Social Media Leadership

One question today.

How are you using social media to lead?

Don’t think it’s important? Watch the short video below.

Again. How are you using social media to lead?

New Design

I just want you to know that I’m thinking about changing the blog design. Kind of working it through. Trying to get the header just the way I like it. Photoshopping around a little. So don’t be surprised if you come here one day and nothing except the content looks the same, because it’s going to happen. I’m just not sure when. I’m going for a more professional look.

Until next time.

Importance of “The Blog”

Want to know the importance of the blog? Check out this article from the Des Moines Business Record. Bloggers can be great sources information, but also a great source of knowing your customer service to the community. Good or bad. Have you ever felt like Tom? I have. Did you notice his change after some great customer service. Oh how a song can change.

Two important points here. One, blog. It’s a great way to get some attention, but also some needed traffic to your website. Two, have GREAT customer service. Great customer service brings referrals, but can also bring a firestorm of negative advertising.

Bottom line. In today’s market, no matter what the business type, the internet and blog are vital. Find a way to use it to your advantage.

Until next time.

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LifeChurch has Joined the Blogosphere

Craig Groeschel and Bobby Gruenewald from LifeChurch.tv are blogging now on their new blog Swerve. I’ve already enjoyed the tech articles that are on the blog. It should be great reading from the looks of the start of it. Check out this blog for several great links from Swerve’s view on CES and MacWorld. Good good stuff.

I want to encourage you to not be afraid of the unknown. Alot of the items that are coming out this year are going to be great tools for ministry. If…..If we decide to use them. Check out the link on swerve’s blog for MediaFLO. How’s your church’s cell phone ministry going? Ever thought about it. I have. I’ve been talking about cell phone ministry for a while now. My church uses cell phone technology to reach people. We’ve only hit the tip of the iceberg though. We are only at the beginnings of what can and will be done. You can check out church info and we have links to Roman’s Road and the 4 Spiritual Laws for someone witnessing and can’t remember all 4 laws. You can get a mobile map of the church so visitors who can’t find the church just need to go to their cell phone. It’s great but only the beginning. Check it out by pointing your phone’s web browser to www.centralbiblechurch.org.

And of course bookmark and SUBSCRIBE to this blog so you can get daily e-mails and stay up to date on what’s going on with the church and technology.

Until next time.

The Geek Shall Inherit the Church

Okay, so I wanted to give this to you in sections and expound on each a little, but I can’t wait. Here’s the article from Ministry Today Magazine showing about just some of the ways to embrace technology to reach the world and your community. I don’t know how long this page stays up, I actually read the article originally from the print version. So read it before it goes away.

It talks about e-mail, new ministry positions available, and even examines the ‘dark’ side of it all. Great job of covering alot of different aspects of technology ministry. Good news: alot of this you can incorporate into a smaller church too! You just have to scale it down a little. I’m already examining different ways to assimilate it into my church. Have fun with this one, let your imagination go wild.

Until next time.

“Not Understandable” on DVD dot com

Okay, so let me first apologize for being so long since I wrote. So, I’m sorry. It was a long wonderful Christmas and New Year’s (in Atlanta and Des Moines) and sometimes it’s just hard to get out of vacation mode. I was also working on my newest website, a real estate website/blog for central Iowa. Woo Hoo. Anyway, that’s done and showing good signs of success already. But fear not, on my down time I was keeping lots of notes for this blog. I’ve been reading A TON of good stuff about how some churches have been using technology in a new favorite magazine of mine. But more about that at another time.

My issue for today is a great idea with just the wrong context. BiblesonDVD.com has an offering that amused me at first and then saddened me. I saw a commercial on television (not sure if it was a Christian station or not) for what I thought would be a good product. Only to be saddened once I got to the site. Have you went there yet? Did you notice anything? I did. Those three old initials kept popping up. KJV. Aaahhh! Why? It’s not like the church doesn’t have a hard enough PR problem. (i.e. I don’t understand the sentences) No one talks in KJV today. Why not a nice little version with NIV, or better yet, redo it completely in terminology that the lost of today understand?

My problem is this, if you’re going for realism and going to spend all this money to make something quality, why not make it effective too. If you just want realism, take the Mel Gibson Passion of the Christ approach and do it all in the original language. I know some of you like the NKJV for the ‘poeticness’ (is that a word?) and flow of the scripture. But when someone is down to their last leg and at the end of their rope, they don’t want poetry. They want the truth that speaks to their heart, and they want (and need) it to be understandable to them, to be able to apply it to their lives today. My feeling is this, a new believer has a hard enough time trying to make sense of all of the confusion of Christianity. Why unnecessarily further complicate things?

I could go on and on about this, but it’s late and we’ve got plenty of time in the future to discuss this issue. Bottom line: The lost need to find the truth. And we have a responsibility to get the truth to them. Why make the task harder than it is? Be relevant in every form of ministry that you do. Make the gospel usable and applicable to the unsaved. Be transparent, let them see Christ in you. The faster they get it, the faster they start telling other people about it!

Until next time.

Church Google

Seems like everybody is using Google nowadays. When the CIA wouldn’t give up Iranian sanctions targets to the state dept, the state dept started a search of it’s own, on Google. The three lucky Iranians with the most Google hits became the target of “international rebuke.” Seems like there’s a reason for everything to use Google.

Of course, this got me thinking. Everybody’s using Google to find something. What about the Church? What does the Church use Google for? Or, more importantly, when a seeker is looking for a church home, what do they find? When they go to Google and type in ‘mytown, local churches’, what do they find? What they should find is your church. Do they?

Is your church ready when the unbeliever comes looking? Try it. Search your town and local churches. What comes up? If your church didn’t come up, there may be some issues that need exploring. It is no longer good enough to just advertise in the local paper or have your church listed in the local business/church directory. When the seeker is searching, they want answers now, not after they look in the phone book. Are we truly doing everything that we can to reach the lost seeker?

When seekers start googling your church, what do they find?

Until next time.

Oh yeah, need a quality website that won’t leave you dipping into the sunday school fund for extra money? Check here.

E-Mail (my domain vs. MSN or Yahoo!)

I’ve had a pastor or two or three or four ask me about the whole e-mail thing. Why’s it so important to have an e-mail address with their church’s domain name ending in the address. The first answer is name(brand) recognition. Everytime you send someone an e-mail or they send you one, they put your web address in the ‘To’ line. That helps them remember it. Then when they try to tell their friends to visit your website, they remember it.

Besides the obvious evangelism reason, there’s also the credibility reason. Most people give more credibility to a website with it’s e-mail address ending in the church’s domain name. Think about the last time you went to a business website. When you went to the contact page it probably had an e-mail address that ended in the business’ domain name, Info@churchforward.com, etc.

Way back in the day, when I was a manager at FedExKinos, I remember people coming in to get their business cards made. Some looked very good. Then you got a little closer look and OOPS, there it was. myname@gmail.com or myname@yahoo.com. Very unprofessional. Then I started wondering about their “business”. Credibility, it goes a long way in business and in the unbeliever’s world. Let’s face it, the church today needs all the credibility it can get. With 63% of seekers checking their next church out online first, every little bit helps.

I realize that this is a small point, but every little bit helps!

Until next time.

Oh yeah, one more thing. ThrivingDomains.com does give you free e-mail with whatever domain name you purchase. You don’t need a website to get a good .com e-mail address. You can also get a free blog account too. All for under $10! Seems like a good idea to me!

Top Ten Blogging Mistakes

According to Jakob Nielsen, these are the the 10 biggest mistakes by bloggers. Find them in greater detail here.

No Author Biographies
No Author Photo
Nondescript Posting Titles
Links Don’t Say Where They Go
Classic Hits are Buried
The Calendar is the Only Navigation
Irregular Publishing Frequency
Mixing Topics
Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss
Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service

What do you think, right or wrong? Are you a gulity of one of the above? Let me know, hopefully this will help improve your blog. Need to buy a quality blog, instead of just getting a free limited blog. Check out this site!

Until next time.

EXTREME MAKEOVER – BLOG EDITION

As some of you may have noticed, the Realtor Blog just had an extreme makeover this past week, as well as IowasRealtor.com. A couple different reasons for that, some more important than others. IR.com was converted to AdamForney.com and blog.iowasrealtor.com converted to AdamForney.net. With all the changing that was going on, I had to make a decision about the blog as well as the website because the blog had been linked.

With all the different issues being brought to my attention, I decided the blog needed a makeover and different focus completely. From here on, you will still see some real estate blogging going on, but the main focus has been shifted to something a little more eternal, the church. Most know of my past with ministry being a youth pastor and such. Eventually I have to realize that it is a part of me that cannot and will not escape. You pastors out there know what I’m talking about.

Most of you know of Thrive Web Group and it’s new partner site, ThrivingDomains.com. Now everything has been brought under one roof with the label of ChurchForward. It’s a way to centralize everything and have future divisions of the company know how it fits into the whole. TWG and TD.com aren’t changing, you still get the quality service from both that you have in the past.

ChurchForward will be able to take all the services we offer in our web suite (i.e. web design, domains, blogs, consultation, etc.) to the next level as we continue to prepare the church for the newest technology that comes out and how we can reach the world through it!

Adam Forney
Founder/CEO
ChurchForward.com
“Fusing together methods to grow the church and reach your world!”