UPDATE
Today’s post, below, may seem controversial. However, it is meant to provoke thought and discussion, not give instruction to churches.
Social Media has quickly become a primary way to communicate with each other. Giveaways have been part of church culture for a long time - not to mention student ministry. Why shouldn’t churches look for new ways to communicate through social media? I don’t know exactly how this looks in churches, or even in my church.
Some things this post was intended for:
- Inform ministry folks on what’s happening in social media marketing to open discussion
- Provoke thought about social media use in ministry
- Provoke thought about social media contests (in ministries or not)
- Suggest you look inward at what you’re promoting through social media
Some things this post was NOT meant to do:
- Suggest churches jump on a secular band wagon without thought, consideration, and prayer regarding your community
- Suggest churches become social media spammers
Look forward to hearing your thoughts.
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Today’s post was written by Aaron Linne (@linne), Executive Producer of Digital Media Marketing for B&H Publishing Group. Aaron contributes to Collide Magazine and his blog at http://www.aaronlinne.com. He’s a good friend who dates back to Eric’s and Cleve’s days at LifeWay.
Do you know what Moonfruit is? Do you play air guitar? Ever contributed to a product?
You’re reading a blog, so you know this: marketers are finding new ways to get your attention. Amidst the failure of billboards, our skipping of TV ads, and our mental glossing over of the right-hand ad space on a webpage, there is a need to do something a little bit extra to get people interested in your products and services. The solution many are finding? Contests.
It’s a simple formula: you’ve got a product or service that the public (hopefully) wants. Hopefully they want it enough that they’re willing to do something to help you spread the word - and, in return, they get a chance to have the product for free. The genius of this strategy? Marketers get you to talk about their product to your actual, in-real-life friends. Which is the most important buzz any product or service can get.
The Twitter #Hashtag Contests
If you use Twitter, you might know what a #hashtag is. Essentially, users have adopted #hashtags as a method of tracking a subject. For example, during an event multiple people are attending, they might all choose to add #event to their tweets (twitter posts) so they can follow all the tweets about the event, without having to follow all the people attending. #Hashtags also let you easily find and sort data through twitter.
If you’re a twitter user, you may have recently seen some spikes in two #hashtags in particular: #squarespace and #moonfruit. Both are almost meaningless words, but they prey upon the most dangerous of all human behavior: curiosity. When you see all a good number of your friends dropping the word “moonfruit” into their tweets if makes you wonder what is going on. So you do what any curious create would do: you Google (or Bing!) it and discover that Moonfruit is website building tool who competes with (you guessed it) a company called SquareSpace. Why are people adding #hashtags for those companies? Because they were running contests not to get free services, but to win an iPhone or MacBook just for mentioning them in your tweets.
Brilliant: leveraging the passionate userbase of Apple to do your marketing-by-curiosity for you. This is the pinnacle of social marketing: getting people who have no real connection with you to talk about you for very little to give away on your end… just a few hundred dollars for hundreds of thousands of impressions.
And it works. Now that #SquareSpace contest is over, I still see #squarespace show up in tweets - from my friends who are now using them for their websites.
(Try out HashTags.org to get started following #hashtags.)
The Create-a-Video Contest
Dropping a word into a tweet is a low commitment level for a user, with widespread viewership. But what if you could give away a prize so gloriously awesome that people would be willing to invest time, money and creative energies into something just for you to show off? They, of course, would want to show off their project to their friends… and that relational investment will almost surely turn them into super-fans of your product. What would it take to get you to create a marketing message for someone else, for free?
Pepsi and MTV’s Rock Band have recently teamed up to just that at PepsiRockBand.com. They’ve given the usage to a number of Rock Band-related tracks to be turned into a music video by Pepsi and/or Rock Band’s fans in the hopes to win a truly unique prize: an actual Moonman from the MTV Music Awards. The contest, only live for a few weeks, has already attracted around a hundred entries. That may not seem like much, but it’s 100 different groups of people showing how much they love Pepsi and/or Rock Band that they’re willing to truly commit their skills in order to win the contest. And, in the end, they end up with tons of content created that is incredibly personable marketing.
The Contribute to a Product Contest
Sony Entertainment recently ran a contest for their upcoming game, Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time, which allowed it’s community to design a weapon that will be voted on and then placed into the game. If your service or product already has a critical mass of fans, a new question arises: how do you retain those fans and make them even more devoted to what you’re selling? One of the best strategies: get them involved with the actual development process.
The key to this contest was two-fold:
- It allowed the fans to have a chance to give back to the game and help develop it and add a new touch of creativity to the designers.
- The designs had to be voted on, thus requiring the content creators to talk about what they made with their friends and get them to visit the site to vote. Once there, the friends don’t just end up voting - they also take in everything else the site is messaging to them.
Why Social Marketing Matters to You
Social marketing is, in a word, the future. Sure, something else will come along in 10-20 years and make social marketing seem passe, but as more and more people are plugging in to social networks and life updating, there will be a drive to connect you with a product not simply via an image on a screen but by your friend doing something to point you in that direction. Social Marketing is the King of Buzz - if you find a product you like, embrace it and all the chatter around it. But if you aren’t ready to be told by your friends what marketers want you to hear, make sure you’re not spreading the message yourself.
[...] Guest Post at MediaSalt.com Social Media Contests for Ministry? [...]
Makes perfect sense to me, and doesn’t seem controversial, unless you read that into it. I’m not sure why some institutions are so resistant to social media - although, in fairness, all of the more “productive” possible uses are just being discovered. I found the same thing as a high school teacher: there was a general attitude that social media is not only useless for education, but possibly the most horrible barrier to it ever created. My (ex) superintendent said (on my LAST day of employment with her), that she doesn’t have a myspace, or facebook, or twitter, because she is setting an example for the rest of the staff. I asked why, and all she said was “ramifications” and could not expand any further. I was immediately SURE that I had made the right decision in resigning.
My point: Social media is not bad in and of itself. Figure out how to use it in good ways, and the possibilities are endless. Where is the controversy in that???
I agree with the first comment…there’s a lot of hesitancy in “traditional” organizations. I find myself having to push and push and push to get suitable content for my organization’s social media endeavors. I also find that I’m usually “reprimanded” or asked to remove things because there’s this feeling that we should just be promoting ourselves and not personalizing the org. with pics of staff, what we’re working on, etc…
It’s so important to find creative ways to get users talking about, thinking about, and investing in your organization so they’ll tell their friends and become some of your biggest promoters. Unfortunately a lot of non-profits, including churches are unwilling to “let go” and stop trying to “control” the dialogue about their org. In reality, that “control” is just an illusion because with the advent of social media, you just CAN’T control the conversation anymore. That doesn’t mean you should walk away and hope for the best…it means you should do just what @linne said…prayerfully consider if and how you should take part.