MyGrace: The Other Blog Evangelists
Inspired by a member of his congregation that used MySpace to attract listeners for his rock band, Rev. Patrick Gray, am Episcopal priest from Boston set up a MySpace profile, the Advent, to attract listeners to his sermons. His site includes reminders about service times as well as audio files of the choir. The graphics are very cool and the Advent has 671 friends. The WSJ reports that churches across the US are using social media such as blogs and podcasts and on line social networking to connect with members and potential members.
Church Unplugged, according to the WSJ, attributes its growth to its MySpace profiles, saying that the church profile can be found while searching for music, television, or local MySpace users. Unplugged has about 100 church attendees and over 2000 MySpace friends.
The evangelicals are leading the way with blogs such as Outside the Box Ministry and Church Marketing Sucks that provide "how to’s" for churches to improve their marketing and their messages.Church Marketing Sucks has a Squido lens and posts with titles such as, "What Web 2.0 can mean for your church." Outside the Box Ministry is a little less "in your face" than Church Marketing Sucks but the message is similar. Their language is about engagement, connection and recognition that if people are on MySpace or Facebook that’s where they need to be.
The Vatican is podcasting and has a web site and according to Businessweek is hard at work on a faith based social networking site which is referred to as MySpace for Catholics. Sister Judith, the nun who is responsible for the web site and the upcoming social networking site, says that "the Net is the ultimate way to reach millions of people and to connect… it’s about something much bigger than myself…you can touch it, you can change it, and you can touch people with it." Spoken like some other evangelists at a different church.
According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project (2004) 64% of online Americans use the Internet for faith based acclivities. The study said, "Faith-related activity online is a supplement to, rather than a substitute for offline religious life. The survey found that two-thirds of those who attend religious services weekly use the Internet for personal religious or spiritual purposes." Sounds like online out reach is reaching the target.
But what about the MySpace environment for delivering the MyGrace message? Businessweek recently reported of the growing campaign to protect children from online predators that may close space on MySpace. One church education group mentioned in the WSJ article that the challenge was to reach teens without exposing them to inappropriate content. I think he may have the equation backwards, teens and actually most people, are probably not on MySpace to find a church but rather may find a church while they are MySpace.
As Ross Dawson writes about the MySpace generation, on Trends in the Living Networks, " The way I see relational technologies such as mobiles, chat forums, multiplayer roleplaying games, video sharing and so on, is that they extend our capacity as humans to relate. People have a built-in drive to connect with others, and now that has a far wider canvas across which to express itself. We can now discover many of the latent propensities and characteristics of humans, because we have been given new tools to explore our human identity." Or our spiritual side.
Outside of the Box Ministry has a post titled Blogging is Similar to Spiritual Multiplication which is a pretty good explanation of word of mouth marketing with blogs. If you want your message to be heard, as Businessweek notes, OClick All Ye Faithful.
Tags: MySpace, WOMMA, word of mouth, Church of the Consumer, Evangelism, marketing, church marketing, blogs, social media, media, podcasting, social networks
Blogging Irony: We Encourage Corporations to Blog as our Business but Discourage Them by our Behavior
As part of my consulting business I promote blogging to businesses, service professionals, and non-profits. Many consultants, Advertising and PR bloggers do the same thing. We tell them it is an easy, inexpensive way to build businesses and brands; we say, blogs build relationships and join the conversation.And we say the best way to learn about blogs is to read blogs.
Well, I believe all those statements are true…the problem is you hope that they are not reading blogs the week that a number of bloggers are pulverizing a brand blog and asking that the marketing department be fired, or having a too personal slugfest over Wal-Mart and Edelman and who should have said what ,or a lower moment, the Strumpette dumpathon.
John Wagner at On Message from Wagner Communication writes, "There is a lesson to be learned from Strumpette and I hope all you blogists, Kool-Aid drinkers and social media consultants were paying attention." The lesson he is teaching is an old one really, public displays of engagement with an adversary seldom accomplish much. Although he makes some good points and the comments to his post represent the spectrum of opinions, I think his perhaps off hand reference to why corporate America is cautious about blogging is just as important.
He references a blog post on Scatterbox that is critical of hypocricies noted about McDonald’s social repsonisibility blog in light his opinions that their menu is less than responsible, as an example of the kind of criticism a corporation might face in the blogosphere. Again, it’s a valid point. If a corporation has a blog it can and probably will be examined for evidence of inconsistencies with stated corporate policies, product or service offerings, or even political contributions. Any public communication by a corporation is subject to this. And really in my opinion, corporations, just like the rest of us should be held accountable for consistency.
What I think is another important point is that when a company launches a blog and bloggers write things like, "Last wednesday, February 15th Guinness (a generally forward thinking
and creative marketer) launched a blog. As opposed to the usual puffery
and inauthenticity that can be associated with some of the “Corporate Brand Jobs†that pass for blogs, " does it really encourage the brand manager reading the post to feel like adding it to the old marketing plan? And that was pretty tame next to what Juicey Fruit got. McDonald’s blog was not exactly welcomed with open arms, even before the first post went up.
Final comment…it seems that for all the instructions we receive about how to build traffic the way to really build traffic fast is sex, scandal, innuendo, and other forms of negative attention. Thank you Strumpette, building traffic on a blog has now been shown to be the same as building traffic anywhere. Well corporate America, you know all those new things we told you about that will help you build readership and join the conversation…links, pings, comments, tags? Well, the more things change the more they stay the same. Sex sells so come on in…there just isn’t a life guard on duty everyday.
Technorati Tags: blogs, bloggers, McDonalds, marketing PR, advertising, branding, Wal-Mart, corporate blogs, strumpette
Blog Marketing: 3C’s and a B
Yesterday, the Alliance for Building Capacity at the George Warren School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis hosted a program for non-profits called Create a Market for Your Mission. An overview of Strategic Marketing Management was provided by Professor John Branch of the Olin School of Business, Washington University. I presented at one of the breakout sessions on Blogging as a Marketing Tool.
Professor Branch referred to 3 C’s (since my degree from the B School preceded Professor Branch’s tenure I knew he was not referring to my transcript) commonly used to describe the marketplace: complex, changing and competitive. He challenged his listeners to understand their organizations and their customers in terms of the the 3 C’s. He is so right! When I talk about blogging, I don’t use the 3C’s jargon but I do talk a lot about the 3 C’s in terms of change, competition, and complexity.
To note, while I was an MBA student trying to understand quantitative business analysis, Professor Lyn Pankoff assured me that it would not be crucial to business success to completely understand the formulas, only to be able to correctly use the jargon. In many respects, this turned out to be good advice.
When I talk about the 3C’s I talk about two other C’s, the Cluetrain Manifesto with the subtitle, "The end of business as usual" and the statement, "A powerful global conversation has begun.
Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to
share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result,
markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most
companies." And C, for conversation, as in "these markets are conversations". And here comes the B, Blog. Blogs are conversations.
I also have a slide that quotes the Business Week article, Blogs Will Change Your Business: "Look past the yakkers, the hobbyists, and political mobs. You customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Catch up or catch you later." Fortune said in December of 2004 that there is no escaping the blog and a force that cannot be ignored. I also refer to that "says it all" chart from Creating Passionate Users about new marketing versus old school marketing that could probably launch a 1000 topics for blog posts; the message direct to the 3C’s is at the top: Old School Marketing is done by marketers and advertisers/Neo Marketing is done by everybody.
So, I would of course agree with Professor Branch that the marketplace is changing, complex and competitive. I would also agree with his statement that the likelihood of being successful in the marketplace is increased by a disciplined approach that requires research, analysis, planning, implementation and control. It will all lead to the same place: If you are marketing a product or a service to customers or clients, either non-profit or for profit you need to join the conversation.
Matt Homann’s {non}billable hour in a post entitled, "When Are You Starting Your Blog?" references a reference to a study that found "that 55% of corporations have adopted blogs for
both internal (91.4%) and external (96.6%) communications. More than
half of these organizations launched their blogs within the last year,
and most of these started within the past three months.That’s a hockey stick. And it suggests that corporate communicators will drive future growth of the social media market.
The expected benefits from the external blogs according to the Guidewire Group Study are listed on Trends I’m Watching "include improved brand
recognition (78%) and external communications (78%), as well as a
vehicle for customer feedback (66%). A few respondents are expecting
blogs to generate income (20%), but many more are expecting them to
improve search engine positioning (58%)."
START BLOGGING!
Technorati Tags: Blog_marketing, Blogs, Non-Profit_Marketing
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