Marketing and Management Thoughts

The Vatican has received much praise from the international media (BBC, Inquirer of the Philippines, LA Times, Time Magazine, CNN Int. to list a few) with the launch of their You Tube channel this last week (on the 23rd).

Currently it only holds just over a dozen videos (mostly address by Pope Benedict XV). This is a great way for them to reach and interact with an audience that has been, in my opinion, widely ignored by the Church as a whole (Protestant and Catholic).

Make sure to swing on over to their page and give it a once over, maybe watch a video or two. I must also comment that they are doing this page in four languages (Italian, English, Spanish, and Dutch).

If you have been using Twitter, visited a friends twitter page, or seen Facebook status show up with weird URLs in them you have likely been noticing shortened URLs. (Learn how to update Facebook with twitter)

These shortened URLs have come about because of the limit of characters you can use on twitter (140) so posting a long URL to a blog post (such as this one at nearly 90 characters) would take up nearly your whole message. Instead you can post http://tr.im/2h6l and use that to access the article about Facebook and twitter.

I personally use the tr.im service and have enjoyed it (they keep stats for you so you can know how many people are clicking on your links and from where/when).

Here is a list of the 11 Best URL Shortening Services out there. Check it out if you use twitter. I’d encourage you to pick one and bookmark it for easy access.

Warning!

While these URLs are very convenient for a service like twitter, I would avoid using them in printed material. If you have a web page you want people to go to from your church bulletin, use the full address. It will help them remember your domain name to tell others, and will have less problems with people typing them in wrong.

Example: we used http://tr.im/2h6l above and it links to our blog here at nineteen05. Clicking doesn’t have any issues here but what if you were typing and the L looked like an I… Now we’re at a German Internet sales magazine article… 2n6l leads us to an article about mobile phones and security… 2n6i to a NYT article on a potential role of Chinese savings into the financial crisis.

With that warning given, we encourage you to use these url shortening services online. But when it comes to print you are far safer to write out your full address.

Churches, and every non-profit, can always use stuff for free. With that in mind I knew I had to re-post this from swissmiss earlier today. There seem to be some great free sites listed so check it out!

55 Great Websites To Download Free Sound Effects

Note: Some of these sound effects have limited rights. That means they are not allowed for commercial usage. We urge that you check the rights before using them for business purposes.

HatNod (swissmiss)

This video has just astounded me by the brilliant colors and how well the kaleidoscope effect worked. If you have ever been to a fair/carnival after dark you gotta check out this video. It’s a bit long, but just visually stunning.

Imagine asking someone in your church to make a promo video for a church night out and getting this back. I love it (though I do realize it’s a bit abstract and flashy for some tastes/settings).

Visual by: Sai
Music by: Wanderlust -Björk (Ratatat Remix)

hat not (Fubiz)

Another followup to the Building Community series we did several weeks ago because I stumbled across Chris Forbes’ free e-Book “Facebook for Pastors” that does a pretty good job at explaining Facebook and its ministry possibilities.

It is a great supplement to what we wrote about in much greater details than I chose to in our blog and in a short 33 pages (several of which are the intro) lay out it quite well.

The bottom line on Facebook is there are people connected to it. It is not a web site or an Internet product; it is a network of people. Each person in the network is someone for whom Christ gave
himself. That is an important perspective for a pastor, wherever people gather, there are opportunities to minister.

Page 12

Download the ebook for free

Following up our post on the Evolution of Video is this 4 minute video (by MadV)  that uses a communities response to a video to form this compilation of hope. I found it very inspiring, I also tried to find the original video clip but it was taken offline for some reason (likely when the owners account was hacked last week).

While there is a lower production value due to the heavy use of web-cams, the impact more than outweighs that drawback in my opinion. Your thoughts?

Christianity Today posted an article by Tyler Wigg-Stevenson today titled “Jesus is not a Brand“. He basically explains over 8 pages that because the message and hope of Christ is so superior to that of our consumerist culture that we should handle this message in a special way. In more or less terms, he plays the God card and tells us that it’s blasphemy to market Jesus/Church/Christianity (on the middle of page 4).

Tyler Wigg-Stevenson’s Argument

His four main points boil down into (in my summary):

1. The christian life is about Grace and Love not your personal goals, so we can’t sell you something to help you attain your goals.
2. Since consumerism is based on perpetuating discontentment and satisfaction from new purchases, marketing the church follows the same model. This doesn’t reflect the biblical push to find contentment in God alone (IE not needing anything but God for our contentment).
3. Brand Relativism (um, commonly known as Brand Affiliation or Brand Association) leads people to believe that something is better than something else when they are just cars, cities, and computers. The only difference is preference. Thus ‘spiritual shoppers’ think of Christianity as only one option among many.
4. Fragmentation/Niches that are the focus of marketing campaigns are the reason for the distention and lack of unity in the church. Because we market to individual groups in relevant ways (that likely don’t appeal to everyone) we are conforming to the pattern of the world.

His conclusion cutting it down, but never the less in his words.

Consumerism is here to stay. The habits described above—self-creation, discontent, relativism, fragmentation—will become more dominant, not less, in years to come. That’s the way of the globalized economy and ascendant transnational commercial interests. We cannot defeat our situation; we can only seek to live faithfully in it…

But problems begin when we define the church as a whole using a comparison that just describes one of its attributes: i.e., treating the church as a business with a brand to promote. And then, even though there are all sorts of ways the church isn’t like a business, we begin to employ all the tools of commercial enterprise as though we were paying the body of Christ some compliment by treating it like a Fortune 500 company, with a bottom line, investor returns, supply chain, CEOS, market share, and so on. If we treat the gospel like a commodity, can we fault nonbelievers for thinking that the cross is just another logo?

My Response

While I have loads to say about his 8 page article, I will be brief, if anyone wishes me to write more on any point please simply ask in the comments section.

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Clive Thompson wrote an interesting piece on how YouTube is changing the way we use video/film in our society. While the majority of his argument stems from the

It isn’t quite a documentary; it isn’t exactly a conversation or a commentary, either. It’s some curious mongrel form. And it would have been inconceivable before the Internet and cheap webcams—prohibitively expensive and difficult to pull off.

This is what’s so fascinating about online video culture. DIY tools for shooting, editing, and broadcasting video aren’t just changing who uses the medium. They’re changing how we use it. We’re developing a new language of video—forms that let us say different things and maybe even think in different ways.

With over 100 years of the moving picture and we have still be drastically limited in how we use the medium do to cost and time restraints. Over just the past 10 years have peoples home computers been powerful enough to edit their videos on par with the pros, and costs have come down drastically since then.

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There was an article posted to the Times Online website (from our friends across the pond in England) titled “As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God” by Matthew Parris.

It’s a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

But this doesn’t fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

This was such an interesting article because of the perspective it comes from, an atheist who grew up in Africa and how he has recognized the correlation between the works of faith, and faith itself. Could be potential sermon illustration.

Mr Parris goes on to describe his observations to back up the statement above and I highly recommend finishing the article.