Everyone who seeks to mobilize support for a non-profit should be taking notes on what Invisible Children has accomplished. And I think we can learn a lot from the video.

Most of us will barely pause to watch a 3 minutes “cause” video. But this morning, with my bowl of cereal, I sat (with 21 million others) watching a THIRTY minute video.

The rapid spread of the video seemed to have far surpassed even Invisible Children’s lofty hopes (I saw one IC’er tweet that they were hoping for 500,000 shares on Twitter).

• Fast Company called it the Making of a Viral Masterpiece and a public relations coup
• Celebs/Twitter Royalty like Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Kim Kardashian, Perez Hilton, Justin Bieber, Ryan Seacrest and others watched the video and retweeted it.
•  They’ve reached more people in 24 hours than the last 9 years of crisscrossing the globe showing videos on college campuses (Though you’d have to guess that all that crisscrossing gave them the foundation and good will, and brand recogniti...

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This is the 2nd post in the series “Marketing Jesus on the Quad”. Click to read the 1st post.

I know. I don’t like the thought of “marketing Jesus” either.

But in this age, “all communication will be perceived as marketing. All self-presentation, even church advertising, will be perceived as branding. And all outreach will be viewed as sales. There is nothing we can do to change this context.” –  Tyler Wigg-Stevenson

So for simplicity, I’ll use the term “marketing” (my goal is not to split hairs over semantics but to think through how we can better communicate the good news to this generation of college students).

As I’ve chewed on the implications of horizontal marketing for college ministry (see my initial post for an intro), I keep coming back to: we’ve got to figure out what we’re “selling”.

What ideas are we hoping students will spread?

What exactly do we want students to talk about?

We want students to talk about Jesus.

But, there’s really TWO things we want students to ...

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“P&G To Lay Off 1,600 After Discovering It’s Free To Advertise On Facebook” – headline last week

The new age of marketing is great news for college ministry.

Two reasons:

• Advertising is almost completely free
• It’s highly dependent on peer relationships

Every year we spend less and less on traditional advertising.

When I first came on staff with Cru we would spend hundreds of dollars on a single ad in the School Newspaper. Even as recently as 3 years ago we invested thousands on yard signs, facebook ads, and posters around campus.

Now we almost exclusively do free “advertising” on Facebook and peer-to-peer word of mouth.

This graphic does a great job summarizing this new era of Horizontal Marketing. It’s well worth clicking to read the full infographic (graphic via @mcryanmac who tweeted “This has very interesting implications for how evangelism on campus moves forward”).

“Horizonal marketing means creating a remarkable product and story and setting it up to spread from person to perso...

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Photo from Sixth Lie

After reading an article on Google's inability to be accessible, I started to muse how Google will survive the failures of Wave and now Buzz.

It has been said that failing forward makes way for success down the road, but that means that you need to learn from your failures.  But Google doesn't seem to be doing that with 2 big flops and from the rant, I wonder if the message wasn't getting through to Google.  Perhaps Yegge was what Google needed to right the ship.

In the long run, I think Google will hold its own and succeed, but in the short-term will navigate these failures and move on.  They are too big to consider the latest strings of failures to be fatal.

What I appreciated about Yegge's rant was that it made me and a colleague think through what is our online platform to share Jesus Christ.   Do we have a platform that we use and "eat our own dogfood" as well?  Are we making it accessible so that so called "third-parties" can use it to help share Christ themselves?

It may seem odd to ...

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With so many things fighting for the attention of the average college and high school student, it can be a struggle getting students to show up for anything, including class. The social media landscape, however, can make it a lot easier for your ministry to cut through the noise by greatly increasing the number of people you reach, and making it easier to promote and organize an event.

Here’s a tutorial from Mashable.com about how to organize an event with Facebook. Facebook Events Guide

Social media, and Facebook specifically, give your ministry the opportunity to:

• Go Viral With Every Event and Outreach

People you invite through Facebook can invite their network of friends. Your ministry’s event also shows up in their news feeds, all of which serves to increase the visibility of your ministry. Not only is your ministry gaining visibility to a much larger audience this way, but each Facebook invite is much more effective than a random flier because it’s a personal invite from a friend.

• See Who�...

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