Last night, I was watching tv, scanning my tweetdeck and I see this:
We got our church, Imagine Fellowship, tweeted about by @mashable! Yes, when @mashable says something about you, your site gets clobbered (ours crashed, temporarily – thank you Pete Cashmore + Friends!). Tonight, a few of the leaders from the Imagine Fellowship had a conversation about how we got Imagine there in the first place. In fact, the process was surprisingly simple.
- We started with stimulus. There was another church that was testing twitter out in their church. I read about it on Church Marketing Sucks and thought it was a great idea.
- I proposed the idea to Pastor Kevin Joyce (@kevj) who agreed the idea was brilliant. He wanted to do twitter on screen the next day. Not possible, we didn’t have any followers, it’d have to wait a week.
- Imagine Fellowship does twitter weekly. At first it is there to only show people tweeting from the audience, then it grows into @kevj asking questions and having people answer on the screen. Next, we start live tweeting the sermons so people outside of the four walls of the church can attend. Some people even attend church through their phone.
- Imagine Fellowship receives it’s first piece of coverage from @roybragg in the San Antonio Express News aka @mysa. A huge win for us. How’d we do this? We told @roybragg about the story and he liked it.
- K-Love does a national piece on Imagine Fellowship talking about our use of twitter in church. How’d we do this? We sent a tip in through the news section of the page.
- Outreach magazine, a large and influential Christian magazine recognizes Imagine Fellowship and our use of twitter as one of the trends reshaping the American Church. Outreach found us via the San Antonio Express News and K-Love.
- @mashable tweets about Imagine Fellowship uses twitter at church. Amazing! How did that happen? One guess – submit a tip page.
Do you see a theme developing? If not, let me spell it out for you:
- Find a cool idea and apply it
- Contact the media
- Repeat and think bigger
If you’re scared and don’t think you can do it, check out this video from Cameron Herold to get you fired up. Watch the video, do something cool and pick up the phone – GO! Remember, pitching the media is like asking a girl out, she might say no, but you’ve got to swing to hit.