Interview with Tangle.com’s Trey Bowles What is tangle.com? For more information, visit http://www.tangle.com Chris recently interviewed Trey Bowles, the Director of Marketing for the newly launched Tangle.com. The site stands today where the old GodTube.com stood. Chris discussed the reasons behind the relaunch and rebranding as well as what new features Tangle.com now has to offer churches, musicians, ministries, and more. Check out this short but information filled-interview. KEY: C: What was the inspiration for starting the original GodTube.com? T: Well, GodTube.com was started by several individuals. They saw the need for a video saring site similar to YouTube.com, but it be a place for christians to come and find edifying and family friendly videos and a place that was safe for anybody to see videos. If you spend any amount of time on YouTube, you see that there is lots of inappropriate material on there. For instance, you could look up a video of Point of Grace, and you’ll see related videos with soft-core porn and cursing. Unfortunately, people associate those videos with the original video whether intended or not. That was where the vision of GodTube.com came from. They wanted to create something that didn’t have those kinds of associations. C: What was the motivation behind relaunching the site and giving it a new name? T: Many things went into the decision. GodTube showed the need for people to build a kind of community like this. After about 6 months, we realized this market was much bigger than we thought (we went from 200,000 users to 2 million over night). Jason Illian (Tangle’s Chief Executive Officer) wanted us to expand our vision - he wanted to offer many more tools and give access to new content. We did a lot of qualitative and quantative analysis (surveys, panels). What we found out was that people wanted more tools that they could use to help promote things. The Church’s goal is to reach the believer and nonbeliever. GodTube was limited in nature - almost polarizing by its name alone - so through that we decided to offer a more expansive social network. The rebranding came from the thought of needing to reach more than just the church market. C: What are some of new features that weren’t available on GodTube.com? T: Well the initial site was pretty much just video streaming. With tangle, we offer the ability to connect and post videos, post audio files, share content more affectively. There’s also the opportunity to invite friends and create a community. Now, the user individual pages have better functionality. Our new media player allows both audio and video in the same player. All of this was built around community and being a part of a network as opposed to just coming to a page and looking at video. With Other streaming video sites like YouTube, people have no use for being a member because you can just come on and view the video and leave. We are trying to build a community - interaction between visitors and members - so people can use these tools that we are offering more affectively. C: What inspired the name tangle.com? T: We wanted a name that was representative of social media - so much of social media is intertwining different aspects of media. So we got the idea of “tangle” from John 15:5 - “I am the vine…” The idea comes from the thought that in the vine the brances are intertwined and interwoven. Ultimately that led to the name. We’re also ourselves a marketing company and not a ministry - our role is to be a platform for people to build on top of - we have no stance on theology or politics. That gives us an opportunity for reaching all kinds of organizations (faith-based, family friendly) - they can utilize those tools to use for their message. C: In what ways do you think tangle.com will help impact the online world outside of just being a safe-haven for Christians and families? T: Ultimately, we hope to just see people building meaningful relationships. What helps differentiate us from other place is by filtering and monitering the content. This will enable us to create a place safe for the whole family - not only a destination but also a social media platform. It’s not just about me viewing videos, but me also utilizing and building relationships and using the tools that are available on the site. We want to give content that is accessible to people and help ministries from around the world connect with people and bands to reach new people and churches to connect with new people. You work within your one church - but how can you reach the community beyond that church? How do you get the 800 people in your church to reach the 2.5 million people on tangle rather than the one church trying to reach 2.5 million people. You have the opportunity to use the tools that we’ve made available - but we’re just going to help you do it more responsibly. C: What’s the response been like so far? T: We’ve been really excited to see the response from users so far. People are excited about using these tools and the interaction. We spent about 2 months explaining to the users why we changed the name and how we were changing our focus (like myspace, facebook). We feared a drop in users, but traffic is going fairly steadily. We just jumped in the number of our unique visitors. It’s all very exciting. Obviously - there were some people who disagreed with the name change and focus change. We love that there is discussion and interaction - as long as it is done considerately, we don’t mind listening to other point of views. C: Other than tangle.com, where are some of your favorite places to visit online? I enjoy social marketing - places like Twitter and Facebook. However, most places I go the most are places people send me to - my friends and family really decide a lot of where I go - since i don’t have a lot of time surfing the net for personal reasons. |
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