Apple came through by pushing my unit through some pretty impressive hoops and got my new (replacement to my broken MacBook Pro) MacBook Pro to me the day before I head out to WFX in California! Yes, I’m happy, but this is a great lesson in several things that apply to anyone at any organization.

Here’s the three takeaways for Apple or any organization that wants a loyal clientele:

• Communicate between departments (or ministries)
• Don’t let the “Standard Procedure” get in the way of highly unique situations
• Customer Service (or a hospitality/greeting ministry) matters more than you think

When Apple Care learned of their mistake, they first tried to simply follow standard procedure and told me, in essence, “we’re sorry, we messed up, but there’s nothing we can do about it”. But with persistence, it turns out that, yes, there’s a highly unusual way for them to work between departments, clarify some procedure (and hopefully follow up with some internal training) and make the situation right.

Because departments (or ministries) are filled with people, the standard operating procedure is in place to make the typical stuff flow smoothly. But the atypical stuff needs to be addressed by people, not policy. Making the atypical situation custom requires a bit more effort but, in the end, a raving fan of their can-do attitude and someone that now has a better story to tell my friends than the one of the failure on Apple’s part.

Because a couple of key people took some extra time, I was taken care of and my needs were met. They righted the wrong of their system and have gone above-and-beyond to make things work out right. That is great customer service! In the same way, when someone has an issue at church, giving them pat answers isn’t going to solve anything. Instead, because we’re all about people in church (a great tag line, by the way - kudos to Gateway Church), people help with situations and people (leaders) do our best to right any wrongs.

With social media like Facebook and Twitter becoming common-place, we either can let the negative story be told or a highly positive one that does even more good to our reputation.

Today, everyone has a voice. They will be heard. Do your best to help them tell a great story, not a negative one.

Lots of churches will use mailers, door hangers and even phone trees (auto phone dialers with a pre-recorded message) to spread the word about their upcoming special Easter services.

But what if your church could reach thousands of people for free and nearly instantly? That’s the power of not only your network (church members), but of their network of family, friends, neighbors and co-workers!

As the illustration on the left demonstrates, the exponential power of social networking isn’t how many people your church invites, but in how many people those friends invite from their network, and then how many people from that group invite friends from their network, and so on and so on.

For this Easter, or for any event where your church needs to maximize the power of social networks, think of how to leverage a simple, free and existing technology, like Twitter, to easily reach not only more people, but people with a personal connection to your church.

It’s more personal, more targeted, faster and free. That’s the power of a free viral marketing campaign using social networking for your church!

To learn how to use Twitter most effectively, make sure your church leaders have a copy of the $5 E-book, “The Reason Your Church Must Twitter”.

Thanks to everyone for joining the webinar I taught for WFX on using Twitter and social media for churches. We had over 800 registered and 518 unique log-ins (with several people sharing connections) during the hour-long WebEx session.

I want to apologize for the microphone issue for the first 12 minutes. I had no way to monitor how I sounded and didn’t realize the problem’s cause until the moderator, Carol, helped sort it out. The entire webinar was recorded, so if you can turn up your speakers a bit and listen carefully for those initial few minutes, it does clear up and is very easy to understand after I fixed it.

In fact, to watch and hear the webinar, simply click this link: http://budurl.com/TwitterWebinar

I answered as many questions during the Q&A as we had time, but I’m more than happy to answer any questions that we didn’t have time to answer during the webinar. Feel free to post your questions in the comments below or send me a question to either @churchtechie or @anthonycoppedge on Twitter.

Thank you again for learning alongside me as we leverage technology & communications to effectively communicate the Gospel of Jesus!