An article in the current issue of BtoB Magazine called Let’s face it - faces sell caught my eye this morning. Here’s an excerpt:

They are visual magnets that readers, visitors and viewers simply can’t resist because people are enormously curious about their fellow human beings. Faces have a place in b-to-b advertising, despite its reputation for being cold and clinical.

In fact, a human presence in b-to-b ads may be even more critical than in consumer advertising because of the more clinical nature of the product or service being promoted. Networking equipment, servers and software certainly lack the visual sizzle of fashion, travel or automobiles.

This brings to mind a simple tip for church webmasters that while mentioned quite a bit in the Christian website blogosphere, nevertheless bears repeating. Make sure your website is primarily about people rather than organizations, buildings, programs, ministries, etc. The church is people. One of the best ways to get a good start on ensuring that this is conveyed to your website visitors is to liberally use photos of people (photos that show people’s faces!) throughout your site.

A side note: one additional thing to ask yourself in this regard is what does your church website convey if the most prominent photo on your website is of your pastor?

What are other ways that we can help our church websites to reflect the principle that the church is people rathan than an organization, a building, a set of programs, etc.?

Aaron Brazell wrote a guest article yesterday on Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger website which could prove helpful to church webmasters who inadvertently post information about missionaries in creative access nations.

I’ve had to take similar steps in a couple of situations — one in which I was unfortunately not aware in advance that my client did not want to be identified as a missionary and one in which friends of ours moved to a sensitive area of the world and later found that a church was inadvertently publishing their information.

When this sort of thing happens, panic can set in fairly quickly and knowing how to address it quickly helps a great deal. The moral of the story is that it’s good to have a plan in advance!

Rohit Bhargava recently blogged about Placecasting — “sending a message to bluetooth enabled devices within a specified geographic area.”

Within his article, Rohit mentions two solutions for Placecasting: a commercial application provided by Proximity Media (a subsidiary of Wiremedia) and an open-source application named Consola (by the way, if you visit the Consola website, don’t be fooled by the bars that move back and forth in a semi-circle — contrary to what I originally thought, this is not a loading movie for a Flash website — I must have sat there looking at it for a full minute before it dawned on me that it was just an animated logo!).

From the two solutions’ respective websites:

Proximity Media
Wiremedia’s proximity advertising solution allows for the distribution of rich media content and applications to mobile phones, laptops, and other Bluetooth-enabled handheld devices. Content that is engaging, interactive, and informative. The formula works when these wireless devices are relatively close to virtually any public and private spaces that are equipped with Wiremedia’s Bluetooth MediaServer

Consola
Consola is a ‘Bluetooth Proximity Media Server’ application for Mac OS X ‘Tiger’. It detects all Bluetooth enabled devices in range and sends them data such as text, images, animated gifs, audio, flash, video, java, or vCards.

It’s not clear to me if there is some ability to only send content to devices whose owners have granted permission, but assuming that ability is available, I think this presents quite an interesting opportunity for churches to reach out to those in their local area.

Does anyone know more about this technology? I wonder what the range is (which would obviously govern what you might be able to use it for). 

How Can We Take Advantage of New Video Ads From Google AdWords?

The internet marketing blogosphere was a bit abuzz yesterday with the news that Google’s AdWords program will soon be adding click-to-play video ads as an option for advertisers who have opted into its content network.

I first learned of this from Darren at ProBlogger.net. At first, I gave more thought to how it could be used by internet marketers working for commercial companies, specifically by the catalog company I work for in my day job. But then Rob challenged churches and ministries to think about how this opportunity could be used to further God’s kingdom.

Video Profiles
My mind must be working slowly these days since I didn’t immediately make a connection between this new opportunity and my preferred web strategy for churches which includes the use of video profiles of believers with specific life experiences or interests. However, Rob’s article prompted me to consider more carefully how the new video ads from Google Adwords could be used effectively in a church’s overall web strategy.

That line of thinking resulted in a proposed strategy in which a church would use short video profiles of members of their congregation to entice unbelievers in their local area to consider the value of a local congregation’s ministry in their own lives. Perhaps an example will be the best way to explain the strategy.

What do you think of these pages from the website of University Christian Fellowship in Syracuse, New York:

• Questions We Get Asked About Our Church Service, and Our Snappy Answers
• UCF Order of Worship

Found on Todd Rhoades’ Monday Morning Insight Blog

Kurt Steinbrueck, the Director of Marketing at OurChurch.com, recently wrote a valuable article about developing your church website in such a way that it will rank well in searches conducted at major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.). Kurt includes a brief but helpful explanation for several tips such as the following:

• Put the location and denomination of your church in your website’s Title tag
• Put the location, denomination, and other defining information in your website’s description tag
• Put your location, denomination and other local search terms on your homepage
• Register with the major directories and search engines
• And several more (some of which you may not have thought of) even if you’re accustomed to thinking about search engine optimization

The one thing I would like to add to Kurt’s article is that we need to be strategic when we are choosing which key words and phrases to include on our church websites. 

Tony Morgan, one of the pastors at Granger Community Church, wrote an intriguing article for his blog a few days ago entitled “Good For Nothing Websites.”

In the article, Tony talks about a few different websites of companies, organizations, and individuals for which he has a certain passion. The manufacturer of the car he drives. The baseball league in which his son plays. His favorite professional baseball team. A leadership organization to which he belongs. Authors whose books he enjoys (or has enjoyed in the past). His old bank and his current bank. What seems to come out of his article is that he consistently uses the websites which offer him something, which in fact are useful to him. Those that are not useful are ignored.

Then he asks a pointed question: “Does your church have a website.” Although I had to read his article 2-3 times to at least come to a place where I think I get his point (I can be dense at times, especially at the end of a long work day!), I’m still not positive. Maybe it’s meant to say different things to different people.

But here’s what I got out of the article and the question: Does your church have a useful website? The answer to that question, I would say, depends on a couple of things:

1. Who do we want to see using our church websites?
2. Is what we offer useful to them?

Unless we answer the first question, we’ll never be able to answer the second.

From my perspective, as you already know if you’ve read this blog for any length of time, I want to see unbelievers using our church websites. And the most useful aspects of a church website to unbelievers are the stories of real people in our congregations — their joys, their struggles, their interests, their hopes and dreams, their crushing disappointments, etc., etc. Not their Christian testimonies. But their stories.

The real stories of real people will be intriguing to unbelievers because those stories are the stuff of real life. Are you telling the stories of the people in your congregation and are unbelievers in your local area intrigued enough to want to meet the people in your congregation in face-to-face relationships. Is your church website, through its stories, drawing people into the authentic community of Christ lived out in the everyday lives of the believers in your area?

I was gratified this morning to find an article regarding podcasting on the website of one of my denomination’s primary publications: The Pentecostal Evangel.

In the article, Kirk Noonan gives a good overview of the advantages and challenges of podcasting for the church. He quotes Mark Batterson (pastor of National Community Church in Washington, D.C.), Mark Kellner (the author of God on the Internet), and Mark Hunt (Vice president and Publisher of New Media for Zondervan). All have interesting things to say.

I was especially heartened by Mark Batterson’s clear assertion of the purpose and proper use of podcasting in the church:

Podcasting is not a substitute for church, it’s a supplement. There never will be a substitute for the human touch or the corporate worship we experience together in church. Our goal is to evangelize people and get them to check out our church in a nonthreatening way, and podcasting allows us to do that.

It’s good to see the Assemblies of God recognizing the value of technology in reaching the lost.

For those who have been reading the earlier post on this site entitled The Purpose of a Church Website, I wanted to let you know that the conversation is not only continuing in the comments to that article, but Paul Steinbrueck has posted a follow-up article which is also getting a good amount of intelligent discussion.

Thanks also to Paul for the willingness to discuss contrary opinions and for his open spirit.

In a blog post entitled Supercharging Sermons With A Blog, Paul Steinbrueck of OurChurch.com talks about three purposes of a church website:

1) to help people looking for a church home;
2) to assist people already attending the church to know what ministries and activities are available for them; and,
3) to help people grow spiritually by providing additional resources that complement the services and ministries.

Regarding those three purposes of a church website, it seems to me (just my opinion) that there are better ways to accomplish the second and third purposes than a publicly available church website (I would advocate approaches which convey information to already-existing members and attendees through face-to-face community — small groups, for example). My fear is that in trying to be all things to all people, we will end up serving no one.

Tim Bednar of e-church has refocused his blog. In his own words:

As the Internet is arguably one of the most powerful forces of social change conceived by humankind, this topic will be the new focus of my blog. I’m going to focus on how the Internet is changing the congregation; thus, transforming the church through its wisdom from the bottom up.

The first three entries (of a planned 20) represent Tim’s understanding of how modern internet-based innovations which are transforming congregations from the bottom up, transformation which is often happening without leadership’s knowledge or understanding:

Beta from Google
Gmail from Google
Folksonomies and Tagging with Del.icio.us and Amazon

Whether or not you agree with Tim’s conclusions (I’m not certain so far, but they have the ring of truth to me), these articles are definitely thought-provoking.

I would encourage you to head on over to e-church and begin grappling with the implications. Start here.

Thanks to Church Marketing Sucks for the heads up.

I found an intriguing piece of copywriting on a church website today - the website of Seed Church in Bothell, Washington. The welcome message on the front page of the site begins with these words: “It is time for you to lose control.” Eight simple words - definitely unexpected words for a church website. And in that alone, I think the website of Seed Church will intrigue unbelievers. Even their domain, dyingtolive.org, evokes curiosity.

The words we choose to use on our church websites are very important and deserve careful thought.