Archive - February, 2010

Explaining social media to church staff

February 15, 2010 in Social Media

This morning I saw this tweet from @mikeyanderson:

“Just found out I’ll be speaking to the Mars Hill staff about how to use social media on Tuesday. What lessons should I hit?”

My top three lessons (at least for the first training session!) would be as follows:

  • Understand why your church will use social media. Sure, you are getting on board because lots of people in your church and community are using social media. But what specifically is your church or ministry hoping to achieve? Who are you hoping to connect with? How would you like to use social media to engage with these people? ‘15 ways for churches to use Twitter‘ provides some ideas for using Twitter for ministry. Once you understand why, stick to activities that are in line with this objective. It’s too easy to get sidetracked without a clear direction.
  • Commit to at least one channel (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) and stick with it. It’s ok to trial, but one week isn’t a trial. Three months is a trial. Too often I’ve seen social media adopted in an energetic flurry, only to see the tweets or Facebook updates dwindle down to nothing within a short space of time. Persevere and don’t be discouraged if your efforts aren’t an overnight success.
  • Don’t waste too much time. It would be easy to get sucked into spending every minute of every day checking Facebook updates and the latest tweets. For the most part, I only check Twitter on my phone and, usually when I’m traveling (sitting on a train or bus) or having a coffee. Realising that social media is addictive (people love being around people, even in a virtual sense!) and setting up steps to ensure you don’t get sucked into wasting your time (e.g. setting specific times to check and update) is essential. Otherwise, your staff will spend all their time tweeting! It won’t cost your church $2.25 billion, but it will impact your ministry.

What lessons would you share?

If I was explaining social media to the uninitiated, I’d also make use of these videos by Common Craft:

Social Media in Plain English

Twitter in Plain English

“Email owns me”

February 15, 2010 in Christian Living, for Churches, Pastors

A week ago, Christian blogger Tim Challies shared a personal revelation:

“I recently came to the realization that email owns me. A good technology that should be at my disposal has instead taken over and put me at its disposal. And if you’ve read Postman you’ll know that technology is very good at this. No sooner do we put a technology in our service than we find that it has so changed our lives that suddenly we have become enslaved to it.”

How many of us can relate to this feeling?

You can read the full post here, with Tim’s resolutions for dealing with this realisation.

Are you owned by your email?

Envy – a powerful motivator

February 14, 2010 in for Churches, Outreach

Two car companies are unashamedly using envy to motivate Australians to buy their cars. Check out these advertisements for the Mitsubishi Outlander, Ford Territory, and to a lesser extent, the Mistsubishi Triton.

This got me thinking – what emotions do we tap into in church marketing to encourage people to come along to church? We might not have multi-million dollar advertising budgets, but our marketing materials usually try to connect with our neighbours on an emotional level.

Mitsubishi Outlander

Ford Territory

Mitsubishi Triton

Don’t ridicule your customers

February 12, 2010 in for Churches

I’m back in the saddle after an awesome wedding and honeymoon! Praise God!

I’ve been trawling through my emails (as you do when you return from holidays), and came across an interesting email from Magnation. I subscribe to their emails for news on interesting magazine releases. Their e-newsletter this time around was promoting Valentine’s Day purchases, with some not-too-subtle references to sex – basically suggesting that buying a magazine for a loved one will lead to more sex. This approach isn’t particularly unexpected in modern marketing. What was unexpected was the footer at the bottom of the email which read:

“Complaints about our resorting to sexual references to sell a product can be directed to info@magnation.com.

Please put in the subject box “I am a prude and I deserve a spanking” and we will do our best to respond to you in an appropriate and sensitive manner. And if you want to unsubscribe you can do so here. We promise to not publicly ridicule you or publish your name in the obituaries columns, although you will of course, be dead to us.”

Was the insensitive work experience student steering the ship in the marketing department the day this email was sent out?!

I’m not sure how ridiculing your customers can ever be seen as a good approach to increasing sales or promoting good will. Sure, it might make you look edgy and cool to a particular demographic within your subscriber base, but it’s at the expense of alienating another (perhaps larger) bunch of customers. Is that worth it?

I wasn’t particularly offended by the email, but I was by the footer – though its font size was small, its impact was significant.

What’s the message for us as Christian communicators with many of our churches using email newsletters? Every part of the message, from head to toe, is important. Read and re-read what you’ve written. And if you’re going to offend, make sure it’s worth it.

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