Marketing Successes

Recently I've been reading the blog of a venture capitalist named Guy Kawasaki. This guy takes other peoples' money and figures out what companies to spend it on. Remember back in the last 1990's, when everyone was snapping up dotcoms like Monster for millions of dollars? Guy is one of those people with the millions of dollars who feed money into a company. Wouldn't it be nice sometimes? Though reading his blog I'm not sure it's quite as much fun as it always sounds.

I've been reading his blog because I'm getting a bit interested in marketing and how to take a product and get people to fall in love with it. In my case the product is our church, God, Christ or youth group instead of the next best apple peeler corer thingy (of which I do own one and it's invaluable when making apple pies... I just love my apple peeler corer thingy).

Anyway, he just invested his company’s money into a product called FilmLoop. It’s kind of a neat idea which I resisted when he first mentioned because I didn’t want to install something new on my computer. He talked about it casually in his blog about weekly, but I really didn’t see the need to install something new that shows photos.

Then Guy threw out an interesting blog entry. He said:

“One of my favorite restaurants is called Hobees. One of my favorite things about Hobees is its bulletin boards where there are pictures of customers in far off places wearing a Hobees t-shirt. So I've decided to create the digital version of this so that we can all “meet” each other.

“Hence, I've created a loop for you to add your picture. To get to it, click here.”

I admit that I was intrigued. I wanted to be in the first 200 people on the loop (after 200 pictures another loop has to be made) so that people could see me standing on top of Alex. It just seemed cool to throw out pictures of people from different places and see what you get.

All of a sudden I was buying into the product. It was a really neat idea to put up my picture and scroll through looking at others. Find a picture you like and some even had links directly to their Web sites. It just seemed fun all of a sudden.

Don’t take this to mean I’m promoting FilmLoop. In fact I have since uninstalled it because it continually put a pop-up on my screen every time someone else commented on a photo or uploaded a new on to the loop. Far too intrusive for my taste. I also personally would have preferred the loop to be in the Web browser instead of its own application. But I digress…

What struck me more than anything was the ingenious way Guy got people to try out FilmLoop. He talked about it a little without pressure, and then threw out a practical “hook” snag people in. Sure enough by the time I’d put my picture up there were already about 150 people up there (and I only waited a few hours). All of a sudden this thing that I didn’t want to use became interesting to me. It offered to bring me into a new community and I leapt at the chance.

Heck, even yesterday he posted an entry that Tony Hawk’s wedding pictures are in a FilmLoop that anyone can see. I haven’t seen them (since I don’t want to install FilmLoop again), but I know anyone even remotely interested in Tony Hawk would check it out.

I’ve been thinking about church and the way I handle myself around others. I think that everyone who has met me knows I’m a Christian and somewhat involved in church. So I am at least keeping my own message alive, that I like being a Christian.

Over the past few months I’ve been noticing my spiritual faith deepening. That’s gotten me to realize that I’m not doing such a great job of helping others to deepen their own faith. We put on some fun youth group activities in a very safe environment for teens to meet. But so often I have passed up chances to try and bring those teens the next step.

Tonight we are having a Battle of the Bands at church (our third in the past year). It’s an incredible (and incredibly loud, I’m bring ear-plugs tonight) time where we bring in a bunch of teenagers from schools which rarely feeds into our church. Many people whom this may be one of their first steps into the church, and certainly most are surprised anyone would hold a regular battle of the bands in a church without it being a bunch of Christian songs.

I would be well served to get up, or have someone else get up, and speak. Give a short testimony on how God has worked in their life. To be honest with you, I’m not going to do that. I don’t know what I would say and I don’t’ know how to say it without tuning people out. That’s the “hook” for new people that I’m working on.

I’m looking to catch something else as well. I’m looking to take the people in our church and hook them into a closer relationship with Christ. I want to bring people into a real relationship with Christ. Not only how to live in the world as a Christian, but what it really means to accept Jesus Christ as your savior.

Already some people have tuned me out with all this preachy/churchy/Jesusy talk. What I want to do is find a way to “hook” people into the relationship. Past getting baptized and coming to church regularly. To really try and understand what Jesus did and why it is that we should offer the other cheek when someone smacks the first one. What forgiveness really means, that everyone is entitled to the gift of his salvation, including that guy who ate, raped and killed 7 boys (as Alex mentioned a few times during bible study).

What can we do to really get people to “try” church? We go about our lives living a decent Christian life and assuming people will ask us what makes us the way we are, so we’ll have a chance to talk about Jesus. But how often have you been asked? I know of one friend of mine who has… but it’s never been me, and I’m a youth minister!

It’s time for me to really hook people in. Get people into the room but also really have them try this thing called Christianity out. They may decide it is not right for them, but I’d bet that if someone really “tries out” Jesus and finds a personal relationship with him, then they won’t decide to “uninstall” him later.

Of all the annoying things Jesus has brought into my life, at least he’s never brought pop-ups on my computer screen! So for that (an a million other reasons) I’ll keep him running in the foreground.

Peace,
+Tom/Bob

posted by Tom at 2:27 PM