Two months ago a friend of mine walked up to me at church and said these words, “Man, I love your blog! And you have over 4,000 followers on Twitter. I knew you were a nice guy but you just stand here working a door every week. And you’re like a celebrity or something!”
I am not a celebrity but I am a greeter at my church. I work a door, say “Good morning”, hand out bulletins, help people find seats, and show them where the bathrooms are. Basically, until I became an elder, I was pretty nondescript from anyone else. Oh, and I am also very involved in social media and so are countless others in your church.
I feel there are now four types of leaders sitting in every church – Positional, Non-Positional (leaders in your community but just not plugged into your church), Financial, and now Social Media leaders.
In the July-August edition of Harvard Business Review, H. James Wilson, PJ Guinan, Salvatore Parise, and Bruce Weinberg have identified four levels of social media leaders and how smart companies are utilizing them. The four levels are:
- The Predictive Practitioner –  This works best in organizations that have a clearly defined strategy and purpose. Clorox has virtual R&D capabilities. They frequently run ideas by customers and suppliers. The most engaged responders are given high visibility (great benefit to them) and subsequently brought in for the product development process.
- The Creative Experimenter – This is driven by small budgets and allows your most creative and insightful people to thrive.  EMC uses platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to listen to its 40,000 global employees. Its internal communication strategy allows collaboration between departments and field testing of ideas on a smaller scale before going public.
- The Social Media Champion – Ford’s 2009 Fiesta Movement was launched by lending 100 Fiestas to individuals who would drive the cars for six months and regularly, authentically communicate their experiences via social media. Over the six months, drivers posted 60,000+ comments and received 4.3 million YouTube views. The total cost of the campaign was $5 million and had a prelaunch brand awareness of 37% among Millennials. The result was over 50,000 leads and 35,000 test drives. This level of campaign response would normally cost “tens of millions of dollars”  and greatly reduces risk.
- The Social Media Transformer – Cisco created basically an internal version of Facebook in 2010 called the Integrated Workforce Experience (IWE). This platform contains a news feed, allows employees to update status, projects, and interactions. Cisco utilizes video for real-time virtual training and communications. Employees can comment on information and tag the items that benefit them the most. This has “accelerated ‘time to trust’ among Cisco’s stakeholders.'”
15 years ago who would have imagined positions such as Campus Pastor, Executive Pastor, and Director of Communications. Churches should begin thinking about the position of Social Media Pastor.
Predictive Practitioners, Creative Experimenters, Social Media Champions and Transformers are all throughout your church. Do you know how to recognize and find them? You can begin by creating church Twitter and Facebook pages. Ask those in your church to sign up and comment regularly. See what you get. Also, when people join your church, capture their social media information along with their personal information.
Build relationships with Social Media leaders and allow them to further your mission and vision. Pastors and church leaders, how are you using social media in your church?
To get future posts on leadership sent directly to you, please take advantage of the many subscription options on this site.