Last week, I shared a video clip from an interview with @Jack, founder of Twitter — he shares an interesting perspective in that conversation that gives a clue to Twitter’s potential and original intention.

Twitter has been a great platform for me over the last couple of years.  I’m getting a chance to see Jack Dorsey in person later this week and it got me thinking about some of the great things that have come out of my Twitter experience to date.

Here’s just a few benefits of Twitter:

1. Access to people & new relationships -- This is by far one of the biggest advantages of Twitter.  If someone else is on twitter, whether they are a celebrity or successful leader or just an average joe, I know have the potential to connect with them and build a relationship if there is real value in doing so for both sides.  I now routinely converse with people I’ve first met on Twitter like @djchuang or have traded direct messaging with soem of the “big guys” like @rickwarren, @michaelhyatt and @pogue.  This level of access wouldn’t have been possible just a couple of years ago.  The friction around new connections has been radically reduced with social media platforms like Twitter.
2. Real/near-time updates on various news items.  Next to Google, a Twitter search can yield some great results, especially for topics where there might not have been much time to have a lot of publishing around it just yet.  If it’s just happening, I got to Twitter search vs Google first.
3. Customer service. It’s been quite helpful to tweet about a customer service #fail and get quick attention to the matter.  When brands care about what is being said about them in the Twitterverse (and more and more brands are coming online), then you can usually get the attention of someone that’s empowered to find a solution.
4. Traffic to my websites.  When posting a new blog post, I usually share it on Twitter announcing my “new post” — that or other ways to include links to specific blog posts in replies to others.  I have had some decent months where referrals through Twitter click through links have shown up on the radar of my website analytics.  Well written content draws people just like in an other medium.

It will be interesting to see what Jack says about Twitter, especially about where he think we are all going.

What benefits have you found working on Twitter so far?  Please share them below with a comment.

If you’re like most organizational leaders, a significant part of what you do on a daily basis is process emails. . . Responding to emails, initiating emails, filing, deleting and forward emails.  We all do it.

The problem with the clear majority (95%+!!!) of email is that when you sit down to process your email inbox, you are deciding to let other people’s agendas dictate how you spend your time IMHO.  So figuring out how to tame that inbox is one of the most strategic things you can do for your own work.

One of my colleagues is a master of killing that inbox every day.  So I asked Rich Birch, to share some of his best practices for dealing with email.  Take heed and you’ll find hours being freed up every week so that you can spend more time on things that are on *your* agenda, not others’.  Enjoy today’s post below.

Here are 6 “not-so-obvious” email tips from what I’ve learned after almost 25 years of trying to figure out this email thing . . .

1. Email Is Not Your Job

2. Schedule Your Time

3. Don’t Use a Smart Phone

4. Filters Are Your Friends

Every email program has some sort of filter function built in. These filters will automatically process emails when they come into your inbox. I currently have over 40 filters running on my inbox. I have emails that I get every month that I need to forward to other people . . . my system automatically forwards those emails and I don’t ever see them in my inbox. I want to highlight emails from some people as urgent when they arrive . . . as soon as my email sees that certain people email me it flags them for me. I’ve heard that some people will even filter out those pesky forwards from parents who always send them their way . . . of course I’ve just heard about that and have never done that.

5. Reply Sparingly

6. Use Gmail

Rich Birch is one of the early multi-site church pioneers in North America. He led the charge in helping The Meeting House in Toronto to become the leading multi-site church in Canada with over 5,000 people in 12 locations. In addition, he served on the leadership team of Connexus Community Church in Ontario, a North Point Community Church Strategic Partner. Currently Rich serves as Operations Pastor at Liquid Church in the Manhattan facing suburbs of New Jersey.

Rich is passionate about helping churches reach more people, more quickly through excellent execution. He blogs at www.killerchurch.com

I was fortunate to connect with Paul Caminiti, vice-president of church & bible engagement at Biblica at the Q conference in Washington D.C. this April.  On a daily basis, 700 people quit reading the Bible.  And that means not just taking a break or putting the book down for a couple of months, we’re talking *quit*.  The latest project at Biblica (the copyright holders of the NIV), is an elegant approach to a seemingly ubiquitous circumstance.

Distinctive features of Books of the Bible NIV – part of the Community Bible Experience

• They’ve taken the NIV bible and the chapter and verse numbers have been removed.  
• It’s printed in single-column across the page like any other book we are used to reading these days.
• The books are re-arranged (un-arranged?) in an order that makes more sense in terms of keeping authors’ writing together and individual books that later tradition divided into separate parts were put back together again.
• And footnotes, headings and any other call outs have been removed from the pages of the sacred text.

Q. It is interesting how instead of going through deep word studies of various scriptural pericopes, or other similar avenues that Bible study groups typically end up pursuing, the Community Bible Experience decidedly takes the path of trying to read the Bible in large conceptual swaths as it consumes it through a story lens. To this effect, how does Community Bible Experience promote conversation within the small group / book club setting?

A. In-depth word studies are great, but only when you have the big picture backdrop. You don’t gain a comprehensive understanding of your favorite novel by doing grammatical analysis of a word here or there. You gain the most understanding by reading the whole thing. Same goes with the Bible. That’s what we’re trying to achieve with Community Bible Experience. We’ve found the very act of “reading big” promotes conversation, simply because when you read 12 pages a day, you come to the group with plenty to discuss. We give groups five basic questions to help navigate the conversation; but some groups don’t even need them. They just open up and start talking. Sometimes the best thing we can do is get out of the way.

Q. Typically, book clubs grow organically as friends of club members hear about it and get invited in.  How does Community Bible Experience fall in line with that trait of book clubs?  

A. Community Bible Experience is still fairly new – and relatively small. We don’t have big promotional budgets or a slick ad campaign. So most of our participation so far has been through word of mouth. We’re OK with that. So many programs promise to revolutionize your church or whatever. We happen to think in-depth Bible engagement is the one thing that can make a difference in every area of Christian life, but we’d rather let the experience speak for itself. So we’ve kept it as simple and organic as possible.

Q. How would you pitch this book club to a fellow soccer mom or dad? How do you overcome the visceral gut reaction to hearing that a bunch of people are sitting down and reading/discussing “the Bible” straight through — typically perceived as a very boring, Bible-geeky, or even a religious fanatical thing to do by most people outside the church?

A. Our sense is that many people, including those who are nominally Christian or  consider themselves “spiritual but not religious,” have a natural curiosity about the Bible. Reading the Bible at least once is on a lot of people’s bucket lists. But many of us have tried one of the various “read the Bible in a year” plans and failed. What if there was a way to read the Bible that (a) is doable and (b) doesn’t come with a hidden agenda? That’s how we see Community Bible Experience. We see our role as helping you experience the Bible; we’re not here to tell you what to think of the Bible. We’re not here to force a particular interpretation on the text. That’s why Community Bible Experience has been embraced by churches and groups across the spectrum – from Episcopalians to Southern Baptists.

Q. Is there a difference in themes or issues that tend to get brought up in the conversation under this format? How does this Bible study experience differ than a “traditional” Bible study group?

A. The biggest difference is that it doesn’t matter where you’re coming from. Some of the best groups have been those where seekers and seasoned Bible readers were in it together. The book club model levels the playing field, so to speak. It also opens the discussion to a wide range of questions – including those not normally considered “safe” or “acceptable” in a traditional Bible study. We’re not asking people to give fill-in-the-blank answers. In other words, we’re not trying to “control” the discussion.

Q. One of the immediate flags that many people have is when they see that you are “messing with” the Bible.  They might say we have final expression of the current canon for a reason.  Are you trying to replace the NIV Bible people carry? Do you expect them to carry just one or the other? How does The Books of the Bible NIV compare to the current one being used in the church?

A. We would probably say we’re “un-messing” with the Bible, giving it an “un-makeover.” Much of what we’ve done is to remove formatting that’s been imposed on Scripture over the last 500 years (e.g. verse numbers, which were first added in 1551, centuries after the Bible was completed). The book order was quite fluid until the invention of the printing press. Sometimes, reading in a different order than the one we have today can be quite helpful. For example, which is more useful: to read Paul’s letters from longest to shortest (as they appear in almost every Bible today) or to read them in the order they were most likely written (as they appear in The Books of the Bible)? That said, we’re not out to replace people’s traditional chapter-and-verse Bibles. A lot of the features in a traditional Bible are there for reference purposes – to help you find a specific word or passage. We still need reference Bibles. We see The Books of the Bible as an ideal “reading Bible” to compliment and help you get more out of your traditional Bible.

Check out The Community Bible Experience Resource Site

Check out Books of the Bible on Amazon

Paul Caminiti is Vice President of Bible Engagement at Biblica, where his team pioneers innovative ways for the 21st century church to engage the Bible. Previously Paul was the Bible publisher for Zondervan, where he led the launch of the award-winning Archeological Study Bible and The Bible Experience. A leading spokesperson on all things Bible, Paul has been featured in media such as NBC, Fox News, Newsweek, The New Yorker, USA Today, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

This spring has been an amazing sequence of events for me.

The next one on the docket?  Seth Godin Live in Tribeca, NYC on May 16 – yup an all day event with Seth Godin himself.

So I’m ordering up a set of new custom business cards for the event and pulling out some of the good old Seth Godin books, etc.

There’s a bunch of interesting people that are sure to be there, so it should be a great place to connect with some amazing new friends too — hopefully there will be some actual project collaboration, perhaps even before we leave the event.

If you’ve never read any of Seth’s books or heard him speak, here’s a little taste of Seth at TED:

Are you going to the Seth Godin event?  Let me know in the comments below — let’s meet up!

What would you ask Seth if you had the chance?  Let me know in the comments below — if it’s a good one, I’ll ask it if I get a chance!

Wanting to go to the Seth Godin Live event?  I have an extra ticket — let me know in the comments below and you can have it for $300 if it’s not taken yet.  Share what you do and where you’re coming from.

Do you spend time thinking about what’s going on in your city?

Do you pay attention to what’s happening beyond the streets you normally traverse in your commute or daily/weekly routines?

Do you ever go off the beaten path?  Even within your own zip code?

One of the interesting ways to look at social media is to see it as a listening post.  A way to observe and feel the pulse of the city you live in, no matter how big or small it may be.

Before you start spewing a whole slew of social media content to gain the tons of followers you think you can amass, one of the most basic elements (and advantages) of social media over other mediums is its ability to let you visualize in a sense, what people are doing, saying, going around you.

Check out this insightful video interview of Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and how he came to the current iteration of the social media platform that we know today:

Do you look at social media this way in your usage of the medium?  Are you more concerned with what you have to say vs. what you can see through Twitter and other social media available to you today?  Please leave a comment below.

This is going to be a great week ahead.  I’m headed off to Q DC (www.qideas.org) to hear and interact with some forward-thinking ministry leaders and then returning to NYC to participate in Redeemer’s Entrepreneurship Initiative annual conference called the Ei Forum.

This year, I’ve been invited back to speak as a communications practitioner and share some of the trade strategies I have been employing for ministry and non-profit campaigns.  It should be a great time.

Right now, the workshop is shaping up to dive into three specific areas of which many church and non-profit leaders seem to be apprehensive about.  These are areas where most know they need to figure out at some point in the near future, but there’s a lot of anxiety, apprehension and just plain fear of being sucked into a time sink that won’t ever end.

But in my experience, these three areas are also very powerful ways to extend the reach of your communications efforts and tap new audiences in a very efficient manner.  Also, if you are strategic in your approach, using some structured frameworks, it doesn’t have to take over your life.  In fact, it can be quite manageable.  So the three areas that I’ll share in the Ei Forum presentation will cover:

(1) PR.  Public relations is a very powerful tool.  Earned media as they call it, can provide awareness, legitimizing influence and tangible outcomes if done well.  I’ll share the three keys to success in crafting great PR stories that news media outlets want to cover.

(2) Video & SEO (search engine optimization).  As our world gets even more media savvy, content production and distribution is becoming easier and easier.  Anyone trying to maximize SEO potential, needs to take a serious look at how they can incorporate video into their communications praxis.  I hope to share a simple yet powerful framework called the “10-4″ methodology for video syndication success.

(3) And lastly, social media.  Social networks can leverage existing networks and the more important weak links in your contact ecosystem.  Last year, at this same conference, I shared my “5 C’s for Digital Community Engagement.”  Since then, Google+ has been one of the most recent entrants to the game that everyone needs to take notice about.  Not just because Google Plus has gained a tons of users to give it a core network worthy of connecting with, but just the fact that it’s run by the Google behemoth.  I’ll have a co-pilot for the presentation from the Google+ team in LA that is flying out to NYC to share some Google wisdom in this area.

I plan to share much of the content covered in the presentation here on this blog in the near future.

But in the meantime, take a look at this promo video for the Ei Forum this year:

Tim Keller will make an appearance from the stage on Saturday afternoon. Last year, his Ei Forum talk was about how “God is an entrepreneur.” It was fantastic. I’m looking forward to what Tim has to say this year around.

Will you help me with crafting a practical and impactful presentation? What’s your one question that’s top of mind about PR, search engine optimization (especially WRT videos), and social media? Leave your question in the comments section and I’ll see if I can address it directly in the presentation and/or a future post.

Today, Facebook is changing the design of the “pages” that most churches use to the “Facebook Timeline” format.  

I had a chance to sit down with Sean Coughlin of FaithStreet.com recently.  He has been gearing up for the transition for some of his church clients.  

So I asked him to share some tips that you can use right now to helping reach a bigger audience on FB.  Enjoy today’s guest post.

Here are 5 tips to make sure your church’s timeline is optimized to reach people on Facebook. 

(1) The change to Facebook Timeline happens on March 30th, so be ready!

Facebook says, “On March 30, 2012 your Page will automatically get the new design.” Right now, Facebook allows page users to edit their timelines in a preview stage, so take advantage.  If you haven’t made any preference changes, it’s time to visit the admin section today!

(2) Choose a beautiful cover for your Timeline.

Probably the most important feature of the Facebook timeline update is the “cover”. (The cover is the giant 851 x 315 pixel banner at the top of your new profile). Churches should make sure to choose a wide angle, high resolution photo to minimize distortion. Your church is your people, and studies have show that people engage with pictures of other people far more than pictures of places. A church we work with here in NYC, City Grace, has done a great job of creating a good-looking, welcoming covers shot. Check out City Grace Timeline and Cover here. 

(3)  Pin the posts that you want people to see first.

If you have a post that you’re especially proud of or just want visitors to see on your page first, make sure to “pin” it to the top of your timeline. This might be another great picture of some members, a recent milestone you celebrated or a campaign you’re running now. To pin a post:

• Scroll over the upper right-hand corner of the post and click the pencil icon.
• Scroll down within the menu and click “pin to top”
• The post will now appear at the top of your timeline until you “unpin” it.

As TechCrunch recently reported, “The feature gives you significant control what visitors to a Page see first. Be sure to at least keep a link to your website pinned at all times, and rotate it with links to your apps and whatever else you want to drive the most traffic to or impressions of.”

(4) Post Pictures Wisely

As I mentioned above, newcomers and church members alike respond to pictures. Pictures generate more likes and shares than most other types of content, which means more exposure and an expanded “reach” for your church. Since pictures are powerful outreach tools, you want to get the most out of them, right? Here’s how you do that. Instead of posting an entire album, post one picture at a time. You’ll get more engagement per photo if you individually post them than if you post an entire album. Try posting 3 photos per week – one of Monday, one Wednesday and one Friday. This will create anticipation within your Facebook community and drive engagement.

(5) As an admin, make sure your church members (and your friends) “Like” the page

This was true for “Pages” and is still true for “Timeline”, the first step to using Facebook as a tool to reach new people is to make sure your church’s people “Like” the page. By simply inviting their congregants to “Like” their Facebook page, one church we work with here in NYC went from 35 “Likes” to almost 100 in less than a week and increased its “reach” by 495%. (reach is the number of people who have seen a post about your page, and yes, that four-hundred-and-ninety-five-percent!) You can invite your friends and fellow church members to join the timeline by clicking on the “Build Audience” tab at the top of the Admin panel.

Then, you can track your page’s reach, likes and how many people are talking about your church from the Insights box on the Admin Panel.

Sean Coughlin is the co-founder and CEO of FaithStreet.  FaithStreet helps churches reach people using the Internet. Follow Sean on Twitter: @seanwcoughlin

Pinterest is taking the social media scene by storm.

The platform’s users are overwhelmingly women (90%!) as of now. In 5 months, the has gained over 15 million new users.  WOW.

One of the stats that stand out about typical Pinterest behavior that speaks into the potential from a word of mouth marketing perspective is that 80% of of the content on Pinterest is shared content – that’s the essence of what social media is about.   Contrast this with Twitter users, where only 1.4% of the content is passed along (via Retweeting) by other users.

What to make of this?  It means that the chances of content to spread has huge potential on Pinterest.

The mad rush from business is taking place as new teaching content starts to emerge about how to take advantage of the traffic referrals that can happen with content introduced to the Pinterest ecosystem.

Take a look at this infographic that shares some of the interesting aspects of the Pinterest social media platform:

The question that arises of course is, what about the church? Can Pinterest be seen as an effective vehicle for church marketing?

I’ve been spending time on Pinterest over the last several weeks now and have started to formalize some approaches for sharing content which in turn drives traffic to the site where the images were originally picked-up.  I hope to share some of these practices in the near future here.

But in the meantime, here is a round-up of various posts that have started to explore how Pinterest might be relevant to church communications:

• Big Bible Project – 10 Ways Church Can Use Pinterest
• Internet Evangelism Day Site – another Pinterest infographic
• Church Marketing Sucks – Churches Reaching Out with Pinterest
• Ministry Best Practices – How to Use Pinterest for Your Ministry
• Church Juice – Pinterest for Churches – Part 1  Part 2
• Mars Hills Church’s Pinboards

Just got out of a team meeting where we reviewed Andy Stanley’s leadership talk on Trust.

Aside from the call out he makes in the video where he challenges ministry organizations to become (start by defining it as a goal!) the best place to work in your own city, he makes a great case for ensuring one aspect of team culture that is vital to success of any ministry organization:

Stanley’s premise is simple: “To maintain the relational integrity necessary to operate as a team, we must choose to trust and be trustworthy.” Stanley emphasizes that trusting and being trustworthy both are choices. “Often there are unexplainable gaps between what we expect people to do and what they actually do. We choose what we place in those gaps. Our choices determine the integrity of the relationships. We can choose to fill them with trust or suspicion.”

While the talk itself could have benefited from some message compression, the core principles he teaches are so important for healthy teams.

This is a great example of a basic operating principle that might not normally warrant a full-blown staff meeting.  But if you do circle wagons around core issues that can drive (or kill) organizational culture, it not only makes sure everyone is on the same page, introduces common language, but it also signals explicitly the expectations for culture norms.

Here’s the talk from Andy Stanley that we reviewed together as a team:

Sure, he probably didn’t need to spend a full 40 minutes on this stuff, but I appreciated the “protocols” for:

(a) defaulting to trust when there are unexplainable gaps between expectations and performance

. . . and in particular, his spelling out of

(b) how to choose to be trustworthy with your peers:

1. Do what you say you will do.  And more importantly, when we don’t deliver on what we said we were going to do, tell them immediately.
2. Don’t over promise, and under deliver. Promises > Delivery is a BAD thing.  Here’s the kicker — when you are mid-stream on a committment and know you’re headed in this direction, flag it out loud.
3. And lastly, you have to build a trusting environment, where you invite others to flag it for you.  When someone points out gaps in your commitments or promises and what you’re delivering, choose to tell the truth.  What is the cause of the gaps?  Sometimes they are great reasons.  Sometimes, you just messed up.  It’s time to put out all on the table.  When you do this in an environment of ongoing trust and trustworthiness, the margins are there to absorb the occasional gaps.

One of the best one-liners I caught in this talk was:

Being trustworthy is not the equivalent of being flawless in character or performance.

~ Andy Stanley

If we are successful in these areas, it can become a great example of living out the tension between grace and truth — which at the end of the day is the distinctiveness of our Christian faith – applied in the workplace.  Faith & work integration at its best.

YouTube is the #2 search engine on the web today.

In the time it takes you to read this post, over 100 hours of video have been uploaded to YouTube.  That’s because over 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube.com every minute of every day.

And people are watching a lot of it.   Viral video campaigns have changed our culture with millions and millions of video views.

And as we become a YouTube nation, viral videos are changing themselves.

So what makes a video go viral?  There are tons of people studying the phenomenon.  Here’s one guy that might be worth your video view — his job is to go to work each day and watch YouTube videos all day long.  Kevin Allocca is the “trends manager” at YouTube (as if trends can be managed. LOL).  But anyway, he recently spoke at TED sharing his 3 insights for why and when videos go viral across the Interwebs.

Check out his TED talk and see if you agree with him:

I believe the church marketer has the opportunity to produce messaging (and in video format too) that hits upon the points Kevin shares in his presentation on viral videos.  What can your church be doing to become the tastemaker locals come to trust and follow?  I’m talking about becoming the curator of excellent content, highlights of life in your city, and interviews with interesting people in your community.   Becoming relevant to the people outside your church walls is one way of gaining attention and trust as a contributor to community life in your city.

Now wouldn’t that be a totally unexpected yet refreshing role for a local church?