2012 Social Media Strategy: February Review

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Jeremy Smith

Yesterday, we shared with you our review of our blogging goals. If you have not seen what we did, you should view it as our social media goals directly interact with that strategy. Below is a list of ten goals that we hope to achieve this year, divided up within each social networking tool.

There are two things we need to keep in mind with our social media strategy: we have to be consistent and frequent on the platforms we use or not use them at all and we need to differentiate between the different networks. To the first point, I always state that it is better to not have a presence on a social media platform than one that is abandoned. You send a terrible message that you do not care if your last post was two years ago. Secondly, if you do the same thing for Facebook that you do for Twitter or Google+, you are not effectively using your accounts. Make specific purposes for each group.

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2012 Blogging Strategy: February Review

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Jeremy Smith

From day one, we have had some sort of blogging strategy that directed our energy, gave us measurable goals to achieve, and know where adjustments are needed. With a year long 2011 plan, we reevaluated it every quarter to see if changes needed to be made and an adjusted vision for the site would come about. The goals of the blog in the fourth quarter did resemble a bit of what it started out at the beginning of the year, but we had differences.

Over the course of this year, we hope to follow a model established by Kolby Milton on his site to publicly review every month how the goals are going. Depending on the success and failures of these goals, we may have to make changes at the quarterly intervals and would love your input as we go along in this process.

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5 Essentials In Ministry: Collaborative Community Strategy

Posted on December 8, 2011 by Jeremy Smith

My first youth ministry experience with Youth for Christ was to serve two very small communities with a Campus Life club for high school and middle school students. I was building from the ground up, no one in the community knew was Campus Life was, and there was no team put together. As a new staff person, I was full of ideas, expectations, hopes, and dreams. My desire was to surround myself with great volunteers, parents, student leaders, and other ministry pastors, but after two years when I passed the ministry on to the next director, I was still doing ministry by myself.

In this situation and so many like it, to do ministry well, you need to bring in other experts and people to surround these teenagers with people. Instead of giving up, I began to see how I could work with other organizations that these teens work with to bring a better quality ministry for them. One school system allowed me to join the football coaching team to impact students, the other school allowed me to be an assistant teacher in a classroom for a few periods every day, a local restaurant allowed me to have a breakfast club before school, and a local church combined several events to provide effective ministry to these teens.

The idea that we can work with other ministries means that we do not hold tightly to ministry that is “ours” and allows God to work through the whole community, instead of just one ministry. Collaboration means that we bring specific experts, different perspectives, and creative investments to a once one-way, narrow, and ultimately stagnant approach. At the same time, this concept fosters unity with area ministries and benefits their ministries as much as your own.

Youth for Christ defines Collaborative Community Strategy as “We intentionally work together with local churches, agencies and other partners to provide sustainable youth and family ministry in the community.”

Paul’s description of the body of Christ is the ultimate understanding of collaboration in Scripture:

Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many.

1 Corinthians 12

Here are three ideas to initiate collaboration in your community:

Constantly support other organizations with words. Even if their may not be any “direct or immediate benefit”, support them. That means principals, teachers, coaches, other Christian organizations, youth pastors, and parents.
Support other organizations with presence. Words are good, actions are better. Showing up to PTA meetings, being present at community events, and going to youth worker networks can speak volumes about your character and openness.
Be prepared. Collaboration does not work best on a whim. You need to know your own schedule several months in advance and be able to work with other peoples schedules. This means that events are scheduled and thought out.

What have you done to collaborate with other businesses and organizations? What potential is there for you to do more?

Twitter Strategy: Networking

Posted on April 20, 2011 by Jeremy Smith

Yesterday, we discussed how we could come up with a strategy to better use Twitter. Today, I wanted to discuss how to best network with Twitter. We will look at three different ways to improve our Twitter network.

80% Give – 20% Take For those that have a cause or organization that they are using Twitter, there is a need to make your tweets valuable. We suggest to achieve this, that 80% of your tweets be you giving something to your followers and taking something from them only 20% of the time. When we say giving, we are talking about fresh ideas, links to the latest news you care about, or free stuff. Make sure that it benefits your followers. As for the taking, this can involve an advertisement to buy a book you wrote, vote for something on a contest, or leave comments on your blog.

Grow Your Network Increasing followers goes both ways. You need to follow others just as much as you need them to follow you. Monday, we shared one way we try to improve our network this way. Follow 1 new user a day for at least a week. In the “Who To Follow” section of the Twitter homepage, we research some of the suggestions and pick one every day to follow that we think we might retweet their work or have very similar interests.

Appreciate Your Followers Just growing your network will not achieve success, you need to sustain the ones you currently have. When you do get new followers, remember to contact them immediately. Direct message them a thanks for following (we shared what we say to new users) as well as publicly announcing a thank you (include #follow). At the same time, make sure you are consistent with retweets of quotes or links that are along your own interest or mission. And finally, I suggest taking advantage of #FridayFollow, when everyone lists people who they appreciate on Twitter from that last week. Maybe it was a great tweet or old friend, but share with your followers who you appreciate following.

Twitter Strategy: What Do You Want?

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Jeremy Smith

Yesterday, we posted our Twitter strategy and coincidentally, Collide Magazine posted a similar article. I wanted to offer four questions to answer before you go forward with developing your own strategy so as to streamline the process. Giving well thought out answers can make the process painless and achievable. Tomorrow, we will look at how we plan to handle networking.

Who do you post tweets for? This can be as simple as “for myself” or as complex as what we said: “Everyone who wants to impact the Church as well as those who love technology and social media …” Remember, the broader you get, the more you will have to keep track of, write for, and network with. In a business model, hopefully this is already written done somewhere. If not, look at your mission or vision statement and hopefully it will become clear. For those that are just posting for fun or as freelance workers, what topics do you find yourself wanting to post?

What is the endgame of your tweets? Do you want your followers to go somewhere to buy something? Are you intended to have them see your blog? Or maybe you simply want us as followers to see how brilliant you are, awesome! For churches, it might be reminders of events. For us, we have stated that “the first line of interest is our ‘product’ including our blogging and projects we are working on.” Whatever it is you are wanting to do, remember that this is your top priority. Retweets and #FridayFollows are great, but these are not the top priority in the vision of this Twitter account. Always keep perspective of that.

When is it best to tweet consistently? For some, once a day is all that they care to post. Others have an automated WordPress plugin like Twitter Tools or scheduling web app like HootSuite to plan things out for you. One advice for multiple daily tweets, space them out through the day. It is good marketing to not only let followers know you exist but remind them throughout the day. For us, we have scheduled tweets from 8AM EST to 5PM PST as well as semi-hourly networking tweets.

Is there value to what you have to say? It is one thing for us to have a strategy of using Twitter and whole other problem of not having anything valuable today. The last thing I care about is that the Chinese food you had for lunch was too much for you. In fact, I might stop following you solely for that reason. We are not asking you to reinvent the wheel, a Scripture verse that caught your eye or a retweet about the latest Google or Apple press release is perfect, but will your audience like it too? At the same, some of it should be coming from you. It does not have to mind-blowing, but should represent you or your organization.

Twitter Strategy: Our Strategy

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Jeremy Smith

How do you approach Twitter for your church, organization, or self? Are you winging it? Hopefully not. Do you have a Twitter strategy? You should! Tomorrow we will discuss a good way of putting together a Twitter strategy, but we want to share with you our strategy.

Here is our Twitter strategy:

We want to network with those who are like-minded. Everyone who wants to impact the Church as well as those who love technology and social media are our targets and we want to be clear to those following us what we are about.
Follow 1 new user a day for at least a week. This does not mean you are married to the person nor are we following them so that they will follow us. Instead, we are forcing ourselves to network. We research them. Do they post at least daily? Do they tweet something that I would retweet? Would following them start up a new conversation?
When someone follows us, we direct message them immediately. We actually have a scripted message that we send them, “Thanks for following. I cover youth ministry, soul care, and technology. You can see more @ my blog: http://www.seventy8productions.com” But we send it to let them know who we are, what we do, and that we are active.
We publicly thank them for following us. This is a “thank you gift” to them to show our followers a new user as well as smart marketing to express to their followers that they followed us and maybe they should too.
Be smart what and when I tweet. A few weeks ago, we posted about four great Twitter web applications, one of them being Tweriod that is perfect for this point. It can tell you when to tweet, what topics were most retweeted, and who is listening to you. Use this tool!
Twitter is important but not our first focus. The first line of interest is our “product” including our blogging and projects we are working on. Everything comes second to these, including marketing.

Perfect Time To Network