Thinks I find along the way
I’m doing a training session next week at NWTC on ‘Facebook for Fun and Profit’. Unfortunately, it’s all filled up — for those of you interested in the topic that won’t be able to make it, this may help…
Pound for pound, this may be the most effective advertising a church can buy. Because of the demographics, it beats the snot out of the Yellow Pages and other traditional forms of marketing. You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’d like to dig a little deeper…
Social media is not only here to stay but should be recognized and used as a “new form of pastoral ministry,” U.S. bishops were told Nov. 15 in their annual meeting.
“Social media is proving itself to be a force with which to be reckoned. If not, the church may be facing as great a challenge as that of the Protestant Reformation,” said Bishop Ronald P. Herzog of Alexandria, La., a member of the bishops’ Committee on Communications, in an address to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore.
Bishop Herzog noted that although social media has been around for less than 10 years, it lacks the “makings of a fad” and is “causing as fundamental a shift in communication patterns and behavior as the printing press did 500 years ago.”
“I don’t think I have to remind you of what happened when the Catholic Church was slow to adapt to that new technology,” he told the bishops. “By the time we decided to seriously promote that common folk should read the Bible, the Protestant Reformation was well under way.”
A news report that challenges conventional wisdom, especially one about a personal/cultural topic like religion, is often rich fodder for online conversation. This was the case last week as a Pew Research Center survey showing that atheists and agnostics were more knowledgeable about religion than followers of major faiths drew significant attention.
For the week of Sept. 27 to Oct. 1, almost a quarter (23%) of the news links on blogs were to a Los Angeles Times story about the survey, making it the No. 1 subject, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
The survey from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that non-believers were able to answer more questions about religion correctly than believers, even when one controlled for educational background. It also showed that people were ill-informed on some of the questions related to their own religion. A majority of Protestants, for example, were unable to identify Martin Luther as the primary figure behind the Protestant Reformation. (The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life and the Project for Excellence in Journalism are both are part of the Pew Research Center.)
You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’d like to dig a little deeper…
With only 40 respondents, I don’t know how solid this data is but I still find it interesting. You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source to read the rest of the article. e1evation = “simply powerful social media”!
Churches and their communicators are always sending a message to their local communities. Our given message is to be the kingdom of God and gift of Jesus Christ. When this message is not clearly proclaimed by our verbal and non-verbal communication, our audience fills in the blanks. Our neighbors come to two conclusions: we are either ignorant of their problem, or we don’t care. Or both. And unfortunately, there are churches in both camps.
No one accidentally concludes you are a loving church without hearing your message. No one guesses you are a serving church without seeing your actions.
The current religious climate demands we exhaust every possible avenue in carrying the message of Christ clearly and concisely to any open ear. If your church is not using Facebook, then start—your high school, chamber of commerce, library and most tax paying citizens are. If you don’t use Twitter, learn—your friends and community already have. Does your local community have a bulletin board, free town mailer, radio station or homepage? Get on it. Go out in your community, and do something. The church’s silence is killing her message. If you make people guess what you are about, they will guess wrong.
The gospel is to be communicated. This is evangelism. By what means should this communication happen? I get the feeling from the Apostle Paul that it’s “by all means” (1 Corinthians 9:22).
Paul preached and spoke as he traveled the Roman roads from city to city. He wrote and utilized the volunteer help of messengers to spread his ideas. He hit the synagogues, the marketplaces and even the prisons to share the gospel. Yet the tools at Paul’s disposal were quite limited compared to our arsenal today.
By enlarging your congregation’s collection of tools, you can stretch the value of your communications strategy and talk to new audiences in new places via new mediums never possible in the early apostolic era. Consider this:
- The pastor’s message can be re-distributed by media through the mail.
- It can be printed in periodicals and publications.
- It can be offered in a media player on a website.
- It can become part of a podcast, updating weekly with very little effort or financial cost.
- Pieces of that message can become blog posts when re-worked for an online reading audience.
- More pieces can be sent out as a daily devotional email.
- Nuggets from that message can be tweeted and retweeted, or shared on Facebook.
- Discussion arising from all of these distributions can create opportunities to converse with people previously out of reach.
- Those conversations can become the beginnings of new content as the message takes on a life of its own by its listening audience.
- A short clip from the message (if recorded on video) can land on YouTube.
- Church members can share the clip on their Facebook wall.
- The slideshow from the message can be shared online.
- The slideshow, transcript, and audio and/or video can be packaged together and distributed by download, CD or even custom-imprinted thumb drives for other churches to benefit from.
Should we be creating new messages? Absolutely. But we can also take what God has given already and put it to its fullest possible use, spreading it around in the cloud of content we’re all breathing and then fielding the questions that arise.
The mission has never changed: Get the gospel to the world. But the tools have multiplied many times over, allowing us to do it more efficiently than ever before. Which means we can spend less time fighting to create more content at all costs and spend more time simplifying our message and distributing it effectively.
It’s all about churches this morning @ on the ‘elevation blog’ — due in part to rediscovering ‘Church Marketing Sucks’, subscribing to their feed, and being reminded of their great content…
I want to put a really fine point on this post by saying imho — it’s all about using a blog as a homebase that automatically re-expresses or redelivers content to multiple points without additional burden on the church staff [same principle applies to business, btw!]. For example, the author puts podcasts above blogs, but a podcast is nothing more than an ‘audio’ category in a blog. Here’s an example — get it?
I quoted the whole post above for busy people — pasters, ceo’s, thought leaders — who wouldn’t normally take the time to click through to the source. Comment, call or use the contact form to connect so we can talk about how this applies to your ministry…
Most respondents indicated they don’t think their church is doing a particularly good job with Facebook. While those results could be perceived as negative, a closer look reveals some big opportunities for those churches willing to embrace the world’s largest social network.
- Communicate More – Clearly people would like to see their church do more on Facebook.
- Ministry Pages – A second opportunity for churches is for individual ministries to engage with people through Facebook pages.
- Facilitate Connections – A third opportunity for churches is to help their people connect with one another.
- Evangelism – A fourth opportunity for churches is to encourage and train their people to develop relationships with those who are not Christians and show God’s grace and love to them.
- Facebook Ads – A fifth opportunity for churches is to use Facebook ads to reach out to people in their community.
A detailed report on the survey results including lots of pretty charts and additional analysis is available at OurChurch.com.
Happy Sunday! I’m blessed to be bringing a new client on board — Q90 FM in Green Bay. Here’s a great post from a great resource I found; Church Marketing Sucks! :-D
The Rev. Robert Barron, a Chicago-based Roman Catholic priest, has made himself a new-media messenger for the church, bringing a Catholic perspective to topics from “Avatar” to atheism to the use of steroids in baseball.
The author of 10 books, he has posted more than 180 cultural commentaries on YouTube and delivers a weekly homily on Relevant Radio (WNTD-AM/950 in Chicago). He contributes guest blogs to CNN.com and ABC.com, adding pithy, pointed commentary to hot topics. He has filmed a 10-part documentary, “The Catholicism Project,” which he hopes will air on public television next year.
On Sunday, he will begin presenting a half-hour television show, “Word on Fire with Father Barron,” on WGN America. It’s paid programming, the airwaves’ equivalent of vanity publishing; his messages, from earlier DVDs, will air nationwide for 13 weeks (at 8:30 a.m. Sundays in Chicago). The airtime will be paid for by private donors; he declines to reveal the cost.
“My job is to bring the Catholic perspective to bear,” says the Rev. Barron, 50. Catholicism, he says, “has been underrepresented in the conversation.”
Here’s one priest who’s taking the Holy Father’s admonition to start blogging seriously! What about you others? Let’s use the internet to spread a little Gospel and Community! Comment, call or use the contact form to connect so we can talk about how this applies to your parish…
Religious groups are increasingly trying to harness the power of social media — from a Pentecostal church in Canton using Facebook to reel in new members to a Catholic priest in Plymouth who uploads podcasts of sermons to an Oak Park rabbi sparking national debates on his blog.
And with its own particular rules and rituals, the world of social media has become, in a way, its own religion.
“It creates a buzz about what’s happening without you even trying,” said Tami Frailey, 42, director of Twitter and Facebook accounts at Connection Church in Canton.
With the popularity of these sites growing, the U.S. Catholic Church issued guidelines this summer for its leaders and members to keep Jesus in mind when they tweet.
But that can be difficult to practice in the freewheeling world of the Internet. Still, houses of worship are diving into the world of social media to create larger communities that can help spread the faith.
They have a ways to go.
If you’re a church or 501(c)3 looking for direction in this area, comment, call or use the contact form to discuss how this applies to your organization…
I used to be so squeamish about asking for a sale. Now, I’m all for it. Let’s talk about that. I give some takeaway tips at the end.
Let’s use the word “sale” to mean “a request that you do something that benefits me as well as you.” For example, if I were in the religion business (which I am not, directly), my ask might be that you come to my church or that you practice religion in the way my faith practiced. If I’m a nonprofit, my “sale” might be to get your donation or your support or your extension of my information to your networks. “Sale” can be very flexible, so use it the way you want to use it.
In my case, I’m talking about the sales that have dollar signs.
Oh, and I also don’t mean “sale” as in “a discount.”
The great bizdev guru RJ Siegel used to say “If you don’t ask, you already have your answer. If you don’t like the answer you have, ask!”
What would Todd do? I have a friend from church who has a blog about missions in South Africa. He’s also interested in soccer. If I were him, I’d view all of the World Cup activity as a gift from God and use the ‘e1evation workflow’ of ‘consume, create, communicate’ to grab as much traffic-driving content as I could to bring visitors to my message. What would you do?
The Gospel and social media? Absolutely…
You may take some whacks at Goldman Sachs but don’t lay a hand on my PCs or Macs! That at least is the message one might take from a perusal of Americans’ judgments about who and what are having positive or negative effects on the way things are going in the country today.
A March Pew Research Center survey found public satisfaction with the state of the nation continuing to decline while anger and frustration with the federal government mounts. Nor are the feds the sole target of public distrust. Numerous other institutions share in its opprobrium. On the scale of positive judgments by American adults, banks and other financial institutions, large corporations, labor unions — even the news media and entertainment industry — all score in the 20s or low 30s.
That institutions of higher education, churches and other religious organizations and that perennial favorite “small business” earn higher ratings is perhaps unsurprising. More striking is that at the top of the popularity list — essentially tied with small business for first place in making a positive difference while outranking even religious institutions — are technology companies.
…for the excellent job they are doing with the ‘Catholics come home‘ campaign — a great combination of traditional and new, online media. Discussing this with my good friend Jim Kelleher of Kelleher Creative in St. Louis, I was pleased to see the church hasn’t lost it’s sense of humor, either.
For those of you who didn’t attend Catholic School, the thing that amuses me is the search box. St. Anthony is the patron saint of “lost things”…
;-)
I looked up an old friend in Facebook yesterday and clicked ‘add as friend’ as I have hundreds of times before. The difference this time is, I know he’ll never accept. Why? Zach’s life was cut tragically short on Tuesday while he was doing what he loved best on this earth; flying…
Firefighting News covers it here, although his name is not mentioned. Details on the accident are sketchy…
“The Lockheed P2V-7 aircraft on the way to drop retardant on a California wildfire was between 100 and 300 feet off the ground when it crashed less than 2 miles from the Reno-Stead Airport on Monday evening, said Tom Little, lead investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board.
Little said nothing indicates pilot error played a role in the crash, which brings to 27 the number of deaths in fatal crashes of firefighting air tankers in the U.S. since 1991.” Source: Official: Jet engine on fire before tanker crashed – USATODAY.com
My buddy Craig Hairrell and I were talking about this yesterday as we pored over the reports across the internet over the phone. You read this stuff in the headlines every day, but once in a blue moon it means something to YOU personally.
Zach was a young man of the most exceptional character and potential. We both attended Morningstar Community Church in Aurora, IL when I lived there and we would still visit from time to time when we came back to town to visit family. Later, when I was engaged by LoPresti Aviation on a couple of projects and he was a student at Moody Bible Institute’s Aviation School we would seek each other out after services and talk flying. He was living my dream; young, handsome, gifted, a bright career in aviation ahead of him. His eyes would shine as he shared details about the program and I would hang on every word. All that is over now…
All except the eternal part — the part that really counts. You see, Zach knew Jesus Christ in a personal way and it showed in everything he did. His salvation and eternity are secure. Still, my heart breaks for his parents, Marci and Steve, and the temporary loss they most certainly feel until they are reunited with him in glory. Until then, I imagine that Zach will be testing a new set of wings — one that will never fail him…
Moral of the story? You’ve heard it before. Life is short. As Shakespeare said in Hamlet “Those friends thou hast and their adoption tried grapple to thy soul with hoops of steel”. In other words, ‘add as friend’ while you still can…
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Bright, shiny objects! 