Florida Megachurch Plants Facebook Church - PR Newswire 3/11/10

On Sunday morning, Northland, A Church Distributed will officially open the doors to its new Facebook app, which will allow worshipers to invite their Facebook friends to go to church with them—without leaving the familiar Facebook environment. Plus, even when live worship isn’t happening, the opportunity for worship is readily available because the previous week's service will be posted and available for viewing 24 hours a day. “We encourage people to be the church everywhere, every day, so it just makes sense to put resources out there that will help people to be that church,” explains Nathan Clark, Northland’s director of digital innovation. With a congregation of 12,000 worshipers meeting throughout Metro Orlando and worldwide via interactive webcast, the church started webcasting live services in January 2006 and, 18 months later, launched an interactive webstream of its services that includes immediate access to an online pastor and the ability to chat instantly with other worshipers. Approximately 2,000 people use this venue each weekend. Two hundred of Northland’s congregants now serve as online missionaries, replying to emails from thousands of seekers around the world. Northland’s live Sunday services will now also be accessible on Facebook. Clark says the motivation behind this new tool is to “take the church where people live.” “At Northland, we often talk about the need to take the church to the people, versus asking them to come to us. For us, it was a wake-up call to realize that we were doing precisely that online—asking people to come to our website for worship. Why require a virtual commute over to our website when you can have church where people are?”

PR Newswire 3/11/10

Urgent Message from Nigeria shared by Mike Breen

Dear Friends,

Below is an email from a dear friend of mine, and a member of the Order of Mission, who is currently living in Jos Nigeria. Please keep him and his family in your prayers.

Many Blessings
Mike

Message from Jos:

Beloved,

Please help post this onto the TOM website so members can read and be informed to pray more effectively. The cause of these attacks which started on Sunday January 17 is the determination of the Muslims in Nigeria to destroy the church in Jos. They are convinced that this will give them the basis from which to make Nigeria completely islamised. So this is an all out Jihad.

What you may be hearing on the news is sheer propaganda and a deliberate attempt to hide the truth. The whole thing started when a church was attacked during her Sunday worship service. Quite a number of people were killed and many others wounded. Soon afterwards, violent Muslim youths went on rampage burning churches and killing/maiming Christians. Few Christians were able to defend themselves because no one was prepared for it. The next day, the violent destruction of lives and property continued even in the presence of the police and army personnel, and in fact with their help in some places. Things got out of hand, and Christians were forced to defend themselves as best as they could, in the city and in the villages. Consequently, lives were lost on both sides. This, the Muslims could not accept because they consider themselves children of the federal government. They feel they have the right to kill and no one should touch them. So, Christians have continued to suffer attacks from Muslims since then with many of the killings carried out by the soldiers, majority of whom are Muslims. This is because the General Officer commanding the army formation in Jos is a Muslim. He selects Muslims and sends into town in the name of maintaining peace, but they go about killing Christians.

We were suffering from this situation when the brutal and heartless attack of Sunday March 7 shocked everyone. They came to the village at about 2 am while everyone was sleeping. Security information was passed to the army at about 11pm on Saturday, three hours before the attacks started and it was delivered to the army chief immediately. Nonetheless, the army failed to be there to protect the lives because he wanted the Christians in that village to be wiped out. The army got to the village at 6 am when the deed had been done. At the wake of this attack, over 500 persons were brutally hacked to death. Their aim is to wipe out the Christians in Jos because they see them as the hindrance to the country wide sweep of Islam that they are seeking to execute.

So the whole thing is a jihad that is sponsored by the Islamic world. All the Muslim governors in Nigeria, especially northern Nigeria are in support of this dastardly act; not to talk of the huge financial support and mercenaries they get from the Organization of Islamic Countries. We need all the prayers that can be offered. We are living daily by the grace of God. There is tension in the city and in the village. Please pray, and if there is anything else that you can do it will be greatly appreciated. Many people are now homeless, and do not even have food to eat. With the rains just round the corner, we do not know where the thousands who are homeless will live.

Engaging Customers by Mark Mathis 3/16/2010

The hot topic with marketing types like me is “customer engagement.”  You’ll see me overuse this new buzz word.  But it is not new.

Customer engagement used to mean studying customer/stakeholder ‘touch’ points.  Then making sure that the experience is a good one for those who engage you.  Now it seems to mean connecting with people via social media.  But do we really want to be engaged with a bank, with a grocery store, with a gas station, with a clothing store?    I find that most of the engagement just means that a raft of e-mails are coming my way.  But not much engagement. 

The one place I saw real engagement that added value was at Disney World in Orlando.  We went on my daughter’s birthday and they gave her a button at the entrance.  At first I thought, “Oh boy a realbutton, you think they could have sprung for a bit more.”  But as we walked around the park, she was treated in grand style by every cast member (employees) we encountered, making it a truly magical day.  The other engagement tool Disney uses is the trading of pins.  Each cast member has a number of pins that they wear.  You can trade any of your pins with these people.  Even the people picking up the trash get into the act.  The kids (and parents) love it.  Each encounter paints memories that last a lifetime. 

And you are truly engaged.  Why?  Because engagement requires a two-way relationship (and I’m not talking about another survey).  Engagement is a commitment from both sides with equal exchange.  Finding touch points, beyond automatically initiated e-mails, is the key to true engagement with customers and stakeholders.  Want to trade a pin? 

Engaging Customers

March 16, 2010 by iowaadguy