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“People with real influence don’t talk about it; they do things.” (tweet that if you like)

I love that brilliant bit of insight which Linda Bernsteinof, aka @WordWhacker tweeted in a recent #GetRealChat tweet chat.

It’s a great reminder that real influence is not a matter of how many friends or followers or shares you get in social media.  Real influence is doing things – taking initiative, leading, organizing, and inspiring others – that have a positive impact on people’s lives.

What are you doing – online or offline – that’s having a real influence?

Don’t be shy or humble. Share your excitement! Give God the glory for what he is enabling you to do!

The Internet is a dynamic place.  There are always new, innovative thought leaders coming onto the scene adding their unique insight and perspective, developing new tribes, leading new initiatives.  The areas of church communications, ministry & technology, Internet and social media – which we discuss here – are no different.

I love to connect with new people, share new ideas, and introduce others to people I know who they may share some common interests. So, I curious…

Who are the Christian communications/tech/web/social media thought leaders you are listening to and engaging with these days?

There are dozens, if not hundreds of great people who I listen to. I don’t have room to list them all and I would leave some out even if I tried.  So, here are 8 blogs/bloggers I find insightful.  Let me introduce you to them…

• churchmarketingsucks.com – @kevinhendricks
• timpeters.org – @TimRPeters
• socialmediachurch.net - @DJChuang
• stevefogg.com - @Stevefogg
• #ChSocM - @MeredithGould
• churchm.ag - Eric Dye, John Saddington
• michaelhyatt.com - @michaelhyatt
• Internet Evangelism Day – Tony Whittaker

Who is inspiring you, challenging you, providing you with new innovative ideas?

Who would you like to introduce other readers here to?

Tuesday, I had the privilege of being DJ Chuang’s guest on the Social Media Church G+ hangout on air.  One of the questions DJ asked me was, how do you advise pastors and church leaders to manage their time on social media so it doesn’t become a 24/7 thing?

Here’s an excerpt from the hangout with my answer:

What do you think?  How would you advise pastors and church leaders to manage their time on social media so it doesn’t become a 24/7 thing?

You can listen to a podcast of the full interview, plus get notes and related links on SocialMediaChurch.net at Paul Steinbrueck of Christian Web Trends: Episode 43 or watch the full interview on YouTube.

In the past month Google rolled out a new Local Places for Businesses dashboard.  But the biggest news is not what’s been done, but what’s coming.  There were some big announcements about the future of Google’s Panda and Penguin Updates, Facebook’s search engine (Graph Search), and Google’s treatment of local businesses.

I’ll discuss all this in this month’s SEO update video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCCuU0flqBU

Hello! I’m Kurt Steinbrueck, Director of Marketing Services for Ourchurch.com. I’m here with this month’s SEO update for April… (Click here for a full transcript)

Summary:

• Facebook says they aren’t planning to launch an external search engine. Then again, with 1 billion members, do they need to?
• Google is planning to integrate their Panda algorithm into their main ranking algorithm.
• Google is planning another major Penguin update.  If you’re not sure what Google’s Penguin update is, you can find a quick explanation here.
• Google may start considering the quality of a business in their rankings (I. E. Customer satisfaction, quality services).
• Google updated their Local Places for Businesses dashboard.  It has new categories, widgets for Google Adwords and Google Offers, better integration with Google+, better accommodation for service area businesses and more.

Share your thoughts:

• Are you concerned by Google’s announcement of a major Penguin update?
• Have you tried Google’s new local business dashboard?  What do you think of it?

Digital media have transformed the world in the last 15 years. We have entered a new ‘digital communication culture’ where all the rules for effective communication have changed. Even offline!

There are 2+ billion web users, and over 5 billion people use mobile phones (increasingly these are web-equipped). The Web is not just another means of communication, but a hyper-medium that subsumes, links together, and enhances all previous media.

It’s in this context that Internet Evangelism Day takes place this Sunday, April 21.

Internet Evangelism Day is…

… NOT a single day in which Christians are encouraged to share their faith online – we should be sharing our faith online every day.  Rather it is an awareness day in which churches, schools and other Christian organizations make a concerted effort to inform their people about the myriad of opportunities and resources available to help in the sharing of our faith online as well as challenge and inspire each other to be more intentional about making the most of these opportunities and resources.

We at OurChurch.Com have blogged a lot about IEDay and ways to share our faith online in the past.  Here are some links to some great ideas!

• 20 Ways to Share Your Faith Online
• 14 digital ideas to share with your church
• 12 Ways to Share Your Faith Online with Instagram

What are some ways that you’ve shared your faith online?

Is your church or ministry doing anything to raise awareness about sharing our faith online on Internet Evangelism?

If not, there is still time.  And at the very least, you can champion the importance of sharing our faith online by blogging about it and sharing stories and ideas in social media.  You can do that, right?

I was reading “11 Tips I Gave to Marketers this Morning” by SEOMoz founder Rand Fishkin and this one jumped out at me:

#6 – Crappy content often outperforms amazing content when the publisher/brand/site has a powerful community.

Community is one of the most ignored/under-appreciated channels of an inbound marketing strategy, yet it makes every other channel – social, search, email, content, viral, etc. – more effective

I’ve been saying for years now Content is NOT King, relationships are.

Obviously none of us is out to create crappy content, but the point is, if you’re spending a lot of time writing, blogging, tweeting, sending out newsletters and you’re not getting the kind of response you’d like, perhaps you need to invest more in people and less in content.

• Who is your target audience?
• What are they like demographically? Psychographically?
• Where are they?
• Are they already congregating in online groups? Which ones?
• Are you engaged in those groups?  Not just sharing your own content but meeting people, listening to them, getting to know them, interacting with them?
• If your target audience is not congregating in an online group is this an opportunity for you to create and lead a new community?

Think who before what.

You can tweet me on that.

Think who before what.

Apr 12, 2013 9:38 am via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@paulsteinbrueck

Paul Steinbrueck

See 11 Tips I Gave to Marketers this Morning for Rand’s other 10 tips.

How do you prioritize your time, strategic thinking and energy between content and community?

I’ve been ruminating on a communications / social media dilemma that has the potential to be either a major problem or major opportunity depending on how it’s handled. It’s a bit complicated and is going to take several paragraphs to explain, but there’s a pretty good chance you’re facing the same dilemma, so I hope you’ll bear with me…

You, the “Brand Evangelist”  

Since you’re reading this post, there’s a pretty good chance that you are the primary communicator or “brand evangelist” for your organization.

• You’re the CEO or communications director for your company
• You’re the pastor or communications director for your church
• You’re the principal or communications director for your school
• You’re the director or communications director for your ministry or nonprofit

If you believe in the value and power of social media, you probably have social media profiles for both your organization and yourself on Facebook and Twitter, perhaps Google+ and YouTube, and perhaps even others like Pinterest, Instagram

As the primary communicator and brand evangelist, you probably find yourself sharing your organization’s content on your own social media profiles in addition to your organization’s. You’d be wise to do so. Your shares and tweets expand the reach of your organization to more people and can lead to better search rankings. Plus research has shown people are much more likely to connect in social media with other people than organizations, especially if you compare individuals who use an image of themselves for their profile pic vs organizations that use a logo. (Link?)

However…

This interaction between organization and personal branding is a tricky dance prone to missteps

If you personally retweet/share everything your organization posts, you may undermine the need for anyone to connect with your organization. Why would someone follow your org if they know they’ll get the same info from you?

Even worse, if you personally tweet/share your organization at the same time your organization does, people who follow both of you would get back to back identical posts, which is annoying and appears to be self-promotional. The end result is you could actually damage your reputation and cause some people to stop engaging with both you and your organization.

This post is already pretty long as it is, and I don’t want to jump in and start offering solutions yet. So, let’s just get the conversation started..

1. Are you the primary communicator / brand evangelist for your organization?
2. Do you share your organization’s content/announcements on your personal social media profiles?
3. Are you concerned at all about the potential pitfalls of sharing your organization’s content described above?
4. What if anything are you doing to ensure that what you do personally with social media creates engagement with your organization rather than undermining it?

Stay tuned as I’ll follow this with another post to discuss potential solutions.

When it comes to technology and social media, I am pretty much a geek at it…well let’s just call it what it is, I am a geek at it. You could also call me a geek when it comes to wanting to share the Gospel and utilize technology in doing so.

I think in this day in age we are up against some pretty difficult odds if we think we are going to reach people using “old school” tactics. A door to door approach or only a mailer coming to a house once a year isn’t going to cut it. Whether it’s with the next generation, or any generation really today, there is one area we can think of utilizing as believers and especially as Pastors and leaders of the church, and that is social media. Primarily in this discussion, let’s talk about Twitter.

I have had multiple conversations with Pastors young and old and typically hear and see the same thing. Ones who utilize technology to reach others typically have a larger influence of people and it’s not always the younger ones. I think it’s just a matter of looking at the culture today and getting in where people are at and at the same time, choosing not to compromise on core values of the Bible. Ones who don’t utilize technology don’t reach as many people and typically think there is not a need to do so.

I can’t argue that if a Pastor does not use Twitter, that he isn’t Biblical or anything like that, but I would definitely ask – Why Not? Surely there are people within each local body who could help their leader out in this area and show them how to use it. Also, you can reach a huge amount of people with even a single tweet. Here is an example, I tweeted this quote very recently, and it has been retweeted by others several times resulting in over thousands of people reading it. Here is that tweet:

Why do bad things happen to good people? That only happened once, and He volunteered for it. - RC Sproul #Jesus

Mar 19, 2013 10:14 pm via Tweetbot for iOSReplyRetweetFavorite

@MikeJMobley

Mike Mobley

Still not convinced?

Here are 3 reasons why Pastors should use Twitter along with their benefits:

1) Relationships

Sometimes depending on what church you serve in, it is difficult to get a chance to meet with many people outside of Sunday morning or outside of your 1on1′s during the week. Twitter can help you build and establish more relationships and gives you a window into people’s lives to see what is going on with them each day or throughout the week. You’d be surprised how many times you can see where people are at in their walk with Christ as they tweet.

2) Authenticity

This is huge for Pastors. Most people always want to know if authenticity is truly there outside of the pulpit. Not only can people see by what you tweet if you act the same way every other day of the week, but they get the opportunity to see “real life” happening. For example, a Pastor posting a picture of him & his wife on a date night or him & his son fishing during the week can mean a whole lot to the church since they can relate quite a bit to moments like that. It doesn’t even have to be a happy moment really, as long as it’s real, it has tremendous value.

3) Church

This one might be obvious, but you can utilize Twitter to help promote the church you are leading. Whether it is getting the word out on a students event coming up soon, a men’s retreat a few months down the road, or Easter service times coming up within the next couple of weeks, there are huge benefits to this and shows a great amount of support to that church from their Pastor.

Pastor, next time you hear about someone “Tweeting” and maybe assume there is no need for you to get involved in that, I encourage you to think twice about it and at least do some research & look into it before calling it off. You never quite know who you could reach or encourage with the Gospel.

Online marketing is great and getting high rankings is always nice, but how would you like to absolutely dominate your field? How would you like to be known as the go-to person/organization for your niche either in your local area or nationally? You can.

Dominating your niche isn’t just about getting high rankings in the search engines, though that’s certainly part of it. Dominating your niche is about making it so wherever people go; they just keep running into you. When you dominate your niche, you can even start to transcend the need the high rankings as people become familiar with your name/brand and simply go to your website because you are the main source in your niche. This isn’t just a business thing. Churches, schools, ministries, people, who/whatever can all dominate their niche. So, how can you dominate your niche?

It Starts and Ends with Your Website:
Your website is the heart of your online presence. A heart pumps blood out to your organs, but then draws the blood back from those organs. Similarly, your website the source of much of the content you will produce. You will send that content out to other places (social media, blogs, search etc.), but all those places will send traffic back to your site. So, your website needs to have a good design and quality content. It will be very difficult to dominate your niche if people are turned off by your website and even if you are still able to dominate, you will lose conversions if your website isn’t good.

Search Engine Optimization:
Search is still the primary way people find things. So, it’s important that you optimize your website for the search engines and target as many relevant keywords as you can. When you are starting off, you probably won’t rank well for all of your keywords. You may only rank well for a few, but by getting your site optimized, as you start to grow your online presence in other ways, your rankings will improve as well.

Authorship:
Authorship is quickly becoming very important for a variety of reasons. It’s helpful for search rankings in Google (and possibly other search engines), which is great, but when you want to dominate your niche authorship has another even more important role. It establishes who you are. You and your organization can become known in your niche. People can see you on Google+ and your name and picture will be displayed right alongside your search results. This is extremely powerful. If you’re not yet familiar with authorship, check out, “Don’t Think You’re an Author? Well, You are Now?”

Blog:
Quality content is key. Not only do you need to have quality content on the main pages of your website, but you need to be regularly producing new, quality, original content. A blog is the perfect way to do that. A quick tip for creating your blog…Your blog really should be on your site. As easy as it is to install WordPress these days, there’s no reason to have some blogger.com blog somewhere off your website.

Video:
I can’t say enough about the power of video for establishing yourself in your niche. For now, however, let’s look at four great benefits to video.

1. Video creates a connection audio and print just can’t. You can see a person and get a sense of their personality. Video is like having a conversion with someone. Don’t underestimate the power of the feeling of connecting which video can create.
2. All the major search engines display videos in their search results. So, they can get you showing up in the results for keywords your website can’t.
3. There are several video sharing sites that are very popular (can anyone say Youtube?). So, videos give people more places to find you which is key to dominating your niche.
4. People tend to be attracted to video. People who otherwise wouldn’t click to read an article, may be willing to watch a short video.

And don’t think that video is too expensive or too difficult. You can get a great HD webcam for under $100 and videos don’t need TV quality editing. As long as you are engaging and have interesting, quality content, a simple webcam video can do very well.

Social Media:
So, you’re producing great videos and blog posts, now you need to let people know about this quality content. So, you have to post that content to where the people are. Facebook has about a billion users, so that’s a good place to start. Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, even Pinterest. You need to be in these places and don’t just use them to push your content. Social media is about connecting people with people. So, engage and connect.

Other People’s Blogs:
What’s a better endorsement than someone giving you their platform (their blog) to talk to their audience. That’s exactly what guest blogging is. The more you can guest blog, the more audiences you can reach and the more people there are endorsing you. Start by connecting with other bloggers in your niche. Comment on their posts and reference their posts in your posts. Once you’ve formed that connection, offer them some unique, quality content you’ve produced for their blog.

Everything Else:
These are just some of the more important ways you can start to dominate your niche. There are other places you can be participating to further establish yourself in your niche. Find important forums where you can engage people and answer questions. Answer question on question sites like Yahoo Questions and Quora. Encourage members and customers of your organization to post reviews about you. Write up press releases or be a source in new articles. In general, just look for places online that are important to your niche and be there.

The Secret Sauce:
This all sounds like a lot doesn’t it?  It is…and it isn’t.  If you do all of the above yourself manually, it will be too much.  So, the three secrets to being able to dominate your niche are…

1. For everything you do, you need to create an efficient process.  Take the time in the beginning to develop the process.  It will save you tons of time in the end.
2. Only do what you have to do, outsource and automate the rest.  The great content of the a video will probably require you in the video, but you don’t have to edit the video, transcribe it, or post it to Youtube.
3. Leverage everything.  A video can be uploaded to Youtube, posted on Facebook and posted on your blog.  That’s 3 uses for something you created once.  A couple of blog posts can become a whitepaper.  A forum post response can become a blog article.  I’m not suggesting you become overly repetitive, but usually a piece of content can be used in a few different contexts with little to no overlap.

Start Dominating!
There are really three key aspects to dominating your niche:

1. Produce interesting, useful, quality, original content.
2. Be everywhere. Whenever someone looks for something related to your niche, they should come across you.
3. Create a unified identity across the web and connect with people. Don’t have a different username on every website. Don’t use different pseudonyms/personas on different platforms. Don’t use impersonal avatars. Use your name, use an image or video of you, have one username for all the sites, and reference your organization consistently.

By consistently doing these three things, you can establish yourself and dominate your niche.

Share Your Thoughts:

• Do you want to dominate your niche?
• What else would you add that could help to dominate your niche?

Most of us don’t think of ourselves as authors.  Authors are people who write books and get published.  They’re people like Tom Clancy, James Dobson, or J. K. Rowling.  Well, no longer.  According to Google, you and I and every other website owner  are now authors…and it’s very important that you realize this now.

Why Would Google Care if I’m an Author?
Google has a problem.  They want to rank high quality content at the top of the rankings for every search.  Unfortunately, there’s a lot of garbage out there.  Between innocent people who don’t know what they’re talking about to “evil” spammers, there’s just a lot of low quality content sift out.  To make things worse, enough people have figured out how to get a page to rank well with tricks and dirty schemes that they’ve been able to make a lot of poor content appear good to Google.  So, Google needed to figure out a way to know who to trust.

Enter Google+
Google launched their social networking platform, Google+ in the Summer of 2011.  A lot of people rolled their eyes and laughed.  This was Google’s 5th or 6th attempt at getting into the social game. (Does anyone remember Google Buzz or Orkut?  I didn’t think so.)  Additionally, Facebook and Twitter were already dominating and Google+ seemed to wanting to get the same audience.  The question was legitimately asked, why would people leave a social network where they already have friends to go to one in which none of their friends are?

Perhaps it truly was Google’s dream to sink Facebook and Twitter, but it definitely was their goal to get their hands on social data for use in their search engine and advertising services.  After a little over a year and a half, Google+ boasts over 340 million users.  It’s an impressive number, enough to make them the second largest social network.  However, many people have said that Google+ is a ghost town.  They basically forced all people who had an account with any of Google’s products (Google, Gmail, Youtube, etc.) into a Google+ account, even if they had no intent of using it.  But all that has started to change because of authorship.

The Solution – Authorship

“Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.” – Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google

Did you get that?  Google is going to rank the web pages from verified authors higher than other pages.  This isn’t a theory.  This isn’t speculation.  They are going to do this and I’ve seen tests that indicate they are already doing it.  Authorship is a key way Google is going to verify content is written by a real person and determine the trust they can place in that person.

Right now authorship is still relatively new.  That’s good news for you.  If you become a verified author and start establishing yourself within your niche, you will probably be ahead of most of your competition.  Of course, this also means that if you don’t establish yourself as an author, eventually you will start loosing out to your competition.

So, how do you become a Google verified author?
Here are six simple steps to becoming a Google verified author:

• Create a Google+ account.
• On your blog and your website’s pages, add a link to your Google+ profile page and, in the link code, use the attribute, “rel=author”.

• In your Google+ profile, add your website to your “Contributor to” section.  You can find the “Contributor to” by going to your profile, clicking the “About” tab, scrolling down to the “Links” section, and clicking “Edit”.
• Add a faceshot picture as your profile photo.  If you use a picture of your face, your image will likely show up in search results next to your listings.
• Start sharing some of your posts/pages to your profile.

Note: If you contribute to websites/blogs other than your own (like guest blogging) you should add those websites to your Contributed To section and have a link to your Google+ profile on those posts as well.

It’s also a good idea to set your organization up as a publisher.  You can do this much the same way as setting up your personal authorship.

• Create a Google+ page for your organization.
• Add a link to your organization’s Google+ page on all the pages of your website and use the rel=”publisher” attribute in the link (this is often done by adding a G+ Icon).
• In your Google+ page, add a link to your organization’s website.
• Start sharing some of your posts/pages to your profile.

Quality and Authority Are Key
Now that you have setup your authorship, it’s time to start producing some content.  Keep in mind that in Google’s eyes the whole point of all this is to determine what pages are good, quality, authoritative pages so they can rank them higher.  They determine this by looking at who has you in their Google+ circles, how many +1 shares your pages are getting, if other people on Google+ are sharing your content, etc.  They want other people, especially people in your niche, to tell them whether your pages are authoritative and high quality content and therefore worthy of higher rankings.  So, it’s not enough to just setup your authorship, you have to produce original high quality content, share that content, and get others to add you to their circles and +1 or share your content.

Authorship isn’t the end all be all of ranking well in Google+, nothing is.  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and inbound links are still critical and there are a couple hundred other signals Google looks at.  That said, authorship can affect your rankings and I believe it’s going to become one of the most important signals Google looks at, right along side SEO and inbound links.

So, it’s time to get out your quill and ink well.  Your about to become an author.  Take a few minutes today and set yourself up as an author and set your organization up as a publisher.  Then start connecting with people on Google+ and start thinking about how you can start producing some great, original content.  You can do it.  Charles Dickens aint got nothin’ on you.

Share your thoughts:

• Do you have any questions about authorship?
• Will Google giving priority to verified authors get you to start using Google+
• If you do start using Google+ will you actually try to connect and interact with people or just use it to share your content?