Facebook page? Check.

Twitter account? Check.

Doing more than posting status updates or re-tweeting the pastor? Uhhhhmm…

Those are all good actions and activities, but as checklists go, they’re simply tactical. That’s motion without progress; or, if there is progress, how can you know if it’s in the right direction or getting the right results?

The 30/50/20 Rule I outlined for pastors in my previous post is partially tactical, but it’s built around the idea that pastors will start to see value (ROtI – return on their time investment, which is minimal) through conversations. However, to fully take advantage of Social Media is to see beyond the actions and tasks and engage the individuals using these near real-time technologies.

7 Crucial Elements of Social Media ROI for Churches

I will briefly touch on these, as it’s too much information to put into a single blog post.

1) Know How Social Media Integrates the Vision of Your Church

2) Decide What’s Measureable – and What’s Not

3) Define ROM (Return On Ministry)

4) Which Metrics Matter?

5) Empower Every Ministry with Tools & Training

6) Drive People to Decisions

7) Share Success Stories

Having a strategy for your church’s social media efforts goes beyond the tactical and produces a plan to do something with the opportunity. Deciding to measure the return on investment (mostly, time, since churches are not selling product or service) will take time, effort and above all, consistency. However, the results can be very impressive when a strategy is employed.

Learning from the business world helps give context to this kind of dedication, consistency and effort. The folks over at MarketingSherpa polled 3,342 consumer and B2B (Business-to-Business) marketers, giving us valuable insights about how these firms are using social media to engage audience, build brand, generate leads and drive sales. Based on the survey results, the overall average ROI reported by those who are measuring it is 95 percent. One-quarter said they have achieved 100 percent ROI. Higher percentages were reported, too. Twelve percent said they have achieved 200 percent ROI; two percent reported 1,000 percent ROI.

While local churches aren’t looking to generate sales, they are interested in connecting with their communities (loosely translated as “leads” in the business world). The principle here is the point: a consistent social media strategy will yield results.

How is your church approaching social media? With a more tactical or strategic mindset? What have been your success stories and learnings?

If your pastor is new to Twitter or hasn’t found a good rhythm of how to use it, try my 30/50/20 rule for Pastors on Twitter:

30% message application: drop hints in your weekend message that you’ll be tweeting life application from the sermon topic every day for the upcoming week.

50% family/personal life: people want to feel like they know their pastors. Since you live in a glass-house anyway, offer them the view you want to share as you live life transparently.

20% inspiration/information (including ReTweets): You don’t have all the answers, and you’re learning, too. Be human and share what’s inspiring/challenging you and who you’re learning from.

More data continues to add to the pile of information that’s showing how mobile connections are shaping the lives and habits of Americans. According to the Performics 2011 Mobile Search Insights Study, conducted by ROI Research,  57% of us use the mobile Web more than once every day, with a whopping 77% of us using mobile search more than five times in the last month.

Overwhelmingly, satisfaction and adoption of mobile search holds true throughout the study:

• 75% said mobile search makes their lives easier
• 63% said access to mobile search has changed the way they gather information
• 32% said they use mobile search more than search engines on their computers

81% of respondents reported evening use of mobile search at home, 80% reported weekend use, and 59% reported use before work while 61% reported using mobile search at work.

Churches, the future is now and it’s on the mobile. I just can’t say this enough: rethink how people are finding your church, activities and resources and make it easy for them to do it while on-the-go. Chances are, you’ll need to do at least a few of the following:

• Build out a mobile version of your church website
• Integrate your Small Group finder tool (a part of your church management software) for mobile browsing
  
• Conduct a poll and find out how many of your attendees use smart phones
• Use mass email tools that have a mobile version output
• Have people “check-in” to your church via Facebook or Foursquare when they arrive. Sharing this information creates free visibility to their friends who may not have a church home.

The future of mobile is wide open for churches. Think through how the life of your church can (and should) be anytime, anywhere for ministry.

I don’t normally make predictions, but this is one I see coming like the light of a freight train in a tunnel. I believe that there will be a need (and eventually a demand) for a Pastor of Social & Digital Communications.

I’m not putting any bets on when churches will make this move, but when church leaders realize that social media isn’t a fad but instead a fundamental shift in interpersonal communications, the need for such a position will become apparent. Ironically, I believe that churches have a significant leg-up on just about every other social media market due to the fact that there have been the core makeup of social media segments in churches for thousands of years. Said another way, churches already have multiple small groups of people with similar or same affinities, needs and goals. The church social network existed long before it was made real-time anytime, anywhere by digital technologies.

What Defines A Pastor of Social & Digital Communications?

In my opinion, it’s more than a job description (though that’s helpful to a point), the position is a reflection of the unique DNA and needs of a church in context to their local and glocal (globally local; time and venue are almost entirely irrelevant on the Internet) communities.

Update: I don’t believe this will be the same as the current role of an Internet Pastor, which I believe is more similar to today’s multi-site campus pastor. Also, after additional consideration, I don’t think this will be a position at small or possibly even medium sized churches. To take a guess towards the future, I’d say this position might be more oriented towards the Communication team with a pastoral bent.

If a church is a focused on outreach through projects, social justice and equipping, I believe the role of an SDC pastor (Social & Digital Communications) will largely be around coordinating online event registration, making community connections and helping organizing logistics.

I also believe the same position at a church that’s more discipleship focused will most likely have more of their time coordinating between ministry leaders to ensure the left hand knows what the right hand is doing and working with a robust database of church members, attendees and community leaders & organizations to help raise awareness, make personal connections to the right leaders and managing multiple channels of information dissemination and communication.

Understanding Channels & Communication Mediums

Because this role has an emphasis on social media and Internet technologies, it most likely prove necessary for this staff position to have a strong communications background, leveraging social monitoring tools and clearly understanding demographics. Though the term “targeted demographics” sounds like pure marketing speak, what it represents is a truth in every church and organization:

The need to get the right information to the right people at the right time in the right way or ways.

Churches deal with this week in and week out today…

• Making phone calls to senior adults
• Sending postcards to first-time visitors
• Sending HTML-rich emails to Gen X’ers
• Sending SMS text messages to Gen Y’ers
• Sending a combination of emails, postcards and personal phone calls for people who miss serving or attending (such as children’s classes)

The Matrix of Social & Digital

These channels of communication must be managed through a matrix of frequency, demographic, medium and priority.

Frequency is how often a need, activity, event or opportunity occurs. It also must represent the number of times the message is communicated across different mediums with different content.

Demographic is the target group, from church wide all the way down to an individual. Sub-demographics are the methods for slicing up a target group (young adults) into other, more specific parameters (single, married, attends X-often, has not attended since Y, has or has not served in a similar activity in the past or has signaled an interest that is saved to their profile (an attribute such as “like volunteering with other kids” or “wants to serve with other single mothers”).

Medium is the kind of content and the distribution channel for the medium. From video to email to text message to Facebook to Twitter to phone calls, defining the technology/vehicle options that best reach a certain people group(s), the content can be customized and delivered at the right time to the right people.

Priority defines the urgency of the information and the authority to remove, replace or reschedule other communication and/or engagement.

Is This Really A Dedicated Person?

Why I think this will become a common new position is the combination of talents, technology integration, leadership and interpersonal relationship capacity. While I do believe certain staff members may be able to “double up” on some of these roles today, I also believe that the velocity of change in technology combined with the need for near real-time communication will require a dedicated person who can meet the unique requirements of this role.

So, what do you think? Am I too early on this prediction? Are most churches so far behind the culture and technology curves to make this any kind of near-term need? Share your thoughts and speak into my prognostication.

Sometimes, I wonder how what I’ve said can be misunderstood until I get a fresh perspective from someone else to re-read what I’ve said. And then it hits me: “Ooooh. What I meant was…”

I’ve learned that email is a poor communication medium for conveying emotion, sarcasm or subtlety. What I’m continuing to learn is that with social media – and the 140 characters of Twitter, in particular – it’s important to re-read what we say before we have it hit the web.

This happened to me tonight, and it took me a while to understand what the hub-bub was all about. Here’s what I tweeted:

“PASTORS: Please use Twitter & Facebook to share your life instead of spamming scripture. We’ve already got YouVersion.com.”

What I Meant Was…

I intended to help pastors understand that while tweeting scripture is OK, you’ve gotta do a lot more than send lots of verses our way if we are to get to know you. So, my intention was to help them think about sharing more personal stuff and less about multiple verses a day making up the bulk of their tweet stream. So, I used some humor (or, attempted to) to say that we’ve got lots of scripture opportunities online already with YouVersion.com (online Bible tool).

What Happened Was…

I had some people read what I wrote as making scripture look unimportant, or, worse, less important than sharing their personal insights. So, as a way to set the record straight, I then sent a second tweet out on the heels of the brewing controversial tweet:

“REVISED 4 clarification: Instead of spamming scripture, share life application & revelation, not recitation. Share the impact of the verse!”

From my perspective, one of the best benefits of Twitter/Facebook is the ability to gain insight into what you think and how you receive revelation. To me, a tweet that illustrates the application, truth and real-life moments of scripture are – usually – more insightful to me than seeing a litany of verses tweeted ad nauseum. Sure, the Word never returns void, so tweeting scripture is good, but it’s not the only thing you should tweet.

Step out from behind the pulpit and show me your sermon illustrated in how you live life. Help us understand how scripture comes alive in your life, your actions and your thinking!

So, we good? I hope so!

A reasonable expectation to privacy. With the online world intersecting more of our lives on a nearly daily basis, do we have really have a reasonable expectation to privacy?

The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is the part of the Bill of Rights, which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures. That’s one type of privacy that, at least here in America, we can expect. But beyond denying someone access to things in our homes, cars on wallets, are our lives really private?

I submit that we’ve willingly sacrificed privacy for immediacy.

We share our lives out loud. From GoWalla or FourSquare telling me exactly where you are, to Twitter and Facebook telling me what you’re up to, and blogs telling me what you think, to out of office email messages, we’re providing an unprecedented level of access into our daily lives.

It used to be we had work lives and personal lives. No longer. The lines between our work life and personal life have been blurred due to our propensity to share. Though not anonymous, there is a certain sense that because we’re not looking directly at someone when we share something, our status update is somehow still limited to a semi-private audience.

Though it is possible to use multiple accounts and limit networks to only a few followers – I do this myself with a ‘family-only’ Twitter account – the reality is that anyone can choose to re-post anything I say in a very public fashion. You see, privacy today is limited only to the extent that I control what I share and when I share it.

We seem to have forgotten that what we share, say, post and do online is stored, forever accessible, cross-indexed, referenced and cached. I wonder how many young people looking to advance in a career 10 or 20 years from now will have what they’ve shared today come back to haunt them? And here’s another thought: our kids and our kids’ kids will have more than a photo album and grandma’s memories to find out about good ‘ol granddad.

Do we have a reasonable expectation to privacy? I think we have a very limited expectation to privacy when we share so freely. What say you?

With consumers searching, researching and buying online at an exponential rate, the advertising industry has realized the need to change from “shotgun marketing” to “laser-focused marketing”. The concept is simple and the application for churches is intriguing.

Put simply, since people are searching and looking in specific places more often, it’s possible to provide the right ad to the right person with greater frequency and accuracy than has been possible before.

Not too long ago you’d buy a billboard ad, for example, in the hopes that some small percentage of people would see what you had to say and respond to it. This “shotgun” approach worked the numbers game; high traffic areas meant more eyeballs and more eyeballs meant the greater chance of reaching the right person who liked or resonated with the ad. You still see this approach online with banner ads on websites that do a slightly better job of targeted by being placed on specific sites with unique topics. Better, but still a virtual shot in the dark.

Today, more of us are logging into sites – even retail sites – because we get a discount or some other benefit of shopping while logged in than if we just skim the website. Ad firms realize this and are working like crazy to be the behind-the-scenes engines that handle that log-in information on behalf of the merchant so that they can not only report on buying and traffic patterns but because they want to engage – often in real time or near real time – with the person while they’re online. For example, a woman named “Beth” might use a trip planning website to look at possible destinations for a vacation. The site, recognizing she’s logged in and tracked that she’d last searched for flights to Scotland, might pop up a question like “Hey, Beth, we thought you might like to know we found a great deal on airline tickets and a cozy bed and breakfast for a trip to Scotland. Click here to watch a 15 second video and see more details.”

Because they knew she’d been looking at that kind of information in the past, along with her basic profile information, it’s safe to make an educated guess that she might like to stay in a bed and breakfast once she arrived. Laser-focused ads are served up based on previous interactions, potentially providing “Beth” with something that she’ll want to buy. Taking it a step further, when “Beth” answers the question and chooses to watch a 15 second video from a major airline, she can earn points for virtual currency, Facebook credits, drawings and more.

With Facebook striking deals left and right with advertisers and businesses, it’s common knowledge that advertisers are tying into these websites with Facebook integration, providing even more accurate predictive targeting opportunities. Customization that’s tailored to our tastes and budgets all because we simply use the sites we’re on and we share information – a lot of it – through social networks.

Ignoring the obvious privacy implications (that’s being addressed on multiple fronts and is not the focus of this thought train, though the reality is that most people don’t realize just how public their life becomes with how much they share online), the thinking I’ve had since reading about this has been on how this applies to churches.

Today, churches don’t “sell” very much (mission trips, summer camps and maybe concerts being reasonable exceptions), so how does this behavioral marketing apply? Simple: people use your website and often log-in when you offer a way for them to stay connected (online calendar, volunteer reminder, small group leader reporting, online giving and contribution statements) to their life within the church. It’s not unreasonable to think that missions organizations or non-profit organizations would take advantage of this and potentially offer to tie into church websites.

On a more practical, we-can-do-this-today note, it’s also possible to consider that churches may want to be diligent and strategic about using analytics on their website, in combination with data in their church management software, to see where people click, what they fill out (or don’t complete), which videos they watch (or don’t) and begin creating a trend analysis to look for opportunities to improve the value and functionality of their websites. Beyond that rather simple measure, the communications options available to churches today mean it’s possible to utilize multiple methods and channels of communications. In effect, churches can move from a “shotgun” to a laser-focused approach by developing a strategic communications methodology that includes personal (face-to-face), phone calls, email, text, website, announcements, print materials and social media to develop a targeted communications campaign.

Regardless of the whiz-bang future predictive ad-serving or the more simple analytics analysis, this will first require church leaders to sit down with some knowledgeable folks (possibly inside their church) and take the time to understand their goals, develop proper strategies and apply the best tactics to more effectively connect and reach their people.

What say you? Please share you thoughts below.

I had a new first time experience while at WFX: someone who follows me on Twitter was asking about where we as a group were going to eat. This person chimed in and said, “well, I know Anthony doesn’t like Greek, so Gyros are out!”

Now here’s the really interesting part: this person and I had NEVER MET in person until that day.

So, how’d he know my aversion to Greek food? He’s read my blog and followed my tweets. Somewhere along the way, he remembered me saying something about my dislike of Greek food.

Though this is a very small and mostly insignficant fact, the big take-away is that the power of social networks allow us to get to know people without ever meeting them in person. Perhaps this was best exampled by the “tweet ups” we did where conversations happened easily and bonds were already formed by our online interactions well before we’d ever met In Real Life (IRL).

How has social networking impacted you with IRL meetings?

More often than not I try to share freely from my experiences and give you a lot of useful info, links and content. But for this request, I’m asking for a favor from you.

I’m asking for you to help promote my E-Book “The Reason Your Church Must Twitter” to your friends and peers. You can simply share the link “TwitterForChurches.com” and they can download the E-Book there. Best of all, it’s a ministry-friendly price of only $5 (five bucks)!

Blog it. Tweet it. Just share it. Thank you for helping me promote this resource!

Today I asked the following question on Twitter:

Would your church spend $250 per month to measure, track & engage what’s being said or asked about your church/ministries across social media?

The responses were nearly identical: “No, we don’t need that. We can get that information for free with Google Analytics.”

Oh, if it were only that easy. Well, in a sense, it is – if you only want limited statistics. But there’s more to measurement than click-thrus and page loads.

In fact, I’m using some amazing software from Radian6 that allows me to compare, analyze, report and engage with people using social media. Measurement is good, but we need a way to connect, share and relate.

Measuring More Than Numbers

Let’s use an analogy everyone in church is familiar with: attendance numbers.

While it’s helpful to measure total attendance during weekend services, it’s more helpful to know who was there, what service they went to, if they volunteered, where they volunteered, how often they come to the services, how much (if anything) they give financially, what small groups they’re involved with and what kind of growth (i.e., life-change) they’ve experienced.

It’s good to know who showed up. It’s better to know more about those people than the fact that they’re a warm body in an empty seat.

With Social Networks, measuring page views, number of Twitter followers and the quantity of Facebook friends is a very narrow metric system. Many of the answers to my question were based on the fact that, yes, it’s easy and free to get basic stats. But to actually have a cross section of data points (measurement across all social networks simultaneously) and the ability to track, measure and actually engage with people from those metrics is where the strategic value provides a strong social networking strategy.

After all, social networks are: A) social - meaning connections, conversations and relationships; and B) networks – meaning an exponential reach.

Churches Need an Online Strategy

Many pastors I talk with ask a very simple yet very relevant question:

“Why should our church care about social networking?”

The answer is simple: because the local church is best at reaching out to people. What happens inside the four walls of the church (relationship building, community, sharing, support & encouragement) is exactly what happens on social networks! Therefore, the church is best equipped to do exactly what they do offline, online via web and social media.

Without an online communications strategy, a church will spend a lot of time trying to use a social networks as a marketing vehicle rather than as a relational connection. That strategy will require more than baseline metrics; it will require an ability to measure, track & engage with people online proactively.

Use the free measurement tools all you want, but until your church has a way to not only see metrics, but measure holistically, accurately and in real-time, you’re still just counting heads!

Putting a Price on Relationships

If a church could find conversations, answer questions, build relationships, establish a reputation for being personal and relevant, what would that be worth? How do you measure the value of helping people get connected into a local body of believers? I think most churches spend quite a lot on it! Just look at all of the hard costs (salaries, facilities, technology, supplies, etc.) and soft costs (time, volunteer coordination, content creation, etc.) that goes into each and every weekend at churches.

I think there’s a better way. I think churches can do more than passively count click-thrus. I think the answer is in developing an online communications strategy, and I’m here to do it for them or show them how. It’s time for churches to embrace the digital culture!

If you’re  ready to learn how, let’s set up a phone conference and find the right strategy for your church. Just email me: anthony AT anthonycoppedge.com

Go ahead and share your thoughts below.