Six Tips for Using Instagram in Your Church

by: Jon Thomas

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Instagram is a pretty big deal.

It’s not breaking news but something I thought about as I was going to bed last night. I was about to fall asleep when I realized I hadn’t checked my Instagram feed. I reached from my bed, grabbed my phone and scrolled through the square, filtered photos of people, buildings, foliage, workouts, posters and, of course, food. I commented, Liked and even searched through a few hashtags to find fellow Instagrammers who share my passions.

For the better part of the last decade, I haven’t checked a social media platform not named Facebook or Twitter daily until now. Instagram has quickly become one of the top three social networks, and since photos are more personal than a 140-character statement, it has the potential to connect brands with fans on a deeper level than Twitter.

Instagram is a channel that brands soon won’t be able to ignore, and innovative brands are already making waves on the platform.

Here are a few tips for steering your brand’s journey on Instagram:

1. EMPLOY USER-GENERATED CONTENT

If you can motivate your fans to submit photos of their own, like pictures of them using your product or just living your brand story, add them to your Instagram stream. Sharpie does this well, often featuring works of art created with its pens and markers.

2. OFFER A GLIMPSE INTO YOUR HUMANITY

While Instagram can be a place to feature your products in action, consider using it exclusively as a place where your brand’s fans can get a glimpse behind the scenes. Feature photos of faces and places they never get to see. Show them that your brand is more than just the product or service you sell. The Boston Bruins have done a great job of this, especially while the league is in a lockout. The team often shares photos of their fans, the players, and the organization’s philanthropic endeavors.

3. PRODUCT IN ACTION 

There’s no hard data to back this up, but I’d bet that Instagram features more photos of food than any other subject. Outback Steakhouse and other restaurants have used Instagram as a place to find photos of all their dishes in their filtered glory. There’s a thin line between sharing great content and being overly promotional, so be considerate when sharing photos of your product in action.

4. CONSIDER USING TEXT, BUT NOT TO BRAND OR COPYRIGHT

Overgram and other apps allow you to add text to your Instagram photos. Add a hashtag, give credit for user-generated content, or just add creative copy that will resonate. But use it for good, not evil, and not on every photo. It’s not a place to stamp your brand mark or try to copyright your images. In fact, doing this will make it very unlikely that the photo will be shared with your audience’s audiences.

5. DEDICATE DESIGN RESOURCES

Instagram has challenges that other social channels do not. The app is purely mobile, so the photos have to be at least published, if not taken, from a phone. Make sure your Instagram community manager knows the brand’s tone of voice well enough and has an eye for photography so he or she can capture the right kinds of photos.

6. HASHTAGS

The best way to find users with a common interest is through hashtags. This is a feature that quickly caught on because of its popularity on Twitter. Are you a sneaker brand? Check out #kicksoftheday. Instagram will even help you with similar suggestions and sort them by popularity. Create your own hashtag, like Tiffany’s did with #TrueLovePictures, to activate fans on Instagram.

Remember, there’s a risk and reward here. Instagram isn’t the best social network to help you drive traffic to your site or be a conduit for e-commerce as well as Twitter or even Facebook will. It’s this inability to “sell,” however, that allows Instagram users lower their guard and embrace the brands that use the platform well.

See more from Jon here.

Tags: Attention, Awareness, Brand, Jon Thomas

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Lessons in Live Polling at Your Church

by: Rich Birch

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Last month we hosted a series of messages at Liquid where we featured “live polling” as a core part of the message.  The “big idea” of the series was to use national interest in the upcoming election as a jump off point to talk about the Kingdom of God.  Tim did an amazing job with the entire series.  [Click here to check out the series and see the live polling in action.] [Download this infographic of some of the things we learned from polling our people.]

Live Polling gives your services an incredibly dynamic feel. Our people are used to interactive everything but when they come to our church services they are often seen as just “one way” monologues where people on a stage dispense information.  By using the cel phones that are in people’s pockets you are able to access what your people are thinking and create a fun dialogue with your people.  Here are some lessons we learned about live polling in church:

• Choose Technology Wisely – I spent a bunch of time over the summer looking at a number of different technology solutions for live polling because I didn’t want to have any problems once we actually got to the services.  I would highly recommend [Poll Everywhere] because their service is robust and gives you tonnes of options for conducting your live polls.
• Set Autoresponders – When people submit their poll answer make sure the service sends back an acknowledgement text because as important as actually taking in people answers is … having your people know that you got their answer is even more important! People want to know that their vote counted.
• Do “Demo” Questions – Every week we had our Campus Pastors walk our audiences through fun questions earlier in the service to show how the technology works.  Each demo included the campus pastor asking everyone to take our their cel phone (wave them in the air!) and then actually explaining how the “short codes” work for the polling.  We asked questions like “Which Pastor is most handsome?” and “Who is going to win the Super Bowl?”
• Tell the Press About it – Make sure to send out a press release to local and regional news outlets about the fact that you are attempting to garner your people’s feedback through polling.  It’s counter to the broader culture’s perception of what “churches do” and therefore it’s a great news story!  [We had coverage from both local] and [regional news outlets about our use of this technology]. [Check out our press release.]
• Ask Questions with Wide Variety of Opinions – Try to craft your questions in such a way that they don’t lend themselves to “binary” responses.  Our participation was more dynamic and engaging when we had responses that became a horse race between 3-4 answers.
• Practice the Technology – This probably goes without saying … but make sure you test the questions multiple times before you get to Sunday morning.  Make sure you know exactly how you are going to display the response screen … make sure the shortcodes work … make sure everyone is well aware of what is happening.  Spending extra time on the front end will make sure it’s a smooth experience for your people!

Live Polling could add a nice interactive piece to an up coming series at your church!  How could you see using this technology in your ministry?

Read more from Rich here.

Tags: Attention, Awareness, Live Polling, Rich Birch

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Leveraging Social Media for Your Next Church Event

by: Rich Birch

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As our people use social media all the time it’s becoming a growing expectation that as a church we leverage these tools to help them experience what we do. How can you use these tools within your ministry?

I sat down with Ali Raney who is the Social Media Coordinator at The Meeting House to talk about how they leveraged these channels at a recent event.  Ali is thoughtful leader, talented musician and gift to the church on all things social media.  You should follow her on twitter: @aliraneymusic.

On October 20th 2012, The Meeting House hosted a large event (part worship service / part tailgate party / part epic dance party) for all 13 sites at a local hockey arena (how Canadian!) called One Roof. The purpose of the event was to bring the entire family together under (you got it!) one roof and to kick off the church’s new mission, Transform.

RB: How did you leverage social media to help promote your event before the big day?

AR: We are a large multi-site community of around 6,000 people and we hoped to pack the place out! So two months before October 20th, we made the big announcement on a Sunday morning and immediately followed that up with an e-news blast and a “save the date” on our Twitter feed and all of our Facebook pages. We also introduced a hashtag for the event (#OneRoof) and I made sure to use it every time I posted anything about the event on Twitter (and we asked staff to do the same). A month before the event, we began putting One Roof promo into heavy rotation on all of our communication channels. At least once or twice a week we featured a short, engaging
video on Facebook and Twitter, and/or a photo from last year’s event reminding people to mark it in their calendars. In the last three weeks before One Roof, we did a Facebook cover photo campaign in which we changed the cover photo on each of our 14 pages weekly to feature a picture from last year’s event accompanied with helpful – why, where, who, what, how – details.

RB: Describe how you interacted with your community on the day of the event.

AR: The night before One Roof I scheduled an hourly countdown in HootSuite. I made sure each tweet had momentum by building in excitement, photos, practical reminders and our #OneRoof hashtag. I was sure to follow the hashtag and retweet almost everything that came in from followers. As we got closer to the event, people started to tweet more and more and I was RT’ing about 7 or 8 tweets every 5 – 10 minutes. As soon as doors opened for the event, we began a live-tweeting party! As the 5,000 seat arena was filling up, I had a long list of (pre-planned) fun, serious and meaningful community- building questions scrolling on the big screens. We would tweet a question and then RT our followers’ answers. Our community went crazy for it, and it created an awesome vibe as people waited anxiously in their seats for One Roof to commence!

Later on in the evening we had an epic dance party, deejayed by none other than our Teaching Pastor/ DJ Bruxy. We set the stage throughout the day on Twitter by asking the Instagrammers in our community to start posting photos of their One Roof experience, using the #OneRoof hashtag. We then used all of their photos in a scrolling slideshow throughout the dance party! This was an awesome social media feature, because as people were dancing, they saw photos up on the big screen and wanted to see themselves and their friends up there too. It was an easy way to get people to
interact with us!

RB: What tools did you use to manage your day?

AR: HootSuite for posting and scheduling Tweets, ProPresenter 5’s Twitter app for fielding and posting tweets on the big screen, Facebook, Instagram and Hashtagram.com – the fun web platform that allowed us to automatically create a big screen slideshow of people’s personal photos from the day, using the #OneRoof hashtag in Instagram.

RB: What did you do that you would repeat in the future at an event like this?

AR: I would definitely do a live-tweeting session again. It created such a cool, community vibe as we waited for the service to start. It helped to build momentum because it was an active, living, breathing thing that people could immediately participate in, and receive immediate gratification in seeing their Twitter handle and photo up on the screens in the arena. It definitely encouraged others to join in the party (and we got 60 new Twitter followers, 72 new Facebook fans and 53 new Instagram followers throughout the day because of it)! I would also do the Facebook cover photo campaign and the day-of countdown again as well as the Instagram slideshow – another great reason to create an event specific Hashtag.

RB: Was there anything you did that you wouldn’t repeat?

AR:I would investigate other Instagram sharing platforms as Hashtagram has limited functionality. You have no control over which photos are put up and in our context, although that wasn’t really a huge concern, it would have been nice to deselect any photos that were in the rotation for too long. I’m not sure if it was a site traffic thing, or something in Hashtagram’s functionality, but it seemed like many people’s photos were never shown (although they followed the instructions correctly) and so we had an issue with the same photos recycling over and over, which got a little stale. It corrected itself a few times over the course of the two hours that we were rolling, but it was disappointing that so many great photos didn’t get any air time on the big screens.

RB: Anything else you want to let our readers know?

AR: I think that social media within the church is one of the most underused methods of evangelism and community building. It (of course) will never (and shouldn’t) replace real time face-to-face relationships, but why not do both well? I’m excited to see where we go from here and I look forward to connecting with other churches and organizations on how best to share the message of Jesus through the use of great social media strategy and application. I would love to connect directly via email with anyone who might be interested in chatting.

Read more from Rich here.

Tags: Attention, Awareness, Rich Birch, Social Media

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Using Just Enough Words

by: Seth Godin

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Free Coffee, Next Exit

That’s the most effective billboard one can imagine, particularly if it’s typeset properly and if the coffee is good.

Most billboards aren’t nearly as useful, because the wrong service is promoted, or, more likely, because someone saw all that space and worked hard to fill it up.

The same thing is true of most websites. You know so well the why’s and how’s of what you built and how terrific it is, and the thought of using just a few words when a bunch will do is frightening indeed.

No, your solution doesn’t have to be simple or obvious. But the story about what it accomplishes does.

The goal of a marketing interaction isn’t to close the sale, any more than the goal of a first date is to get married. No, the opportunity is to move forward, to earn attention and trust and curiosity and conversation.

Simple, clear and actionable.

Read more from Seth here.

Tags: Attention, Awareness, Seth Godin

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Using Repetition to Reiterate What’s Important

by: Scott Belsky

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A CEO of a large start-up recently made this comment:

“I used to assume everyone on the team knew the grand vision, but an informal survey revealed the opposite. New employees had no idea what we were aiming for in the long term…”

Clearly, he felt he was falling short of his leadership responsibility to clearly articulate goals.

It left me thinking: in my efforts not to be too repetitive, am I failing to communicate effectively? Sure, we have a major team offsite that covers long-term strategy once per year. But in every other meeting, I am focused on goals for the month and other team issues. Our roadmap is accessible to the entire team, and I’ve worked with at least half of these folks for many years. I always assume the team knows where we are headed.

It’s becoming more clear to me: Effective leaders (and brands) repeat themselves to the point where they can barely stand to hear themselves any more. When it comes to setting strategy, they make a few simple points multiple times. And they compromise on “new messaging” to reiterate what is most important.

Read the rest of the story from Scott here.

Read more from Scott here.

Tags: Attention, Awareness, Scott Belsky

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12 Essentials of Church Communications

by: Tim Peters

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The church is the hope of the world. As church leaders we have the responsibility of communicating the greatest message known to mankind; the only message capable of changing a person’s entire eternity.

The weight of that responsibility is both profound and incredible. It moves us to action, and demands that we communicate it well.

In the United States alone, we have 350,000 churches; each started by people with the desire to communicate the gospel message. Yet oftentimes, churches have a difficult time communicating this message because they don’t understand the basics of communication.

Think about it … Is your church clear on who they are and where they are going? Does your church use social media to nurture and grow relationships? Has your church spent unhurried time developing a brand that resonates with people in your church and community? Are you proud of your website and does it accurately communicate the uniqueness of your church? Have you evaluated and observed what guests experience on a Sunday morning? Do you want create more awareness of your church in local communities?

These things may not seem significant, but they are critical. In fact, they are essential.

We have researched and identified the 12 Essentials to Church Marketing and Communications and developed a resource that equips Church Communications leaders. And we did it for one reason; because eternity is at stake. We developed this important resource to help you reach more people with the gospel. We  wanted to give you a sneak peek at the 12 Essentials.

The 12 Essentials to Church Marketing and Communications

#1 – Eternal Perspective

When it comes to Church Communications, it’s critical to remember that you want to produce an excellent product not for excellence sake, but because eternity is at stake.  Lose that perspective, and you lose everything.

#2 – Vision Clarity

Vision clarity is about staying focused on the mission and vision of your church.  To reach clarity, you must know who you are as a church and where you are going.

#3 – Brand Standards

Brand Standards are the compilation of documents where you articulate the mission, values, strategy, and vision of the church.  They protect the treatment of everything from your logo and tagline, to fonts and color choice and even email signatures and phone messages.  Brand Standards are critical but often overlooked.

#4 – Communication Strategy

Your communication strategy involves understanding your audience and then identifying the best way of communicating who you are to that audience.  It helps you determine what, when and how you will communicate.

#5 – Project Systems

Andy Stanley says, “The systems down the hall trump the vision on the wall.” If you don’t have systems in place, standards and strategy mean absolutely nothing. The systems that you set in place allow the day-to-day operations to run smoothly.

#6 – Social Media

With over 845 million active users each day, Facebook reports an unbelievable 4 billion posts, likes, comments, and photo uploads every single day. Facebook and other social media sites understand the power of community. They understand that people want to be a part of something they feel connected to.  Learning to use social media to reach the lost and to extend the influence of the church isn’t just a good idea, it’s a must.

#7 – Web Essentials

We live in a technology and social media driven society. Today’s church visitors will most certainly check out your church on the Internet before they attend for the first time. It must reflect the experience they will have when they do attend.  It has to be more than just a website of information. It has to be an experience.

#8 – Guest Experience

There are few things first time guests expect when they visit your church. They expect to be greeted warmly; they expect to fill out a card with their contact information; and they expect someone from your church will follow up with them. Fail to meet any of these expectations, and they aren’t likely to return for a second visit.

#9 – Audience Connection

Ever been disconnected on the phone but not realize it until you have finished speaking?  Then you understand the importance of making sure you are connected to your audience.  To connect to your audience, you must understand who they are and how they take in information.

#10 – Creative Leadership

Creative people are not easy to lead and motivate. They are a breed of their own. Understanding how to lead creative people, and how to facilitate a creative meeting are critical. Moreover, learning to lead those in authority over you who lack creativity is equally important.

#11 – External Marketing

Churches and marketing have a rocky relationship. Historically, churches have not communicated effectively to their external audiences. Most churches make the same marketing mistakes: the message is not unique; the content is not inviting; and there’s no long-term strategy in place. If that description fits your church’s marketing, it’s time to make some changes.

#12 – Storytelling Principles

At the end of the day, stories move people.  Effective storytelling is always more effective than just another event announcement. Vigorously find and celebrate the stories of people within and outside your church.

The 12 Essentials help you master the basics of Church Communications. Mastering the basics of church communications helps you reach more people with the most important message in the world.

Simply put, it’s essential. 

Read more from Tim here.

Tags: Attention, Awareness, Tim Peters

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The 2 Secrets to Success for Social Media in Your Church

by: Tim Kastelle

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It’s getting hard to keep up with all the different social tools that are flying at us every day.  We constantly hear things like:

“If you’re not on Pinterest you’re in big trouble.”

or

“Blogging is dead.”

It seems like people are putting a lot of effort into trying to figure out which tools they should use, and how they should use them.  What’s the best way to deal with all of this us? I’ve been repeatedly hit in the face with the answer to this recently from my network, which teaches me a lot.

So here is the secret to social success:

Connect with people.

Simple, isn’t it.  It doesn’t matter what tools you use – and if you spend too much time worrying about tools, you’ll forget to use them to do the one thing that matters – connecting.
Connecting Ideas is the Fundamental Creative Act in Innovation.  You have to connect ideas to ideas to innovate, and you have to connect people to your ideas to get them to spread.  It’s all about connection.

Earlier, I told you about the best social media strategy of all time:

Do awesome work.

That takes care of the connecting ideas to ideas part.  Then, to get them to spread, you need to connect the ideas to people.  And that means that you have to connect with people – that is the core purpose of all of these social tools.

Connections create value – that is the core message of Nilofer Merchant in her book 11 Rules for Creating Value in the #SocialEra. Here is one of my favourite quotes from the book:

We want innovation, but without experiencing failure. We want to embrace the new, but without risk. We want to act fast and fluid, but to maintain tight controls. We want to empower everyone, but retain decision rights for ourselves. We want to experiment, but we also want predictability. We want to be flexible to customer input, but remain ruthlessly efficient. We want to adapt, but we fear the death of familiarity.

This is why it’s hard to go from being an 800-pound gorilla to a herd of nimble gazelles; an organization goes from being a centralized institution that competes through overpowering strength and scale to a set of relationships or interrelationships. Gazelles thrive and win by how they share power with one another. And, as a result, they can act fast, fluid, and flexible. For organizations, this is key to winning in the marketplace.

As organisations, we win through connections. The same is true for people.

Here is Shane Mac from his book Stop With the BS:

All these apps, gadgets, buildings—everything for that matter—they don’t make me smile and think about how much I love what I do. The people I know do. It is the people and my relationships with them that really matter. Done. Simple as that. All we have in life are relationships, so we better start spending more time building new ones and rebuilding old ones. Build bridges, Re-build bridges, never Burn Bridges.

It’s the relationships that matter. Hugh MacLeod nails it in his latest book Freedom is Blogging in Your Underwear:

…all the internet is, as Doc Searls said, is a bunch of protocols that “allow us to get along.” Protocols allow us to talk to each other. The stuff in the middle, the stuff that separates us, the stuff that directly makes use of these protocols – hosting companies, web sites, blogging platforms, microblogging platforms, etc. – matter far less.

You’re on one end of the wire. Just think about who’s on the other end of the wire, and what you can do for them. Worry less about the wire. Worry less about the shiny objects in the middle.

Just worry about MAKING your own stuff, and the rest of the internet will look after itself.

So there is your two-step guide to social success.

Do awesome work.

and

Connect with people.

The problem is that while these steps might sound simple, they’re not.  They take a lot of effort.  That’s what makes the shiny new objects so seductive – they look like shortcuts.

Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts.  That’s why it’s still remarkable when you do awesome work and connect with people.

I know that I still have a long way to go myself.  But now that we’ve connected, maybe we can do some of this awesome work together.

Tags: Awareness, Intentionality, Social Media, Tim Kastelle

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Reducing Communication Confusion

by: Sam Rainer III

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Leaders often confuse followers by communicating imperatives as declarative statements. An imperative is a command. An imperative sentence has a grammatical structure expressing a directive. A declarative sentence is quite different; it makes a statement. In an effort to sound less forceful, leaders will often make declarative statements and expect followers to recognize them as imperatives.

Sometimes this tactic works. For instance, the garbage stinks is a declarative statement that—when spoken by my wife—becomes an obvious imperative, take out the garbage! Most of the time, however, imperatives disguised as declarative statements simply generate confusion.

I understand why leaders use declarative statements when they really want to communicate imperatives. Imperatives can sound harsh. Declarative statements have a softer tone; they are also terribly confusing. Imperatives direct an individual to a specific action (fix the leak), but declarative statements make the problem the subject without any prescribed action (the faucet leaks).

When leaders communicate imperatives as declarative statements they make two critical errors. First, they communicate a problem without a prescribed solution.  Second, they do not assign a person (the subject) to the problem or project. So everyone now realizes the faucet leaks, but no one knows who should fix it and how it should be fixed.

The confusion caused by this communication error makes a leader appear unnecessarily weak. In an attempt to be considerate, leaders just come off as confusing. We already knew the faucet leaked. Who should fix it? Sentence structure may seem like an inconsequential part of leadership, but imperatives are important because they direct people to action.

If you want followers to act on a problem, then don’t use a declarative sentence. It’s confusing and a weak form of communication. Unless, of course, you are my wife. The garbage stinks. I get it.

Tags: Attention, Awareness, Leadership Characteristics, Sam Rainer

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Say It Over and Over

by: Steven Furtick

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Here’s a simple and obvious leadership tip for you today. But it’s one that I’ve seen pay big dividends over the years.

If you’ve ever watched an infomercial, you know that it says to call their phone number over and over again. The TV personality says it repeatedly. They flash it on the screen multiple times.

It seems repetitive, almost to the point of being obnoxious. But they’re just trying to make it simple for people. Obvious. And they do it for two simple reasons: 1) people need them to, and 2) it works. Otherwise they wouldn’t do it.

I think every church should adopt the same strategy. Obviously I don’t mean flashing numbers repeatedly on the screen. But we do need to make the simple things simple. The obvious things obvious. Because we should never overestimate the ability of people, including ourselves, to miss the simple and the obvious.

Here’s a few ways this works at Elevation:

• Every week we tell our first time guests that they’re our VIPs.
• Every week we tell everyone to stop by an orange tent to get involved.
• We encourage people to give all the time.
• We encourage people to get in groups all the time.

In a different way every week and every time. But the same basic, clear messages every week and every time

Is it repetitive? Maybe.
Does it make the obvious things obvious? Definitely.

And those are just the nuts and bolts of a church. Imagine how much more important it is when we’re talking about things like the Gospel. Or the vision of the church. Yet many churches only communicate those things a couple of times per year.

This might seem like a simple and obvious tip to a lot of you. Why even blog it?

Because we’re no better than our audience. Even the simple and obvious leadership principles need to be made simple and obvious, and repeated over and over again to leaders like you and me.

Tags: Attention, Awareness, Steven Furtick

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The 6 Elements of Compelling Vision Illustrated

by: Will Mancini

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Tags: Articulating Vision Proper, Awareness, Kony 2012, Will Mancini

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