Using Profiles to Build Your Communication Strategy, Part 1

by: Justin Wise

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Every church is made up of different groups (or personas) on any given Sunday.

Collectively, you may not be able to tell the difference between them. But these groups—new visitor, regular attender, committed member, and mature disciple—all use your website in profoundly different ways.

Today, we’ll profile the first two personas and reveal what our research shows as the most important sections for each.

New Visitors

A new visitor will be paying attention to different areas of your website than someone who’s been to the church before. They’ll want to know things like:

About Us/Directions. How do they find your church? If they’re on a mobile device, are the directions in your site easy to read? Better yet, is the site mobile-ready?

What can they expect on a Sunday morning? If they show up in a three-piece suit, will they feel out of place? If they don’t show up in a three-piece suit, will that ruffle some feather? More than just attire, people showing up for the first time will want to know what to expect. Can they find this easily on the website?

Event calendar. We find consistently new people want to get connected to the community as quickly as possible. The best way to facilitate this is through the event calendar. If a new person comes to the event calendar section, are they able to find events relevant to them?

Regular Attenders

These folks are the ones who are casually involved with the church. They drift in and out of church life, but they have made an increased commitment to attending regularly. If your church has a membership program, this group isn’t likely to make that commitment without a personal invitation or increased engagement through programs and events.

Here’s what interests regular attenders most on your church’s website:

Event registration. Because regular attenders are more involved in the life of the church, they want to be able to register for events online. In addition to listing out event details, regular attenders want to be able to sign up for classes all online.

Missional or theological statement. Doctrinal or theological positioning statements are rarely important to people until they commit to attending. A regular attender is more likely to seek these out.

Social media outposts. Because a regular attender is increasing their commitment level to the church, they’ll seek other ways to stay involved throughout the week. One of the easiest ways to do this is via social media outposts. Users in this group are highly likely to engage socially with a church.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are similarities between these two groups, namely around community-based activities. In fact, every group profiled does or will include a deep desire to connect to the church community through the website. Join us next week for the profiles of both a committed member and mature disciple.

Tags: Attention, Awareness, Justin Wise

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Your Communication Strategy Starts at the Top: Why Senior Pastors Are to Blame for Bad Church Signs

by: Sam Rainer III

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We’ve all seen them—bulletin bloopers and bad church signs. Both provide good fodder for blog consumption. My father is an expert on corny humor, and he has posted on his blog numerous examples of this vital genre of church literature.

• When parking on the north side of the church, please remember to park on an angel.
• Men’s prayer breakfast. No charge, but your damnation will be gratefully accepted.
• The class on prophecy has been cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances.
• A bean supper will be held on Tuesday evening in the church hall. Music will follow.

For the most part, these slips are forgivable offenses. They provoke nothing more than a few chuckles from the observant. But I believe they are indicators of a greater problem within churches: poor oversight of communication.

I blame senior church leaders for bad church signs and bulletin bloopers. Here’s why.

Anything the entire community sees (signs, websites, social media, and printed materials) should have the approval and oversight of a senior leader within the church. If you’re a senior pastor, and you can’t remember the last time you checked out your church website or read the bulletin, then you are neglecting the broadest piece of your church’s communication strategy. All top church leaders should read church tweets, the worship guide, and website updates every week. If you’re not, then you will not have a clear understanding of what information the average churchgoer is digesting each week. Senior pastors should have a thorough understanding of the contents of whatever method a church uses to communicate with a broad audience, church signs included.

The communication strategy of a church is the responsibility of senior leadership. If that’s you, and you’re just as surprised as everyone else by what is on the church sign or in the worship guide on Sunday morning, then you are not leading a communication strategy. Should you write every word in the worship guide? No. But it would help if you read every word before your entire church does. It’s quite surprising to me how church leaders let one person control broad communications to the world. As a senior leader, you should know who is tweeting what. You should know why certain announcements make the bulletin and others do not. It does not mean you’re out there changing the letters on the church sign, but it does mean you should know and approve ahead of time what message is broadcast to many who drive by your church on a daily basis.

The below diagram might get you thinking about a communication strategy. It’s simple. But given the abundance of bad church signs posted in the blogosphere, I hope it is a helpful visual for church leaders.

I’ll call this visual the “big circle/little circle” decision for a communication strategy. A big circle of people requires the knowledge and approval of a senior church leaders. If more will see or hear the communication, then top leaders should approve and edit the message. Websites, Sunday morning announcements, bulletins, and church signs fall into the big circle. A little circle does not require the knowledge or approval of senior church leaders. Examples of little circles are small group handouts and the student ministry brochure.

Senior church leaders who want to oversee and approve small circle communication are micromanagers. Senior leaders who care little about big circle communication are negligent or apathetic. Like everything else in leadership, balance is necessary. In short, if a lot of people will see it, you should approve it. When few people will encounter the message, let others run with it. And if you’re reading this wondering what’s on your church sign, then go check it.

Read more from Sam here.

Tags: Attention, Awareness, Sam Rainer

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Keeping Your Ministry Brand Top of Mind: A Lesson from Disney

by: Jon Thomas

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Though it was founded in 2006 (which makes it older than Twitter), BuzzFeed stormed onto the social media scene in 2012, more than doubling its 2011 traffic (per Alexa).

The format is perfect for the way audiences consume and share media today. The content is easy to consume, relevant, entertaining and frequent, as the site posts dozens of times a day. Brands like HBO and Velveeta have even joined in, co-creating content with BuzzFeed. It’s a publishing model that requires lots of staffers and community contributors to keep the content fire hose pumping.

So it was quite a surprise to see that Disney has launched its own BuzzFeed-like site. Entitled “Oh My Disney” (OMD), the site features articles with Disney imagery, GIFs and other short-form Disney-related editorial built specifically to be easily consumed, enjoyed and quickly shared. Posts like “15 More Reminders That You’re Great Today” and “You Know You’re a 90′s Kid When” are organized into five categories: Awww; Oh, Snap!; Retro; Silly; and Whoa.

The page is updated quite consistently, anywhere from two to eight times a day (even if the content isn’t necessarily timely). So how is Disney doing it?

A HISTORY OF SOCIAL MEDIA SUCCESS

If any brand were going to dive headfirst into publishing, Disney might be the one best suited to it. Far and away its largest and most successful platform is Facebook, where the Disney page boasts more than 42 million fans. The pages for Pixar Studios and Walt Disney Studios aren’t shabby either, having 12.5 million fans and 6.4 million fans, respectively, and the OMD Facebook page has 11,000 fans after only a few weeks of existence. Oh My Disney is also on Twitter and Tumblr.

So the foundation is there for Disney to create its own publishing channel, where a post can expand beyond the confines of a 140-character tweet or a single-image Facebook post. But what makes this possible for Disney, and difficult (though not impossible) for most other brands, lies much deeper than social media.

A HISTORY OF STORYTELLING

Having movies and characters at its core and countless physical and digital extensions, Disney has endeared itself to many through its heartfelt storytelling. Disney has a wealth of original and beloved content and characters with messages that are relevant no matter what decade you were born in. Parents watch Disney films with their children, just as they watched them with their parents when they were their children’s age. All this content gives Disney vast amounts of ammunition for OMD. They’re not creating new content as much as curating existing content.

This inherent storytelling is what makes social media and content marketing such a fruitful endeavor for entertainment-based brands. Imagery and quotations resonate with audiences forever. I still crack a smile every time the Forrest Gump Facebook page posts an update, referring to a movie that was made nearly 20 years ago (has it really been that long?).

FINDING YOUR AUDIENCE AND DELIVERING CONTENT

Another reason OMD can work for Disney is that the brand has done a great job of finding its audience. There is certainly no shortage of social media channels, but Disney carefully chooses where it will publish content and plans appropriately. Disney isn’t just creating articles on OMD and cross-posting to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Tumblr. Disney creates content specifically for each channel. Granted, the content is often very similar (photo and GIF heavy), but that creates familiarity and a unified social media voice. The key is that Disney finds its audience on the appropriate channels and uses those channels to create instead of solely promoting.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR YOUR BRAND?

As a content agency, we’re obviously big fans of creating an owned channel, like OMD. But we warn brands about biting off more than they can chew. Disney has made such a commitment to content that it’s dedicated a team (albeit small) to OMD, and that’s really the only way to pull off a channel like this.

But that doesn’t mean that brands should ignore the trail Disney has blazed. Like the first brands to create custom-published magazines, Disney has decided to move beyond native advertising and own its content channels. Even though it is an established brand that’s been around for decades, Disney remains at the forefront of brand storytelling.

It’s a bold move. Do you think this will pan out for Disney? Will more brands follow?

Read more from Jon here.

Tags: Attention, Aware, Brand, Jon Thomas, Social Media

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Connection Trumps Conflict: 3 Exercises to Improve Your Leadership Communication Skills

by: Judith Glaser

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I’m sure it’s happened to you: You’re in a tense team meeting trying to defend your position on a big project and start to feel yourself losing ground. Your voice gets louder. You talk over one of your colleagues and correct his point of view. He pushes back, so you go into overdrive to convince everyone you’re right. It feels like an out of body experience — and in many ways it is. In terms of its neurochemistry, your brain has been hijacked.

In situations of high stress, fear or distrust, the hormone and neurotransmitter cortisol floods the brain. Executive functions that help us with advanced thought processes like strategy, trust building, and compassion shut down. And the amygdala, our instinctive brain, takes over. So we default to one of four responses: fight (keep arguing the point), flight (revert to, and hide behind, group consensus), freeze (disengage from the argument by shutting up) or appease (make nice with your adversary by simply agreeing with him).

All are harmful because they prevent the honest and productive sharing of information and opinion. But, as a consultant who has spent decades working with executives on their communication skills, I can tell you that the fight response is by far the most damaging to work relationships. It is also, unfortunately, the most common.

That’s partly due to another neurochemical process. When you argue and win, your brain floods with different hormones: adrenaline and dopamine, which makes you feel good, dominant, even invincible. It’s a the feeling any of us would want to replicate. So the next time we’re in a tense situation, we fight again. We get addicted to being right.

Luckily, there’s another hormone that can feel just as good as adrenaline: oxytocin. It’s activated by human connection and it opens up the networks in our executive brain, or prefrontal cortex, further increasing our ability to trust and open ourselves to sharing. Your goal as a leader should be to spur the production of oxytocin in yourself and others, while avoiding (at least in the context of communication) those spikes of cortisol and adrenaline.

Here are a few exercises for you to do at work to help your (and others’) addiction to being right:

• Set rules of engagement. If you’re heading into a meeting that could get testy, start by outlining rules of engagement.  These practices will counteract the tendency to fall into harmful conversational patterns. Afterwards, consider see how you and the group did and seek to do even better next time.
• Listen with empathy. In one-on-one conversations, make a conscious effort to speak less and listen more. The more you learn about other peoples’ perspectives, the more likely you are to feel empathy for them. And when you do that for others, they’ll want to do it for you, creating a virtuous circle.
• Plan who speaks. In situations when you know one person is likely to dominate a group, create an opportunity for everyone to speak. Ask all parties to identify who in the room has important information, perspectives, or ideas to share. List them and the areas they should speak about on a flip chart and use that as your agenda, opening the floor to different speakers, asking open-ended questions and taking notes.

Connecting and bonding with others trumps conflict. I’ve found that even the best fighters — the proverbial smartest guys in the room — can break their addiction to being right by getting hooked on oxytocin-inducing behavior instead.

Tags: Attention, Judith Glaser, Staff Development

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7 Things Every Pastor Should Do Every Week on Social Media

by: Rich Birch

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The most recent study shows that 67% of adults use social media regularly. [Study] If 2/3rds of your church showed up to a meeting every week would you want to use that meeting to communicate with them? If that percentage of folks in your community came to an event in your town next week would you want to find a way to use that platform to reach people?  Church leaders that ignore social media are missing a significant channel for reaching people in their community.

You might be hindering God’s work in your church because you aren’t posting enough status updates!

Social media is simply a way for you to connect with people and get to know them better. Do you want to build relationships with your people? These networks are amazing platforms for spreading ideas and concepts. Surely you want more people to connect with the message of Jesus? Social networking allows a leader to leverage more influence faster than so many communication platforms in the past. Do you believe God is asking you to influence this generation?

Here are seven simple and straight forward tasks that every pastor looking to connect through social media needs to do every week. They aren’t time consuming and they could be done on a wide variety of networks. These are a good starting point …

• Thank A Volunteer // It’s doesn’t need to be fancy but needs to be sincere. Call out a volunteer who serves with diligence on one of the teams at your church. [Something like this.]
• Show Your Humanity // Authenticity starts with letting people see you beyond just your role as a leader. Take some time to show that you are a normal person. Let your people get a peek inside your home life. [Here’s an example.]
• Bite Sized Sermon // One of the social media “primetimes” is early in the morning. Your people are checking in as they get ready in the morning. Share with them a quick quote from what you read that morning to help focus them for the day. [Morning time is prime time!]
• Post a “Behind the Scenes” Pic // You get to see some pretty cool stuff as a church leader that your people would love to see.. The worship team praying back stage before a service. The youth band rehearsing. Elders meetings. (Ok … maybe not that one.) Keep an eye out for something that your people might want to see!
• Encourage Other Pastors // Who are some other pastors that you follow? Let your people know and take some time to publicly thank them for their ministry to you. It show’s unity in the body and models a healthy respect for leadership. [Honor leadership.]
• Ask for Feedback // Are you working on your message for this weekend and are stuck at a point in your prep? Why not ask your social networks for some feedback? Interact with folks as they leave comments or input. [Some marketplace examples.]
• Dip into the Stream // Set aside some time every day this week to just wade into your social networks for a period of time. Read what people are writing about. Ask people questions. Interact. Retweet. Even 15 minutes a day will give you incredible insights.

Read more from Rich here.

Tags: Attention, Awareness, Brand, Rich Birch, Social Media

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Utilizing Storytelling in Promoting Your Ministry Brand

by: Jon Thomas

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The most effective mass media is the stories we tell and conversations we have with each other. If you don’t believe me, let me prove it to you.

We’ve all seen an endless number of ads for cars, car dealerships, and the like. If I think really hard, I may be able to remember a few of them. Let’s see… I remember the Volkswagen ad with Kid Vader (but mostly because it was so talked-about, not because I thought it was so effective). I remember the Toyota Celica ads in which the senior citizen sees a parked Celica and yells, “Slow down. This is a neighborhood!” If you gave me 10 more minutes, I could probably think of another three to five, but not much more. Considering how many car ads I’ve seen in my lifetime, that’s a pretty low recall rate, and I can assure you that none of them influenced my purchase decisions.

Recently I watched a six-minute video in which a young man, who happens to be too young to drive, tells a story that takes place in a Honda CR-V. His story nearly brought me to tears, then [spoiler alert] had me rejoicing at the end. I was smiling ear to ear, and immediately shared on every social network I could. If you haven’t heard Noah St. John’s story, you should now.

THE POWER OF STORY

I own a Ford Escape now and love it. Though I had searched for an SUV, a Honda CR-V never entered my consideration set. It just didn’t seem to be a fit for me.

But I find myself thinking of Noah and his family’s CR-V lately. My mileage is about to exceed 50,000, and I wonder where I’ll be at 100,000, and I think of Noah’s story. When my wife and I were at Babies“R”Us this past weekend to register for her shower, we looked at car seats, and I thought of it again. I wondered what kinds of practices I’d bring my child to. I wondered if my Escape would be as cherished as his CR-V. Granted, the video is fresh in my mind, but I watched a lot of TV yesterday and I couldn’t tell you five commercials I saw.

Stories are so powerful because they move us emotionally (which ads also can but rarely do). We may not remember the story forever, but we certainly remember it longer than we do that $4 million Times Square Billboard or Super Bowl ad.

THE BEST ADS AREN’T ADS

At the end of last year, our company put together a list of the best ads of 2012, and go figure, the best ads of 2012 weren’t ads. I’ll argue that Noah’s story is going to be Honda’s best CR-V ad of 2013—one the company didn’t pay a single dime for, and one that isn’t even an ad. It’s a story.

If the non-ad does come out on top, it will be no surprise. The most shareable media is most often owned or earned, and that’s because effective advertising isn’t about exposure. It’s about conversations. Since 99.99 percent of the time, the conversations people have with one another are not about your ad (or anyone else’s), only the most relevant, entertaining and informative content will be remembered and shared.

HONDA’S REACTION

I’m actually surprised by Honda’s reaction. If I were Honda, I’d be embracing Noah’s performance in a bear hug. But other than earning a passing mention on Honda’s Facebook page, Noah’s story (which has received nearly half a million views) was practically ignored by the brand. Granted, it’s still early. Honda may have larger plans. Maybe it’ll record his performance in a real studio and use it as a long-form ad. Or maybe it’s distancing itself from the story because it features a two-mother (and no-father) household. I don’t know.

Unfortunately, there’s not much a brand can do to create stories like this one. That’s what makes them so effective—their authenticity. But brands have to implement ways to find customer stories like Noah’s and embrace them in a way that will amplify the message and allow it to be more searchable and shareable. It also requires a certain commitment to quality. If the CR-V constantly broke down and was unreliable, they may have never it might never have made it to 100K.

LEAN FORWARD

Whatever the case may be, Noah’s story is 100 percent authentic. It’s from Noah, not from a brand. That allows audiences to uncross their arms and lean forward, accepting the story into their lives even if it contains a brand, because the story isn’t from the brand.

Most people don’t have 30-seconds to be interrupted by a commercial or held hostage by a pre-roll ad, but nearly a half-million people had six minutes to hear Noah’s story. Heck, I had 90-minutes to blog about it.

The greatest brand stories are the ones told by the brand’s fans.

Read more from Jon here.

Tags: Attention, Brand, Jon Thomas, Storytelling

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Understanding Trends in Church Websites: Mobile First is Growing

by: Justin Wise

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If you wanted to predict the future of the web, how would you go about doing it? Further, what if you wanted to know how people accessed and utilized their church’s website?

For starters, you take a look at the hard data. We’ve been collecting data on 50+ churches for over three years and the data, dear friends, is astounding. If I told you everything we’re uncovering through these analytics, your head might explode.

But, not one to disappoint, here’s a peek into where we’re going.

We wanted to know, with a degree of certainty, what the trends were surrounding church websites. Take viewing location, for instance. The data we’ll be looking at in this post measures four areas:

1. Mobile
2. Computer
3. Tablet
4. Others

Here at Monk, we’re definitely seeing a trend with churches wanting to design for mobile-first. We worked with The Village Church recently to create a site-wide responsive design. If you’re not familiar with responsive, it means a website is “aware” of the type of browser it’s being accessed on—mobile, tablet, or desktop—and “responds” accordingly.

(If you want to see responsive in action, go to Village Church’s website and adjust the size of your browser window. Watch the images move! This is responsive design in action.)

The trends towards mobile comes with good reason and concrete data. Here’s what our stats show: Nearly 97% of users accessed their church’s website via desktop in 2009:

Keep in mind, this is only four years ago. Barack Obama was still a new President and poor ol’ Tiger Woods announced an “indefinite leave from professional golf” to work on his marriage. Seems like it was just yesterday but, of course, it wasn’t.

Our online viewing habits have changed significantly since then. Here’s how users accessed church websites in 2010:

It isn’t a big change, but the divergence from desktop was just beginning to pick up steam. Keep in mind the first iPad was released in April 2010—a stake-in-the-ground moment for mobile/tablet usage. Here’s what the same chart in 2011 looked like:

Desktop usage by church website users decreased 7.5% from 2009 to 2011. Desktop usage decreased another 1.7% in 2012, thus solidifying the downward trend for desktop internet use. Desktop is out. Mobile and tablet use is in. (Maybe that’s what led Google to declare “desktops will be irrelevant“…by 2013.)

Look at mobile-savvy cultures like India to see where the U.S. is headed in terms of website usage. According to Mary Meeker’s research, India become a mobile-first country in May 2012. for the first time in history, more people accessed the web in this country via mobile than did desktop.

This is not insignificant.

As the slide states, many more countries will follow. So will many churches. Organizations must begin considering a mobile-first environment. This can be especially daunting for churches who still wrestle with the purpose of their desktop-based website.

Conclusion

The data I’ve presented here is a small snippet of what we’ll be covering in our yearly “State of the Church Online” report, due out the end of this month. You can get early access to the report by joining our mailing list here.

Read more from Justin here.

Tags: Attention, Brand, Justin Wise, Social Media, website

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Four Focusing Questions to Save Time with Social Media

by: ND Strupler

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The way to keep social media simple is to be selective.

Social Media can be overwhelming. Don’t get me wrong: I love social media. 

Social Media exists for three reasons:

1. to connect with people
2. to share with others
3. to learn from others

If you feel like you are spending too much time with social media,

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Why do I want to go to this social media site?
2. Is this site more conducive to broadcasting or engaging in a network of people?
3. What’s the benefit of this social media site to me?
4. Am I looking to pass the time using a social media?

Here are the Apps I use:

• Instagram. I love taking pictures. I love learning form others. Some great connections have been made over the last years.

• I use the free Buffer App to schedule the sharing of things I think are important. This saves me lot’s of time and I don’t have to be online all day.

• I used the JustUnfollow service to unfollow some people on Twitter whom I had no idea why I was following. A cleaner twitter stream means I’m less likely to miss out on what my friends have to say when I log in to join the conversation.

• Hootsuite. I enjoy being involved in chats, and answering and asking questions online.  I respond to nearly everything…just not necessarily the very second you contact me.

• My goal is to check in on Twitter and Facebook at least twice a day to keep the conversation going.

I’ve turned off notifications on my phone for my Social Media apps. By having these social media apps off on my iPhone means I’m fully present locally but able to connect without distraction online when I do log in each day.

Tell me…How do you keep social media simple?

This post is inspired by Dana Byers

Read more from N.D. here.

Tags: Attention, ND Strupler, Social Media

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Five Reminders for Making Ministry Videos Viral

by: Jon Thomas

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An interesting insight into what makes social content effective has emerged, or at least made itself more visible, in the past year or so. Content is king, but editing may be the queen who’s actually running the castle.

Our traditionally analog means of consuming media—television, newspaper, radio, outdoor—are quickly being replaced by digital means. We supplement TV watching with our iPads, get our news in near real time from Twitter, and share life’s moments in an instant on Facebook.

This consumption of digital content has led to the concept of “virality.” Just a few years ago this concept didn’t exist. Videos, images and articles didn’t “go viral.” Exposure on all levels, particularly for advertising, was limited to the very rich or very lucky.

Now individuals, media outlets and brands alike are owning their channels, creating and publishing content in hopes of that content’s being consumed, appreciated and shared. So now the question is not whether or not to own a channel and create content but what type of content is most likely to be shared. This leads to other questions. What resonates with audiences? Where do they consume it? Why do they share it?

THAT’S WHERE EDITING COMES IN

If you’re reading this, it is likely that within the past day or so you’ve encountered an article by the likes of BuzzFeed, This Advertising Life, ICanHazCheezburger? and any of a number of other sites (there are millions) dedicated to curating and sharing quick bites of content.

But what’s important is not so much why the editors at BuzzFeed create this content; it’s more the lessons learned from how they do it. BuzzFeed has concocted a lethal formula for social-publishing success, combining dozens of unique pieces of content each day with pop culture, timeliness, topics proven to be shareable and brevity. Most articles contain images with captions, and only a few articles contain more than a couple of hundred words.

WHAT DOES ALL THIS MEAN FOR BRANDS?

The idea of editing and succinctness isn’t just a concept for media outlets pushing Grumpy Cat memes and Gangnam Style videos. There is a correlation between the success of viral-media sites and the success of brands on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Vine and other channels. Shorter content works (hence the existence of Twitter, Vine and Instagram). Here are a few tips to keep in mind when creating content in hopes of achieving viral success:

1. Understand your platform
What works for Facebook doesn’t necessarily work for Twitter. Write with the platform (and its audience) in mind.

2. Push the boundaries
Many platforms have technical limitations, but that doesn’t mean the boundaries aren’t there to be pushed. Brands are already using Vine for creative stop-motion videos.

3. Stay on topic
Nothing can derail a shareable piece of content like too much irrelevant content. Stay focused and stick to what your headline promises (easier said than done, especially for me).

4. Don’t under-deliver
If you’re spending more time on your headline than on your content, you’re doing it wrong. Don’t promise “10 Tricks You’ve Never Heard Of” only to repurpose tricks everyone has heard of.

5. You can sacrifice time or quality, but not both
If your content is quick, audiences will forgive a lack of quality. But if you’re publishing long-form content, the production quality must be able to override the audience’s brief attention span (think Harlem Shake versus Kony 2012).

Of course, a brand’s content-marketing strategy must correspond to its goals, since bite-size content won’t work for every brand. But in 2013, there’s no question of the power of effective editing and the shareability of entertaining short-form content. Thinking like an editor when creating your brand’s content may just turn ordinary into viral. 

Read the full story here.

Tags: Attention, Brand, Jon Thomas, Social Media

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What Does Your Ministry Brand Say About You?

by: Justin Wise

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Every tweet, every status update, every avatar, every social network background image—they all say something about your digital brand. Have you taken inventory to see what they’re saying?

For most organizations, the answer is, “no.” It’s not an intentional “no.” It’s a “no” stemming from not enough time in the day. People usually stumble into digital ghost towns by accident, not on purpose.

A Few Good Brands

MailChimp does a fantastic job at translating who they are as a company to their online presence. Their Twitter feed is filled with irreverent kookiness. The welcome greeting on the dashboard borders on nonsensical.

Wherever you interact with MailChimp online, they are the same company. There’s no confusion about who they are, what their company is like, and what they want their customer to experience. It’s all intentionally, purposefully crafted.

Kristina Halvorson and the folks at Brain Traffic are another shining example. Here’s the website for her book Content Strategy for the Web:

Beauteous. Her message of “better content, better business” is actually built into the website itself. I can guarantee you every word on this home page has been poured over and intentionally chosen. For good measure, here’s the website for Brain Traffic, the company Kristina helps run:

And here’s the site for one of their events, Confab Twin Cities:

It’s all in-sync. It all works together. The brand’s values seep out of every corner of the web, ready to be enjoyed by whomever comes across it.

What Does Your Brand Say About You?

Take a quick look at your online presence. Twitter, websites, fan pages, Instagram feeds—the works. Go ahead, I’ll wait =)

What do you see? Do you see a continuous presence, flowing from one channel to the next? Are your values prevalent in each digital outpost? For instance, if you say you value “quality,” does your website actually reflect it? Do you have an online home you can be proud of? Did you invest the time, effort, and, yes, resources to build something of actual quality?

Here’s the thing (and I’m going to shoot straight with you): you don’t have the luxury of sandbagging your digital presence any longer. The game has changed. It is no longer in the act of changing.

You can no longer simply have a blog, you must have a strategy for it. You can no longer simply tweet, you must have a strategy for those tweets. Catch my drift?

As a business, brand, individual or organization, you need to be considering:

• Content strategy
• Content marketing
• Social media strategy
• Social media management
• Social media audits
• Email marketing
• Editorial calendars
• Over digital communication strategy
• And, yes, more…

If you’re not actively developing plans for most of these, I’m afraid the widening gap may prove too wide in the future.

Read more from Justin here.

Tags: Attention, Brand, Justin Wise, Social Media

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