non-JW's are going to want to download an Awake magazine, when they can find short articles of interest to read online instead.