Followers send Easter tweets, Facebook invites

LAKE FOREST, Calif. — Saddleback Church has more than 200 social media sites and may soon become the most popular social media congregation on the planet, according to the church’s relatively new Social Media Ministry.

Although other church’s may have embraced sites such as Facebook and Twitter sooner, Saddleback’s staff and volunteer force of social media savvy team members have been busy getting the Good News out since before last Christmas … taking the church bulletin concept farther than its ever gone.

This year, Saddleback celebrates its 30-year anniversary on Easter weekend, April 3, 4, at Angels Stadium in Anaheim. The stadium seats about 45,000 people and is expected to fill to overflow on Sunday. However, the bigger news may be how many people throughout the world catch the event live online. The church’s Facebook fan page and Twitter account, @YouMatter2God has been buzzing with the news of the mega church’s mega event.

The EasteratSaddleback.com site enables visitors to re-Tweet and Facebook share the link to the page which give details of the event and will host the live video feed. Two Facebook event pages allow Saddleback fans to invite their Facebook friends to the Saturday and Sunday services … reminding everyone that attending the event could mean watching online.

Using Twitter’s hash tag feature, which delivers a feed of all those tweeting on the same subject, Saddleback has established #Easter30 as a way for everyone to be on the same page. A “Buzz” window screen displays the #Easter30 feed on the EasteratSaddleback.com page … making for an interactive Easter the likes we may have never seen before.

A call to echo love

Heartbreak for Haiti – A video of encouragement and love

Sue Thielke, President of Framework Productions writes:

Davidson Jean-Rejouis is a Haitian college student who grew up in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and moved to Florida at age eleven. Loving Christians, especially his mother, led him to Christ. His heart breaks for his loved ones in Haiti as they deal with massive devastation from the earthquake.

Davidson joins with Framework Productions to produce a work that seeks to encourage his brothers and sisters during these darkest of times.

God Moves in a Mysterious Way, is sung partly in Creole by Davidson. Framework Productions would like to see this young artist permeate Cyberspace with love.

Thielke, who along with her ministry is a big proponent of “echo-evangelism,” writes in a Facebook message:

Sharing is easy, just follow these steps:
1) Copy this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egREiVMjR6s
2) Paste the link in your Facebook Status Update
3) Click “Share

Of course, there’s other ways to share this beautiful and touching video/still-photo presentation, including on Twitter.

I hope you are led to echo love!

What’s your take on the church and social media?

My best new friend and hyper thinker, Jay Kranda, posted this YouTube video recently and he, like I, are searching for answers.

What kind of job is the church doing with social media? How much emphasis should we put in learning about stuff like let’s say Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube? And if we already know how to use these social media sites, how much time should we spend using them? And for what?

You can also vote in the poll, “What grade is the church getting in the usage of Social Media?” posted in Jay’s The Church & Social Media? post. Thank you!

SocialMediaMo campaigns to keep Twitter’s ‘Follow Friday’ relevant

As many Twitter socialites will tell you, it’s all about how many followers you have … which begs the question: if a micro-blogger tweeted in the wilderness, would anybody read that tweet?

However, as seasoned Twitter users know, it’s really not just about the numbers. Tweeps usually hunger for quality followers as well. As social media expert and marketer, Dave Humphrey, will tell you: “Twitter can be an awesome relational experience but it rests on who you follow and who follows you.”

To that end, Humphrey (SocialMediaMo) has begun tweaking the popular “Follow Friday” practice at Twitter into #keepFFreal. The hashtag trending campaign to get relevant followers makes sense … and in the long run, a fun way to get those follower numbers up.

I’ll let Humphrey tell you about his motivation and vision in the video below.

_______________

Alex Murashko, the founder of Outreach New Media, has been helping people get their message out for more than 16 years.

Tea Party Express II Releases New TV Ad

Organizers launch second cross-country tour prompted by enthusiasm from supporters during first campaign

The Tea Party Express national tour (www.TeaPartyExpress.org) has just released a new ad to promote their upcoming 38-city tour, entitled “Tea Party Express II: Countdown to Judgement Day.”

PRESS RELEASE

The latest ad features an image of one of the Tea Party Express buses crossing the country, and announces the message to politicians who refuse to support conservative values, “Come election day we’re going to hand you a pink slip and take our country back!”

“When we started planning this new ad, we wanted something that epitomized the Tea Party movement,” said Joe Wierzbicki, head organizer of the Tea Party Express. “The tone of the ad is upbeat and positive – because we are confident that all of our collective efforts will result in removing a great many tax-and-spend liberals from power. This tour really does mark the Countdown to Judgment day – politicians have 12 short months to either make amends with the American People, or start looking for a new job!”

Each rally will consist of a 90-minute program featuring conservative speakers such as Marine-mom Deborah Johns, talk show host Mark Williams, and conservative authors William and Selena Owens. Also featured will be musical performances by Lloyd Marcus, Diana Nagy, and the Rivoli Revue. Although the first “Tea Party Express” tour was extremely successful in bringing conservative principles to national prominence, organizers say the latest installment will raise the bar even further for the Tea Party movement, featuring many surprise guests and announcements.

To obtain more information about joining the “Tea Party Express” or to schedule an interview with a representative from the tour please contact Levi Russell at or via email at: Levi@FrontLineStrat.com

Social Media Addiction Recovery Meeting

First spotted this on Bit Rebels, which is “a blog entirely focused around fun, on the edge and relevant subjects” and a good-looking site I might add as well. You creative types will enjoy this blog!

Back to the subject at hand … Stuck on getting Twitter “followers” and Facebook “friends?” Me: guilty as charged. Mix business with pleasure and the results can be lethal!

The first step is to admit that we are powerless over social media and our tweeting has become unmanageable. Catch you at the next step!

Ad Love 101: IKEA’s Burbank store and guerrillas in housewares

Like love, good advertising needs chemistry that’s beyond the best laid plans. A great illustration of some of the crucial parts to a successful ad campaign can be found in a recent article written by Dan Neil and published in the LATimes.com Business section.

In IKEA’s Burbank store and the guerrillas in housewares we find that going viral, a marketer’s nirvana, sometimes has very little to do with what campaign creators set out to do.

It begins…

For reasons known only to the pop-culture gods, IKEA — the Swedish retailer of cheap, lingonberry-flavored furniture and other shinola — has suddenly become a ubiquitous presence in the ether. Example: in August, when the 2010 IKEA catalog came out, people went utterly bonkers because the designers had changed the print font from the familiar Futura to Verdana — an esoteric difference, to be sure. The story rocketed to No. 2 on CNN.com’s most-read list, according to Mona Astra Liss, IKEA’s director of public relations. But for the passing of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the story might have gone to No. 1.

As the article points out, it might be IKEA’s self-recognition of its “playful” brand that lets guerrilla video shoots occur with virtually no repercussions … in fact, embraced.

Ground zero of IKEA’s mind share is, strangely enough, the Burbank store. No less than three popular Web videos and one rather large motion picture have been shot there in the last three years. In the film “(500) Days of Summer,” Tom and Summer romp through the Burbank store, playing house amid the store dioramas of modern kitchens and bedroom furniture.

The Burbank store also furnished the backdrop for last year’s IKEA-funded Web TV series “Easy to Assemble,” which followed actress Illeana Douglas as she struggled to adapt to the life of a schlub in blue-and-gold polo shirt . . . I mean, an IKEA team member.

“Easy to Assemble,” which got picked by CBS for its http://www.tv.com outlet, was a fairly radical bit of marketing. It was stone-cold branded entertainment — the IKEA logo is in every shot. Yet IKEA also gave Douglas and her collaborators room to gently mock it, right down to the tiny pencils.

The first class lesson in “Add Love 101?” As Neil points out: “Marketers who would capitalize on user-generated content must also be prepared to let the inmates run the asylum.”

Your first assignment? Pray for chemistry!

Author Answers: Is Social Media a Fad?

Eric Qualman helped illustrate the topic of his recent book, Socialnomics, by producing the YouTube video, “Social Media Revolution” (see below).

I’ve been telling all sorts of businesspeople lately that if someone is already spending X-amount of dollars on traditional advertising, such as on TV, cable, or print, it’s time to take at least half that money and spend it on social media marketing.

One of the clearest examples of great usage of social media was in Denver, where several restaurants were offering free food to anyone coming to their establishments … the catch? You simply were asked to Twitter your review about the food and the place.Twitter, by the way, allows for just 140 characters per tweet (message), so how hard is that?

The advertising costs for these Denver restaurants and their Twitter campaign was simply the price of food they cooked up that night, labor they normally would already be paying to serve food, and the time spent monitoring their Twitter accounts.

I’ve even read from reputable sources that social media is the bridge that may lead our country out of the current recession. We can only wait and see whether this thought turns into reality … meanwhile, be social!

Alex Murashko, the founder of Outreach New Media, has been helping people get their message out for more than 16 years.