The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast
CNLP 070 - A Nitty Gritty Guide To Social Media with North Point's Dave Adamson
[MUSIC] >> Welcome to the Carrie Newhoff Leadership Podcast, a podcast all about leadership, change, and personal growth. The goal, to help you lead like never before in your church or in your business, and now your host, Carrie Newhoff. >> Well, hey everybody, and welcome to episode 70 of the podcast. My name is Carrie Newhoff. I hope our time together today helps you lead like never before, and I know you're hearing this a second week into the new year, or maybe way, way later if you're digging back on the archives. But I'm sitting here New Year's Day, 2016, and it's one of those times, I mean, Christmas Day and New Year's Day are just unlike any other day of the year. At least they are in my life. The whole rhythm is different, everything's different. And I've just been thinking about you today, among other things. And I hope this really is already shaping up to be an incredible year. And I think all of you who listen to the podcast regularly, you know the reason I do this is to help you lead and to lead better. And I hope this will be a great companion for you, this podcast over 2016. I'm super excited about some of the guests that are coming up. I think I told you recently, Andy Stanley has reconfirmed as a guest. Perry Noble is gonna be back in the next few months. Ravi Zacharias is gonna come back on, plus we got a whole lot of fresh guests that you're gonna hear from for the first time this year. And, you know, some of them are gonna be people that you know well, and some you will never have heard of. But one of the things I love about this podcast, or at least the way it's shaping up, is you don't have to be famous to make a contribution. And so we're gonna hear a lot of your stories, and we might mix it up a little bit this year too. So always, you know, variety is a spice of life. So I'm hoping that this is gonna be really good. We got a bonus episode of Ask Kerry coming up this week, or at least it's scheduled to it this point. If not, it'll pop up next week. And the best way to make sure you never miss these random bonus episodes is to subscribe, and you can do that for free. And then automatically, whenever we release an episode every Tuesday, or whenever we release a bonus episode on another day, it just shows up on your phone, or on your computer, or, you know, whatever you listen on. So that when you're going for your run, or your commute, or whatever you're doing, it's there, and you don't have to worry about it. You don't have to download it, and you don't miss a thing. So make sure you subscribe if you haven't done that. And just, hey, I got some real encouragement. You know, here I am on a day off doing this podcast, which is great. I mean, I love doing it. But man, your encouragement makes it just so easy, and makes it so rewarding. So there was a bunch of you that left reviews yesterday, actually, December 31st on the day I'm recording this on New Year's Day. And I just want to say thank you, man. You guys really just, you know, you put a lot of air back in the balloon. I just got to thank you. So one of the reviewers whose idea is like a random student pastor, so whoever you are, thank you, and a shout out to all student pastors said this. He said, "Absolutely phenomenal with honest, direct, and broad help for everyday challenges." Man, that's so encouraging. Thank you so much for leaving that review in iTunes. Another one by Clark's 4X. I don't know if that's like four kids, or whatever. But another student pastor, he says, "I really love this podcast as a student pastor, and as someone who looks to get into senior ministry at some point in the near future, which is super cool, that's awesome." Kerry's approach to each conversation is on point. I often ask myself, "I wonder what they, the guest, would say about this?" Many times, Kerry will ask that very question. Love the work Kerry puts into this, has both immediate impact and foreseeable impact on me as a leader in the ministry I oversee. Hey, thanks so much for that. You know, it's fun. I have a lot of conversations with listeners about how I ask the questions. And just if you're ever doing this in an interview context, or maybe you have your own podcast, I know a number of you do, here's how I do it. I will like pre-script 12 questions or 10 questions or so. I'll send them to the person at least 24 hours in advance. But then I'll often, you know, we pre-record these episodes. So when you hear from Dave today, Dave and I did this interview a couple of weeks ago. So I do the intro a little bit closer to airtime, but the interview is usually done anywhere from weeks to months in advance. So I'll tell them, hey, this isn't live. You can say, you know, if you don't like something, we can edit it out or we can go back and redo it. And it gives the guest comfort. And then I say, if you don't mind, I'll just ask some follow up questions. And then often in the middle of an interview, you just follow the trail. Like if somebody says something that's really interesting, I will just bunny trail that because I'm like, I wonder what he means by blah, blah, blah. And of course, you know, being involved in a local church, I've got a filter through which I run all my questions and being a leader. I have a filter through which I run all sort of, you know, whatever a guest is saying. And so I often find the best moments in the podcast, just so you know, a little bit behind the scenes are not the questions that I wrote down. It's the questions that arise in the middle of the interview and those are the ones that just occur to me. And I think that can be often a difference between, you know, if you're interviewing people ever, whether that's on stage, you know, at your church or even in a meeting setting, follow your heart, follow your instinct because I think you're going to get to the real gold at that point. I think the worst interviews are like when there's just five questions, it's like, so tell me about your latest book, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And people just rhyme off, Pat answers. So I think these discussions are fascinating. And this one was this one with Dave Adamson from North Point Community Church, actually from North Point Ministries. He's in charge of all of social media for all of North Point, all six campuses. This was a fascinating conversation, left me wanting more. And I think it will leave you wanting more. So whether you're just starting out in social, Dave and I go there, we talk about, you know, the church with no budget, no people, no nothing, not even a Facebook account here in 2016. How do you get started? He's got practical advice. And of course, if you're listening, as many of you do from a larger church context or even a mega church context, he's got some, you know, sophisticated ideas on how to run social media. I learned a ton and I think you're going to love it. And without further ado, because we go into Dave's background, so I'll let him sort of preface you on who he was, Dave Adamson from North Point Ministries, who's run all of their social media for the last couple of years, is my guest on today's episode. Listen in. Well, I'm super excited to have Dave Adamson from North Point Ministries with me. Dave, welcome. It's so glad to be here. Thanks, Kerry. Good. And Dave, you got to talk about the accent for a second because I know a lot of our listeners, you know, 85% of the people who listen to this podcast are American and they're going to be immediately going, okay, what, what, what, what accent is that? Well, I'm from Australia, but my accent may even have a little bit of a New Jersey tinge to it now. I've been living in the States for seven years and I spent five of those in New Jersey and two in Atlanta. So if you go back to you from Melbourne. Yes, I am. Melbourne. We would say Melbourne, but it's Melbourne, Melbourne, a little bit quick because I'm going to be their next man. You're killing it. I'm going to. Am I doing okay? You're doing it. Yeah. I'm learning. I'm learning Brisbane and Melbourne and Sydney and I think I'm going to be in Cairns too. Do I say that right? How do you say Cairns? Cairns. Yeah. It's almost like the film festival. Right? Cairns. And I know we have Australian listeners to this podcast too quite a few. Oh, oh. Can I, everybody, from Australia? Do you really say good day? I do, but I think that's more of a product of where I grew up rather than, you know, my wife wouldn't say it, for example, my kids wouldn't say it, but I definitely say good day. I call everybody mate. I'm kind of quintessential like that. Okay. Well, that's cool. It's nice to know it's more than just a stereotype, right? Correct. Correct. Okay. So tell us a little bit about like just give us the thumbnail version of sort of your background because you do all of social social media for a new spring church and you're good friends with Chris Dunnegan, who was on the podcast last year. Yep. And he, or sorry, I said new spring. Chris is from new spring. You're from North Point. Correct. My mouth caught up to my brain. So, but you got, you guys will both do the same thing, but take slightly different approaches and I just think it's fascinating. I mean, social keeps blowing up, but you didn't start out doing social. So tell us a little bit about your background before you did ministry and what you're doing in Australia, how you got into ministry and then how you ended up in social media. Yeah. So my career, I always wanted to be a journalist when I was growing up. So I went to college to study journalism, I started out as a sports reporter for a local newspaper, made my way up to being the sports editor, became the number one reporter there as well. And then I went into magazines, became the youngest ever editor of Australia's highest-selling magazine when I was 29 years old, that led to one of our network stations doing a report on me and it was during that that one of the producers said, hey, we think it'd be great on TV. So they pulled me across to a show called Sports Tonight, which, you know, people in Australia would know, but everybody else who's listening, the best way I'd explain it is it's our version of ESPN Sports Center. Okay. I did that for eight years. I was a TV sports reporter and producer, covered a whole range of events and never had a thought about going into full-time ministry. You know, my career in that world was going up and to the right. And then about, I think it was November 2007, ESPN in Connecticut called me and offered me a position. And my wife and I hit what Andy Stanley would call one of those crossroads in life. We had to make a decision which way we were going to go. And we decided to turn the job down, absolutely had no idea what I was going to do because that was like the pinnacle movement. This is what I did. So had you already immigrated to America then? No, we were still living in Melbourne at that stage. But we talked about the process of moving. And it was about two months later, I think that Tim Lucas from Liquid Church up in New Jersey, I've been listening to him on podcasts for a long time. And I reached out to him and said, "Hey, this is what I do. This is who I am." And I don't know if I'm getting called into ministry, but could you give me some advice? And much to my surprise, he emailed me back about an hour later and gave me his cell phone number. And I called him. Before I knew it, he was offering me a job and flying Meg, my wife, and I over to New York for a week and offered us a job and we took it and so we moved eventually anyway. So how does that work? I mean, from sports reporter, journalist, editor, producer to what at Liquid Church? I mean, I know where you landed in that, but that's not a natural translation for a lot of people. No, well, I took on a position as the church online pastor. Yeah, there's a lot of production side to that. There's also on camera side to that. So I did that for five years, helped Liquid really establish an online presence there. And that was really when I started to understand what the impact of the internet and online ministries could have in the world. Now this was back in 2008 and while that might not seem too long ago, not a lot of churches were doing anything back then. Oh, yeah. It's changed so much and so rapidly. So I did that for five years and then handed that off and came down here to Atlanta and worked at North Point. Right. But you didn't start as the guy in charge of social at North Point. That's a fun story. Tell us what happened. Yeah, I actually came here and accepted a position as a media producer. So what I was actually doing was creating the title packages that Andy starts every message with. So I was creating those and then, you know, as part of working here, you get a three month evaluation, but unlike regular organizations where you get evaluated by the organization, what happens at North Point is you, as the employee, evaluate the church. And so I got to say, Andy Stanley saying, "Hey, here's are the questions that I want to know your opinion about how we're doing as an organization." And as part of that, you know, I mentioned social media and online strategy and presence and all that sort of stuff. And two weeks later, I got another email from Andy saying he wanted to have a meeting with me and at that point, I thought I was about to get fired because I had been too honest on this evaluation. Yeah, your comments weren't exactly sunshine and roses. You were saying, "Hey, I think we've got some problems in this area." Yeah, correct. Yeah, I said, you know, there's a lot of ways that we could grow and a lot of things that we could do. And Andy will tell the story that he knew what social media was and he knew what a strategy was, but he didn't know what a social media strategy was until he had that meeting with me. And so we sat down for about an hour and talked through all things social media and what was actually possible to do. And Andy loved it and created a position for me as a social media director and pastor here at North Point. That's pretty cool. You know, and that's one thing I've heard Andy talk about regularly and he'll be back, by the way, on the podcast this year, which is fun. He's confirmed. So I look forward to another conversation with Andy leaders. I know you always love that. But like, he really does read every evaluation for what, how many employees now at the six campuses in NPM, like 500 or something like that, it's a lot. Yeah, there's about 500 and 500 employees and you hear stories about Andy reading every evaluation. But I think in the back of your head, you're not really sure that he's going to read yours. Yeah, you don't think that's really true. But it is true. It is true. He does. He reads every evaluation and he takes it seriously enough and you know, a credit to Andy's leadership rather than just being super defensive or going, "Well, what does that guy know? He's only been here three months." He goes, "Hey, let's talk about it." Yeah, he really sees it as a new employee. There's a window of time where you're not caught up in the machine of the organization that you can actually have an outward perspective and he values that and he seeks that. And when I walked into that meeting, he had my evaluation printed out, covered in highlights and notes. Yeah, it was quite in-depth. It was really good. Yeah, that's great leadership and you know, I don't know how Andy says it, but I know at our church, I always say, "Fresh eyes are the best eyes." And when somebody is new, you just see things that you don't, you know, Andy talks about the couch, the old couch, right, that, you know, that's sitting in your living room that's been there for 20 years that you just don't notice anymore. But a guest notices are the crack in the sidewalk and so we're always looking for people with fresh eyes. So that's cool. And that's how you landed this job. Yeah, that's right. So he literally created this position for me and part of what I do now is, you know, we've got six churches, as you said, and I'm like, Chris Donegan, for example, Chris oversees everything at New Spring. He's got one Facebook page, one Twitter account, one Instagram. We have seven, actually, six campuses in North Point online, so I'm always, I'm trying to balance my time between helping oversee all of those, you know, when I get asked, I remember actually, like my second week on the job, I came home and my wife Meg said to me, "Hey, how's everything going? How's the job going?" And I said to her, "You know what? I feel like I'm a mosquito in a nudist colony. I know exactly what I need to do. I just don't know where to start." And she said to me, "Do not ever share that publicly." And I said, "I'm not ever going to share that publicly." Okay. So I'm glad you didn't. I'm glad to. That's great. Don't tell her. No, I won't. I won't tell her. You know, that's interesting. So let's talk about that because we are having that discussion right now. You and I are recording this interview at the close of 2015. One of my first jobs in 2016 is completely redo our social media, get ready for the launch of our online campus. And literally, just yesterday, I was having that discussion with some of our staff because we have two locations. We hope to add a third in 2016 and it's like one account or three accounts. And right now, they're per campus, but our campuses aren't synced and it's a pain to manage that. It's just going to get more difficult. But like, I think elevation churches want to count across all campuses. New spring is one account across all campuses. Walk through the pros and cons in your mind just for, you know, multi-site pastors or even, you know, people who are planting churches because it's a lot easier just to broadcast and like hit sand. And I'm not criticizing those who do it. We don't know 100% where we're going to land on that issue yet. But let me pick your brain as a practitioner and try to figure that out. What are the pros and cons in your minds? Yeah. Let's say that on the surface, there are a lot more cons to the way that we do it because having one account means that everybody comes into that one central hub where basically disenfranchising people by splitting that hub up into separate locations. But the great thing about that is the community that's built online around that particular church or that particular campus is really specific to that church and campus. That's been a huge win for us. One of the things we talk about when I'm talking to ministry leaders and staff, I will talk about autonomous alignment. We want you to be autonomous, but there are times when we want to have an alignment as a network of churches. And so we let our churches have a certain amount of autonomy. They get to post what they want and how and when. And my job really is to consult with them and get to the point where there is some sort of autonomous alignment so that we're all pushing in the same direction. And what we're seeing created is a bunch of social media channels and platforms that have huge support around them that are very local based. That's what I love about our model. What I love about Chris Dunnegan's model, that new spring and elevation is it becomes a lot easier to manage when it's just one account. Yes, it does. That is a lot easier for somebody to do on their own, especially for a church that's starting out for a smaller church. Having that one account, maybe having a Facebook page, a Twitter page and an Instagram page, that's easy enough to manage. And that's what I advise a lot of churches that are a lot smaller than ours. Have focus on those three channels only and have one account across the board. Yeah. Okay. And by the way, hey, sort of start with a graduate level question. I just kind of got caught up in the conversation there. We're going to do social media for everybody, fully understanding vast majority of churches are under 200 people. You've got one staff, two staff, half a staff, no staff, you're bivocational. You're just trying to do this in your spare time. So we're going to drill down on that, but that's really interesting. And one of the tensions I know that Andy's talked about managing and we talk about managing too is leaders like autonomy. Right? There's a certain... I like your autonomous alignment. I haven't heard that phrase. That's a really good phrase. Like leaders, and this is attention everybody's got to manage, whether you're a new spring church and you have 10, 12, 13 campus pastors or Elevation Church with the same or North Point with a half dozen campus pastors, but leaders like to put the microphone on from time to time. Yeah. And that goes with social media too. So you feel that tension and you're managing it by giving every campus its own voice, its own brand, its own identity. And in fact, the campuses have a name. It's not like North Point at coming or Buckhead, which is different, right? Elevation Church is the same across all locations, new spring is new spring, and then the location. But North Point even has different names. It's more like autonomous churches that are in complete alignment. Yeah. And that probably differs us from a lot of other multi-site churches in that we have created a group of churches. It's not one church, multiple locations. It's multiple churches. So what you see at Brown's Bridge, which is our furthest North campus in Georgia, is way different to what our Buckhead campus is, which is way more urban. And so having these separate accounts means that we can speak a language and post images in Brown's Bridge, which is a little bit more farm and rural that makes sense to them as opposed to posting those photos in Buckhead where it wouldn't make sense because it's all urban and a different clientele, a different sort of guest comes to that church. Yeah. And you know, as somebody who's obviously, I'm part of a North Point strategic partner at Kinexas Church, but as somebody who knows the churches you're speaking of, you look at it on a mat and go, gosh, you guys are like 45 minutes apart. That's not that big of a difference, but it really is. The culture in coming at Brown's Bridge is very different than Buckhead, which is very upscale, very Tony, very young, very Metro. And yeah, yeah, you know, the Brown's Bridge campus is a little more rural maybe. And so I can see that, okay, that's interesting. So, and by the way, if people are wondering autonomous churches, there's one eldership, one budget, but local staffs and then a centralized staff and PM, which is what you're a part of North Point Ministries. So yeah, it's complex, but it creates an interesting setting. I wonder if to some extent the structure of the church dictated the structure of the social media. Is that coming to play at all? It definitely did. That's exactly, you know, when I got in, it made sense to me to have one account across the board. But as I spoke to all the campus pastors and as I spoke to all the staff, it became really clear that the best thing for us to do was to have separate accounts across the board. So there's sometimes when that creates some tensions and some issues, because we want to create content from a central point of view that we push out, but, you know, there needs to be the photography, for example, needs to represent the church that it's going to rather than this central model of what we might hope and lack. So it creates more work, definitely a lot more work. But what it does on the back end, I think for the person who's attending to that church, the person who's a guest at that church, it makes it very personal to them and they understand what they see. And that's the thing that I love most about our model. Okay. That's good. Some good principles there. And maybe it is, if you're thinking about the structure of your social media, look at the structure of your church because, you know, they are very different. You can look at it on the one hand, say, elevation, North Point, New Spring, all mega churches, you know, all in, you know, what, within a four-hour drive of each other, that sort of thing. But by the same token, very different structures. And so maybe that's determinative and then you want to have a social media policy that reflects the culture of the communities you're trying to reach, the vibe even. Yeah, the voice that you present on social media has to reflect the voice that you reflect on a Sunday, for example. Otherwise, it feels like a bait and switch when people come in and go, "Hey, it looks so hipster and cool when I saw it on social media, but when I got here, it was older and boring." Yeah. You've got to have the same voice, the same tone and the same vibe. Right. Well, that's one thing I've noticed in social, even in the last few months, is, you know, it's very tempting to just put 20-year-old hipsters on your social. But I see even larger churches now, you know, featuring what people actually look like. Yeah. It's like the Dove campaign for Real Beauty has come to churches and social media or something like that. Yeah. And there was a big trend to have stock photography and everything. And that became very prevalent. And now I think, you know, we at North Point, people will think, "Oh, you guys must have a huge budget and can afford to have all these people creating content." I'm, apart from a campus level, I'm it, you know, I'm the central person. So I'm taking the photos, I've got volunteers who take photos, I'm building a volunteer photography team at all our churches because we don't, you know, we don't want to pay photographers to come in and we don't want to contract them. We want people who love the church, who attend the church, who are part of what we're doing in that particular location. We want them to be taking images that reflect that community. Yeah. That makes sense. And I'm glad you're mentioning volunteers because I think that is the bias. It's like, well, of course, you know, if there's 500 staff, you probably have a department of 50. Yeah. No, you have a department of one. And so talk about how you use volunteers and even how you cast vision for that. Like one of the things we've talked about at Kinexis Church and we've moved there in the last year is like in the same way that you have a small group leader, you know, their job on Sunday morning is to lead that, you know, second grade small group. We now have people whose job is social media on Sunday morning. Their job is to get the pictures, it's, it's to think about the one or two or three tweets or interaction that's going to happen that morning. And is that the kind of thing you're looking for? Tell me how that's working with North Point. Yeah, totally. So, so we have two levels of volunteers, I guess, when it comes to social media content. One is the Sunday person who we will respond to everybody that tweets about us, Instagrams, comments, direct messages, replies, mentions, their job is to do that. And we have a goal of, of, of responding to 100% of people in five minutes or less on game, which is, which is Sunday. Yeah. Now, I can't do that. Staff members often can't do that because they're busy doing other things. So it takes volunteers to come in and do that. So for example, at Brownsbridge, where not only, that's one of our churches, but I actually do all the social media for that specific. Right. Right. So you're the responder. I am that person. And, and is that North Point online or is that like North Point Church or what account, or do you manage all the accounts in live responding? I manage the Brownsbridge church account and we've got other people who are managing their individual church accounts and I kind of oversee that and consult all of them. But even at Brownsbridge, I can't do it all on my own. I've got a great volunteer guy named Van who, who sits there in the green room every Sunday and tracks every social media channel and responds to everybody in a timely fashion, that 100% in five minutes or less. Okay. And is that, what does he use, like Hootsuite or just to get really granular? Yeah. He uses Hootsuite. He uses Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. That's typically what he's using. And I think he might also use Buffer. I know I use Buffer all the time. Buffer is a... Yes, I do. I use Buffer a lot. Yeah. It's a great one just for managing. I mean, we have access to things like Sprout Social, which is, is about $100 a month, depending on how many accounts you've got coming into it, which is helpful. But for somebody like Van who's volunteering, you know, this is a guy who's got a job during the week, who just happens to be extraordinarily talented when it comes to social media responses. And so I work with him and I meet with him in the same way that any pastor would meet with any volunteer in any specific area, I want to get to know him and I try to encourage and pour into him. And then he, in turn, just volunteers for us on a social media front. We have that the same thing happening with photographers. We have volunteer photographers and I try to pour into them and coach them and train them and help them become better at their craft. And in return, they take photos for us at campuses. My goal is to have two photographers at every campus, at every church. And we're still working towards that, but we're getting there. And we find that there are people who are so good at photography, just sitting in our churches wanting to get activated. So it's just about trading volunteer opportunities. It's great. It's so true. I mean, because you get so many volunteers who are like, I don't think I could ever lead a small group. I don't think I'll ever be an elder. I'm not sure I could ever run a camera, but I can take pictures. Like that's their hobby and they're great at it. Yeah. And that's any size church has that. That's the great thing. You just need to identify those people and then give them, like, just cast them a vision. Hey, I want you to be a better photographer as a person and I want you to help us build community online via social media using your images. Any photographer is going to say, if they love that church, they're going to say, yes, I'm all in. What do I need to do? I think back to when our churches were tiny, and I mean, this is in the 90s, but like, yeah, there were people who took pictures and, you know, if you have a church of 30 people, you probably have somebody who's a really good photographer or, and do you use DSLR or iPhone or both? Like, is it, is it phone photography or do you prefer DSLR? Yeah, we've shifted a lot. There are times where we would use phones, there were times where we would use point and shoots. We've actually decided from a look point of view, we prefer DSLR. Okay. So then, so just explain what that is, just in case people are photographers. That's a digital camera that is very, one of the larger digital cameras that you would see. The entry level would be like a Canon Rebel, for example. Yeah. But typically. So it looks like a real camera, not a point and shoot, but it looks like film cameras used to look. Exactly. What a wedding photographer would use. Now that creates all sorts of issues because it's getting that content out of the camera into a computer and then distributing, which we're working on some stuff at the moment, we're kind of making it up as we go, but we're trying to create an app, a system where we can take photos of worship service and then distribute them to key people like Campus Pass, for example, before the worship set is over, they have access to one or two great images that they composed. Yeah. And so who does the editing, the photographer? Do you have like a volunteer who decide, not the editing, like, I mean, light and all that, but just like, what are the, what are the shots? Because you can upload, and we've had that at our campuses where, you know, you have 50 shots uploaded, but not all shots are created equal. There's that one or two money shot that's kind of like, okay, that's the one that should go up on Instagram. So what I do with my volunteer photographers is I say to them, I want three to five only of your best images, and that puts a requirement on the photographer that self edit. And so they send me three, four, five photos. And then I run them through a really quick processing filter. And then I upload them to a site that helps us distribute again, we're making this stuff up as we go. And we're still got some kinks in there, but it's starting to work a lot better at the moment. See, that's my favorite stuff, though, is to make stuff up as you go along. It's always the funnest to play in a field where there's no rules and you're making it up. Yeah. That's, that's great. So this is good. And again, just don't get overwhelmed by the size of it. I love that it's volunteers. I love that it's scalable. And you know, the other thing, if you think, well, maybe other churches have large staffs, like Chris doesn't have at New Spring, a lot of staff. By the way, that was episode 51, the Nerdist Guide to Social Media. If you want to go back, uh, leaders, you can go back and listen to episode 51 and Chris gave a lot of practical advice from a very different perspective. So I think these are going to be companion episodes and you guys are friends. But the big surprise for me was their Instagram is done by like this, I don't know whether he said it was a 17 or 20 year old volunteer, who just loves photography and sees it as her ministry. Like she prays for people who leave comments on Instagram, like this is her ministry rather than running a prayer group or running, you know, a small group. She runs Instagram for New Spring churches of volunteer. Yeah, that's the great thing about Instagram, right? What we've found at North Point is that Instagram is typically people who are already attending our church. So it's, it's really insider-ish because they're opting to follow us. And so what, what we're learning from New Spring all the time, Chris is one of my great friends and I learned a lot of what, from what he does. And when I've seen the Instagram start to minister to people, we've taken that on as a, hey, how can we do that? How can we contribute to that sort of developing that whole idea? Um, yeah, they're absolutely killing it and we're, we're learning from them. We're learning from churches from around the country who are 200 to 2000, you know, we see churches all the time that are killing social media and we just, we're learning as it goes. Well, and this is the fun part of social media too. I mean, you're part of one of the largest churches in the country period, but I mean, the reality about blogging is, you know, for 10 bucks, you're up and running and Instagram account is free and you can start with your cell phone. I mean, it's just that easy. And so the, the playing field has been leveled and, and the real ability comes from people who just have the initiative and the heart and, and you know, maybe the strategy to try to figure out how to connect with people. There's so much I want to go. I think I'm not hitting any of the questions I sent you, but this is just such a fascinating conversation. Dave, we'll just keep going with it if that's okay. So let's talk about how the platforms are changing. I mean, two years ago, Gary Vaynerchuk released a jab, jab, jab, right hook where he talked about all the platforms and how to use them. And Chris and I talked about that in his episode, but again, things keep moving. This is, this is a moving target, social media. So you mentioned Instagram is primarily for insiders. Yeah. So that tends to be a value add for people who are already attending your locations. Yeah. That's what we've, that's what we've found. And it's just the nature of that platform. People opt in to follow you. So if they're opting in to follow Brownsbridge Church or North Point Church, typically there, there's somebody who already knows a little bit and wants to find out a little bit more. So we get that value add, whereas Facebook, for example, because it's built around an algorithm, you know, your uncle, who I don't even know might see some of my content if you happen to like it. So we try, we try to make that a little bit more unchurched, a little bit more outside of focus in the way that we present content and the things that we choose to post there. Whereas from an Instagram point of view, it can really be a lot more insular. Okay. That's interesting. So say a little bit more, and I know you're making up these rules and thoughts as you go along and next month might be different than this month. But where you sit right now, when you're crafting a post for outsiders, how is that different than posts for insiders? Because this is something I'm really interested. I think leaders are, because you're right, maybe Facebook tends to be the most frequented platform on planet Earth these days. So when you're crafting a Facebook post and you're hoping to reach the guy who's not going to be in church on Sunday, and the odd chance it might show up in his newsfeed, how do you craft that post? Well, there's a lot that goes into this, obviously. First of all, when I'm using an image, I want to make sure that the image reflects the community that's potentially going to read it, you know, sorry, see that image. So the first thing, if I'm at Brown's Bridge Church, which as we've talked about is more of a rural area of Georgia, I want that reflect that community. So I'm putting photos up there of open spaces, I'm putting, you know, tracks and all sorts of things like that, because that's what people relate to. So that's the first thing. The image that I choose, I want that to be relatable to the person who doesn't connect with our church. Then from a teaching point of view, we've got several messages, and again, just using Brown's Bridge as an example, you know, one of the things that we're trying to do there is let people know that we are community focused. So we are posting things about the impact that we might have through our be rich campaign, which is a community outreach campaign. We will post things like that, because that's going to draw people in, people are drawn to generosity, people are drawn to people in the community who are helping other people in the community. So what we post there is going to be about those sorts of things. So the language that we use is important, the image that we use is important. And then, you know, part of it, Kerry, is we need to get people to share that content. The way that the algorithm works, if we want somebody who's not connected to our church to see that post, then we need people who are connected to our church to comment, like, and share that post. The way that it is, the way that the algorithm works, if somebody hits the like button, that's like they've run the first base. If somebody takes the time to type out a comment, then we've got around a second or third base. But if they share it on their wall, that's a home run. So we're constantly trying to create content that people want to share on their wall because if we want as many home runs as we can go. So what is shareable content? Our social media team, which again, is all volunteers except for me and one other staff member who sort of sit in on it. But we say, if we put cat videos up on our Facebook page, like people will just share it over and over again. Unfortunately, for us, that's great traffic, but we're really not about reaching cats. We're about reaching people. You know, if we put a music video up, one that's, you know, targeted to a season like Christmas or Easter, it'll get a lot more traction than say a bottom line from a sermon. But again, you want to stay on mission with that. So what are some share, what is some of the most shareable content you're discovering these days? So obviously, you know, with somebody like Andy Stanley, the way that he preaches, we get a lot of bottom line graphics. But we're even finding lately that the reach of those has been dropping off. But if we post that with a caption, the reach, people won't share it. If we post that graphic without a caption, people seem to want to share it. Okay. So that's interesting. You've got a picture of Andy teaching with no graphic on it, but maybe the bottom line written in the comment section, you know, in the postender, it gets shared. But if you, okay, say more about that. Yeah. So what I mean is if we've got a graphic made with the bottom line written in it, and then we add a caption to that, whatever, you know, hey, if you missed this Sunday service, here's a great thing that Andy said, for example, that does not get shared very much at all. But if we just have the comment in the graphic and no caption in Facebook at all, it gets way more shares, like exponential more shares. Oh, so in other words, put no comment on it. In other words, it's just the graphic of the bottom line. Yes. Say nothing, share, share, share, share, share. And that's the thing. Everybody wants to say something in the caption, right? They want to use a hashtag. They want to say something. But when you don't say it, we find it gets shared 10 times more often. It's pretty interesting to see that. And this is part of what we do. We make this up as we go. We try something. If it works, fantastic. If it doesn't work, we stop doing it. What we've found from a consistency point of view, when we post photos of things, they don't get shared. When we share photos of people, it gets shared. People want to see other people. There's that human connection. The best social media advocates at this are the people who run Starbucks. They're always, the Starbucks social media. It's always pictures of people drinking coffee. It's not just a picture of a latte, for example. They show people in an environment, and it's more about the relationship between the people in the photo than it is, and there just happens to be a latte in there. And if you read onward by Howard Schultz, which came out a number of years ago, he says, "We're actually a relationship company that happens to serve coffee." That's exactly right. We're a relationship organization. That's what it's all about. We try to show off our musical talent, for example. Even just today, I posted a picture up there of an opener that we did, and in two hours, more than 7,000 people had seen it. It's not just because it were a large church that we got that sort of reach. It's because what they saw was so shareable. It was something that showcased some skill and some talent, and people wanted to share that on their own social media walls. Yeah, that's great. A great example, and this was probably before your time, but was the I-band. When it first came out, when the iPad was first released, that thing went totally viral for North Point. One thing just to back up a little bit, if people are wondering, "What's this Facebook algorithm of which you speak?" Man, if you could crack that code, you'd be a billionaire, wouldn't you? Like nobody really understands the Facebook algorithm, but just to give you the 10 cent version, because I've spent hours and hours researching this and listening to podcasts, it's an uncrackable code, but basically, Facebook determines how many people see your posts. Let's say you have 100 friends, if you post something, particularly if you're an organization, I switch to an author account a few months ago, and my reach went down. When I was a person on Facebook, and I just hit a limit and I had to go to an author account, because it only allows you X number of friends, so I'd gone past that, so I had to switch, and basically, then Facebook completely controls and manipulates who sees what. If your post gets immediate traction, people start liking it, commenting on it, sharing it, clicking on it, then it's going to get shared widely, thousands of people will see it, or hundreds will see it. If it doesn't get shared, it dies. If your mom doesn't even like it, you might get 30 views on it. Nobody really understands that algorithm, do they, Dave, or if you do, please enlighten us. That basically explains exactly the way that you did, and the way that I see it is, coming from the publishing world, this is how I look at it. Facebook is essentially an online magazine. It's just that their writers, the content providers, are everybody. Everybody who's got a page, who's got a fan page, or whatever it might be, and so Facebook is trying to protect its audience. They want its audience to come back, and so they only want to share great content. When you post something, it gets sent out just to a few people, if they like it, it gets sent out to more people, and that's how exponentially it starts to grow. And so to think this through for your church, let's say Dave and I are both starting on Facebook for the first time today, and we both like 100 of the same people. We like exactly the same 100 people. Our news feed will be different based on how we interact with those same 100 people. So you click on person 12's post, I click on person 24's post, and then you comment on number 33's post, and I ignore everybody else, your news feed the next day looks different than my news feed. Yeah, wait. Is that true? Yeah, exactly. Did I get that right? Exactly. Okay. And this is why Facebook knows who your immediate family is. You all always, like my wife's posts always are at the top of my wall, but yes, that is a very good thing. The algorithm works. You know, we all get up in the morning and check Facebook and we go, oh, wow, that's a guy I went to high school with. I haven't heard from him in 20 years or whatever. That's because the algorithm has kicked in at that point and said, I'm going to just throw something random at you to see if you like it. And if you like that post, that person will show up more often in your news feed. Right. So if you have a church of 100 people and all 100 people in your church follow you, that doesn't actually mean you're going to be able to communicate with all 100 people of your church. That is so important because when I explain that, a lot of churches of 100 or 200 people think as soon as I post this, all 200 people will see it back in the day. That was true. Not any more. Not the case anymore. You need to create content that is shareable and get people interacting. This is why engagement is such a big thing. This is the biggest thing that we track is engagement. How many people are interacting with and having a conversation? You're one of the things that I always say is to churches of any size. Social media is not a megaphone. It's a telephone. It's not about one way communication. If I've got a megaphone right now, I'm talking at you, you don't talk. But if I've got a telephone, I can pick up the phone and we have a conversation together. Any church needs to see social media as a telephone, not as a megaphone. It's about conversations. Okay. So I was going to say, what do you mean by that? You mean conversations. Yeah. It's all about conversations. This is why we have volunteers who respond. This is why the thing that I track the most of, all the things that are infinitely trackable on social media, the biggest one I track is our response rate and our response time. I want to make sure we're responding to a hundred percent of people who contact us in five minutes or less. And Facebook rates you on that, like inside your page, if you're the administrator for your church account, again, this works with 30 people or 3,000. It tells you your response time, your response rate is 90 percent, 100 percent, and your response time is X number of hours. I used to be terrible before I went to an author account at responding to Facebook messages. And that little percentage, like has motivated me to respond quickly, I must say, it's made me a better human being. So the way I explain, when people ask why is that important, I look at it this way. If your response rate is 50 percent in two hours, for argument's sake, if Kerry, if you and I are driving to that person's church and we text them and say, direct message them and say, hey, what exit do I need to get off? Only one of us is going to get the answer, and we're going to get it two hours too late. So I will be a hundred percent in five minutes or less, so everybody gets off at exactly the right exit, especially on some days. Okay, well, we've gotten really technical, and this is super helpful, but so on Facebook, it's a selective audience, Instagram, is kind of what you would expect. If you follow North Point Church, you're going to see everything North Point posts. It is not selective. There's no algorithm that we get. So if you have a hundred followers on Instagram, all 100 people have an equal chance to see your photographs as long as they're following their newsfeed. Ditto with Twitter. Twitter hasn't gone selective yet, has it? No, it hasn't. Twitter is more like, I always say Twitter is like, Kerry, if you and I are sitting by a river right now and we're having a conversation of one of us sees a duck goes by and the other one doesn't, while the duck's gone, Twitter is the constant stream of information. Yeah, because, I mean, most people I used to in the early days of Twitter, I used to scroll through my whole newsfeed. The only one I do that for anymore is Instagram. And I try to follow not too many people so that I can actually still do that so that I can see every picture. Yeah. I don't know why. I'm just holding out. But Twitter, it's like, if you haven't tweeted in the last 20 minutes or two minutes, I'm not going to see it. It just, if it happens to scroll across your screen, or there's a mention, an app mention. Where are you seeing the most interaction? Is it Facebook, Twitter, Instagram? Those are the three big platforms still these days. Yeah, they're still by far the biggest stream. We totally, completely see way more engagement happening on Facebook. It's just built for that. It's what it's built for. So we try to leverage that as much as we can, but we're also at the same time, we're really trying to focus on Instagram. Some of our campuses, for example, are putting all their focus on Instagram. And the thing that I say with that, that's really good, especially for insiders to give that value add, but we need to be as equally as engaging on that as we are on Facebook. And that means when people comment, comment back, don't let the comments sit there. Don't just like something, sorry, have them like you and have no interaction other than that. I, as you know, I was on the Browns Bridge account today and I was going through liking people in the feed, just liking and making sure that we're following our best followers. There's a reason for that. Facebook is all, sorry, social media in general is all about listening as much as it is about speaking. And too often a lot of churches don't listen. They just put content out there and they use it as an electronic billboard. It's not that. It's a conversation, whether it's Instagram, Facebook or Twitter. And I know that does make a difference, like when North Point Ministries or, you know, Browns Bridge likes something I do or Gwynette Church does, I mean, that still speaks to me, even though I live a thousand miles away and, you know, for church leaders who think it's a megaphone, it's just time to rethink that. But, and you can do this with volunteers. I mean, the largest churches in the country run it with volunteers. So, you know, the good news is that's, that's completely scalable. Who is there a different profile for Instagram, Facebook and Twitter? Like if you think in terms of demographics, like are you reaching more men, just to play into stereotypes, more men on Twitter, more women on Facebook and more people under 35 on Instagram, do you see that true or do you see that basically all the categories are kind of collapsing and you can connect with a variety of people on a variety of platforms? I would say they are collapsing, but this type still predominantly rings true. The thing that I think is the standout for me is most people are saying, you know, most people who I talk with in social media world, they will say that millennials for example aren't using Facebook as much. But the reality is, you know, I saw a stat that at the end of November, 91% of millennials still use Facebook every single day. Don't throw Facebook away just yet. Some people are pushing towards other things like, you know, Periscope Instagram, Snapchat, Spencer Facebook. I would say no. Facebook is built for engagement, Facebook is built for conversation. And we still to this day get our best conversations, our best interactions on Facebook. You know, one of the one of the we're actually looking at from a pastoral care point of view, we can make pastoral referrals by Facebook because that's where people want to reach out. That's where people want to have that engagement and connection and that's happened. And they're not limited by 140 characters. I mean, you can get essays on Facebook. Yeah. And even on Instagram, it's that doesn't happen nearly as much, but I can get a direct message on Facebook, you know, this happens to us on a regular basis. We'll get direct messages from people contacting us as a church who are in dire need of pastoral care, who are in dire need of welfare, for example. And we're able to connect with them and use that as the tool. I think in 2016, more and more churches are going to see that people are making that first connection with their church via social media. It's going to happen more and more often. Yeah. So as a leader, you might be bored with Facebook, but the reality is, you know, a billion people on this planet a day are logging in on it. And I have to remind myself of that as somebody who likes new like periscope. Let's talk about that. You mentioned that briefly. That was like a wave in the summer of 2015. Is it dead? Or like, are you still using periscope? I used it for a little while and then I noticed my feed just kind of dried up and I just kind of thought, yeah, it seems to be drying out a little bit. And we use it typically for behind the scenes stuff, you know, in the moment on rehearsal on Wednesday or behind the scenes on a Sunday. It's great for those sorts of things. But yeah, you know, we focus primarily on the big three, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter because that's they're the ones that are most established and they're the ones that most people are on. You know, you mentioned a stat, the greatest stat that I go for it, if you take those three accounts, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, the average American spends 2.6 hours per day on one of those channels. That's wow. Say that again. That's average American spends 2.6 hours per day on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. So hang on, that's almost like TV used to be, right? Like people with the average American watch TV for hours a day. And now they're doing that for social media. But you get to be the broadcaster. That's a fun part or the conversationalist. Yeah, that's the great thing. And that's what we try to do is we try to be the conversationalist. You're 100% right. We want to connect with them there. We want to engage with them there because that's where they are. People aren't sitting around in their cargo and I wonder what's happening on Northpoint.org right now. But they are surfing Facebook. And so we want to be there in that moment with content that is infinitely shareable, all that connects with them on a relational heart issue. And that way, the next time they think I might go to church this Christmas, hopefully we'll be the church that they think of. Oh, that's cool. So it really is an evangelism tool, which is very, very close to my heart. Yes, it's definitely an evangelism tool and it's definitely it's a long game. It's not a short game. People think, well, I got a post and it didn't get very far. Posts build on posts. This is what Gary Vaynerchuk is talking about in jab, jab, jab, right? You got a jab, jab, jab, jab and then you can write, hook them. Too many churches, ask, ask, ask, ask. We try to flip that. My rule of thumb is always four gives and then one ask. So we give, we give, we give, we give, we give and then we can ask them to come to something and sign up for something, et cetera, et cetera. So give us an example of a give. Like what are some good gives for you? What are some good, hey, we're not going to ask anything, we're not going to talk in about an event, we're just going to give you something. What's a give you something? Yeah, the first one that pops into my head is, you know, in America, we have all these weird national days, like, for example, National Donut Day or National Coffee Day. Well, on National Coffee Day, we post to Instagram a photo of our Starbucks card that has had $200 put onto it and we say to everybody, hey, take this, swipe it, just flash it in front of this swiping thing when you get your coffee and coffee's on us today. We don't. I saw that. Yeah, that went out on Gwynette's channel recently. That's fascinating. We don't ask for anything. We're just saying happy, happy National Coffee Day, coffee's on us today and people will go in and they will swipe it and now, yes, we get people from San Francisco swiping at the other side of the country, but what also happens is people start to put, hey, there's only $20 left, there's only $14 left, there's only $7 left and then somebody will post, hey, there's $100 left because somebody got into that card and re-upped it, somebody like just one of our users. No way! No. So they start to pay it forward. This is just a give. We're giving them free coffee, but we're also giving them the opportunity to give back. So that's a great give that we do on a regular basis. Cool, cool. Yeah. That's great. What are some other things? Well, I'm just being a small church guy here, you know, to put on a card. What else can I do to give people? Tell us a little bit, for example, about your devotional ministry, you know, Ozzy Dave. My personal one? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because that's a give. That's a huge give what you do. Yeah, I would say that that's a give, you know. So I have an Instagram account, Instagram.com/OzzyDave, A-U-S-S-I-E and, you know, I was doing the typical thing, Kerry, I was posting photos of my food, I was posting, you know, ridiculous photos from just my general everyday life. And I've got my youngest daughter has dyslexia and so she struggles with reading scripture. And so I would get up in the mornings and I would just talk to her about Bible stuff and I would share stories with her. And what I started to realize was as a photographer, she loves my images and I was connecting my images to a lesson from scripture and it really made things come alive for her. So at the start of this year, I just started posting those on my Instagram account and didn't know what would happen. I had about 500 followers at that point. And then after a while, I started to realize I was getting a lot more traction, a lot more people were following me as I did it consistently day after day. And now it's this huge thing where I posted a devotional that's linked to a photo every single morning and it's become people's devotions. I get stopped. Literally, it sounds so crazy, but I get stopped in the street. I get stopped at coffee shops. I get stopped at parties that I'm going to with people saying, "Hey, your Instagram account is my devotional." And it's amazing to me, but this is how people are getting content these days. People aren't doing the feedback that I get on my Instagram account is constant. I don't have a book that I read as a devotional, but I'm on Instagram. And so when I wake up on Instagram, you're the first thing that I see and I read your devotional as much. Yeah. Because you post at what? Like 5 a.m. I follow you. Yeah. Six pretty early. I try to do it. Sometimes it's later depending on... Yeah, yeah. That's okay. That's life. Yeah. I believe that. I love being able to do that has helped people hopefully take the next step in their spiritual journey. Yeah. And just to say too, I read a blog and people wonder why does the blog get traction and that sort of thing. And the answer I come up is a lot of blogs I read, it's like, "Well, here's my opinion or here's whatever." If you can just help people with your blog, if you can just write like simple, helpful posts, mine are longer in there for leaders and all that stuff, but if you can just help people, people will appreciate it. Like if you give something of value for free, if it's just a little tip, you know, or even this podcast, we try to make it really, really practical and it doesn't cost the listener anything other than time, which I take very seriously. But you know, if you can just get in the business of helpful as a church and you can be that positive person or you can be that little bit of inspiration that somebody needed or that really practical tip that can help them get through whatever they're facing, man, people love that and they're grateful for it and occasionally they'll share it. Kerry, you just summed up my social media philosophy, I guess. When it comes to social media, I get asked all the time, "Hey, why should, why do you do social media?" And the way I look at it is, you know, back in the Bible days, Paul would be an Ephesus pastoring the people and current 300 miles away, you think the technology of his day, which was a pen, which was handwriting, you know, for those, you know, under 30. Yeah, for those of you under 30, that's when you get a pen and you actually touch at the paper and you move your wrist around and you write words. I used to be able to do that. Yes. So did I. So that was the technology of his day and he pasted people who are hundreds of miles away. Well, we have the opportunity as the local church in this day and age, for the first time in human history, we can literally go into all the world in a second. We can, Kerry, you and I could do a video today of a dancing cut and by tomorrow morning, a million people could have seen it. It's insane what we have. And they probably would if it was a dancing cut. Probably. We need to, as the church, use social media as a way to pass to people, leverage the technology of our day to do exactly what Paul did 2000 years ago. That's why I love doing the social media and online ministry thing. Yeah. Bobby Grinwald from Life Church and I had a conversation recently and he will be a guest, I believe, in 2016 on the podcast as well. He's committed to doing it. We just have to work at a time. But he said, you know, he's, Life Church kind of invented church online. That was a big bold experiment now, 10 years ago. And so they're celebrating the 10th anniversary and he was telling me that they're at times, not every weekend, but their number one audience is India and Pakistan. Yeah. And I'm like, what? What's with that? Because they didn't start out going, we're going to reach India. But he's like, well, they don't have a church. And so we become church for a lot of them. And you just think of the implication, if the mission really is to go into all the world and preach the gospel, you know, we have the tools to be a positive force for good and not a trait one, but this is super helpful. Okay. Anything else you want to share with leaders, because I think this could be a two hour podcast. It's just fascinating, but I'm mindful of your time and the time. Yeah. You know, I think, you know, as I think through what, you know, churches of any size, when I get asked a lot of questions about, hey, you know, how should we do social media? What's your philosophy? What's your strategy? The probably the number one question I get asked Kerry is, is, should the church even be online? Should the church even be on social media when there's so much garbage out there? And that question's still around, isn't it? It's still around and it kind of surprises me in one sense. And in the other sense, it doesn't. You know, if you look, right this moment, every second, there are 20,000 people watching porn via online or social media. It's become a huge thing in social media. In fact, this year alone, the online porn industry will make more money than Google, Amazon, Instagram and Apple and Netflix combined. There is a lot of, I mean, quite honestly, there's a lot of crap online. There's a lot of up in social media, but here's the thing that I always come back to. You know, Jesus several times in his ministry said that we as Christians and as the church need to be salt and light in the world. I've had lots of messages about what that means to be salt, but you know, one specific story about Jesus, he says that if salt loses its saltiness, it's not even fit for the manure pile anymore. I always wondered when is salt ever fit for a manure pile? Then I looked into the history of it and back in those days, Jesus was using a cultural reference that everybody in his audience would have understood. See, they would make, they would cook in these clay pot ovens and because they didn't have much wood around, they would get dried manure and they would cook, they would set that on fire and that would be their fuel for their fire. And they learned over generations that if they put salt with that manure, they mix the salt. There was a chemical reaction that caused the fire to burn hotter and brighter for longer. But what would happen is that process would break the salt down and the salt would lose its saltiness so it was no longer fit for the manure pile. In that story, Jesus says we are the salt, the church is the salt. So we are supposed to be mixing with the manure of the world. We are supposed to be up to our elbows in the manure of the world and that only happens when we move into online forums like Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and church online because that's where the manure is. And when we do that, as life churches found out, we can cause God's word to burn hotter and brighter for longer. That's what they're, that'll preach man. That's a great devotion. I did not know that. Yeah. That blew me away when I first read that. I've actually done an Instagram devotion on that one before. That's great. That's great. And you know what? I mean, I think coming out against social media or the internet as a Christian is kind of like saying, I'm against books. Yeah. It's like, well, wait a minute. There's a lot of garbage written. Yeah. There's actually some pornographic books written. There's some hate books written. And so you're just against books. It's like, I don't, you know, technology is neither good nor evil. It just reveals and amplifies what's already there. And you know, we brought our human nature to the internet. Yeah. And fortunately, by the redeeming grace of God, you can use that technology for good. So why not? But the capitalist church has this history of rejecting technology, right, for centuries. And it's just, well, we're against the printing press just for the record. And the organ and even using seats, we were against that at first when they first brought Jews in in the, in the 1600s. And now some people won't give it up. Yeah. That's amazing, isn't it? Okay. I got a couple of questions I want to get through and make this a little more rapid fire. Sure. You and I have a mutual friend in Rich Birch, who's also been on this podcast. So we'll do this a little more rapid fire. You've mentioned a few already, but what are some like worst practices in social media? So you're kind of like, oh, just don't do that. So the worst practice would be not being on social media. The second worst practice would be promoting yourself constantly on social media. And I mean that for a church and I mean that, but I also mean that for a leader. If you're constantly promoting yourself and what shows you've been on or what articles have been printed or whatever, I think people start to get a distaste for that. The other thing would be not engaging. One of the things that I often say is including people is more important than impressing people. I've seen so many church and leader social media channels that look really impressive, but they're getting very minimal engagement because they're not responding to people. They're not including people in their feed. So don't worry about it making it look. If you can't make it look great, that's okay. Include people before you start to impress people. That's good principle. That's a really good principle. Okay. What about best practices that, you know, where you've stopped and went, whoa, we need to start doing that. Well, you know, Chris Dunnegan at New Springs, they're doing some fantastic stuff with the social media tools that they have to connect with people. You know, I think he shared this on your podcast that he lit, they have campus classes that listen and leaders that listen to the local community and respond to that, use that to get people to come to their church. That's an awesome thing. I would suggest everybody do that. Jay Crander, he's the online pastor out at Saddleback, the way that he connects people who stream their services, stream their content, whether it's YouTube, church online or even social media, he has this ability to connect them with people in their local community that I frankly am still trying to learn from. I mean, that guy is just amazing with the way he does that. I think all of that, what those two examples I just give gave, they point to the same thing. Churches need to find ways to make 2D, 3D. You've got to take what's happening online on a screen and make that personal, make that connection in 3D space. We do that at North Point. We run a program called Starting Point, which I'm sure you've got. We do as well. We want to encourage people to sign up for Starting Point. What we will post is rather than saying, "Hey, signups are this day," which would be very broadcast of us, we create a conversation. We say, "Hey, if you could ask God one question right now, what would it be?" We have pastors and staff on hand ready to answer every question. When we do that, we get such great conversations that come out of it because people use the relative anonymity of social media to ask their deepest, darkest questions. When we've done that, we turn 2D into 3D because we meet with people. We have coffee with them. We have pastors go over and see them. We had this one woman reply to that question by saying, "My question would be to God. How come if I pray every day and go to church on Sundays, why does my husband still beat me?" We had one of our female staff reach out to her via direct message. Our care team came in, found out this was Christmas last year, found out that the woman had just left her husband with her two kids, and our care ministry went in and provided presents for the kids for Christmas, provided Christmas dinner, and really made 2D, what was happening in 2D world online, made it 3D. That woman felt so cared for. Guess where she goes now? Well, she goes to that church. And she's part of a community that loves her and supports her at a really tough time in her life. Exactly. Wow. My biggest tip would be try to find ways to turn 2D into 3D. That's cool. So, one of the discussions, and again, this is more rapid fire than anything, but Andy's got it. Andy Stanley has a pretty big presence on social media, lots and lots of followers. He's not on Facebook, but he is on Instagram. Any by the way, at least last time I talked to Andy, any Facebook account is just not him. It's not him. It tends to be him. Is that still current? It's still current, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I got tricked once, and I messaged him, he's like, "No, that's not me." Yeah. He says so. But he's on Instagram and he's on Twitter, and he manages that himself, correct? Correct. I get asked that all the time, "Do I tweet for Andy?" No, I don't tweet for Andy. Andy has his own voice, Andy has his own vibe, and if I tried to do that, it would come off as anything other than Andy, so no, he does it all himself. Right. And any other notes, because that's a big discussion in social media, that people like to follow people. They don't like to follow organizations as much, but any thoughts on that, the separation of a leader and the organization? I'm 100% behind it. I think it's fantastic. One of the things I do with our lead pastors here is if we're posting content, I will usually inform the lead pastor of the content and say, "Hey, I want to give you the opportunity to let everybody else go second." So can you share, can you comment, can you like this, can you respond? And as they do that as an individual, rather than as a church, it carries so much extra weight. If our Gwynette campus pastor, Jeff Henderson, if he replies to a person who made a comment on our Facebook, well, it carries so much extra emphasis to that person, and we find it to be a real pastoral moment. The thing that I constantly say to our pastors is, if you leverage social media like that, you will be a more efficient and a more effective pastor. That's great. So sometimes do you, if you see something, do you bring it to the campus pastor's attention or Andy's attention and say, "Hey, if you have a minute, do you mind?" All the time. I did it. In fact, just did it today. And it was over something minimal. It was one of the things we do for our Christmas campaign, because it's just before Christmas now, is Christmas is not about what you get, but who you're with. Who are you spending this Christmas with? And I contacted our pastor at Brownsbridge and said, "I just texted him and said, "Hey, can you be the first person to reply to this?" And because he's understanding how effective it makes him as a pastor, he responded straight away, got online and said, "This is who I'm spending Christmas with," and it just started a string of conversation. Plus. That's cool. He then goes in and likes everybody else's comments as well, which is so good. That's cool. If someone's starting out, you've already said, "Just get on social media." And somebody's like, "Okay, 2016 is going to be our year. We don't really have church accounts or I don't have a personal account, but they are now convicted and convinced." What's one or two tips as they start up? First one would be use it as a telephone, not as a megaphone. I like to say that one because it's easier to people usually remember that. It's all about being high touch and not just high tech. So you want to listen to people. You want to respond. If I stick to the rule that I try to post no less than four times a week, but no more than three times a day, that for me is a big thing. It just plays out well on the Facebook algorithm. If you post too many times, people don't have enough time to respond, so your content gets less reach. So no more than three times a day, no less than four times a week. And if you're itching to respond as a result, don't post, respond, respond, respond. - Don't post something, you want to, you've responded to everybody else. That's the thing that even if it's just a liking of their comment on the post that you did three hours ago, that totally counts. That's part of the conversation. That's part of the telephone thing. Too often we want to use it as a megaphone to push our next thing because we've got ministries breathing down our neck saying, "Hey, we've got this event coming up. Can you post it to social media?" So I always will try to have conversations with people and let that conversation happen naturally before I go into posting the next thing. And then even when it comes to, sometimes we do have to promote a service or a ministry or something like that, try to use images rather than using a graphic. We've got a thing here called Seven, which is a men's ministry. We want to promote that. I don't use the Big Seven, which is the logo for that ministry. I use photos about last seven events of men interacting with each other because that gets way more traction. It makes it humanizes everything. Right. So if you're running starting point, show a picture of people in starting point, not the starting point graphic. Yes. And use pictures of people who are actually in your community, not stock photos. Yeah, yeah. Stock photos, you can smell them out pretty quick. Totally. Totally can. All right. Well, just a final question for you. And nobody has a crystal ball, but where do you see social media going and what possibilities do you see as we move forward? Man, I think the possibilities are absolutely endless. I think in 2016, people are going to be organizations, especially churches, are going to be having more direct contact with the people who follow them on social media rather than that big broadcast. I think it's going to be a lot more pinpoint. And I think we're going to find, somebody said a long time ago that the website is the front door to your church, social media is the welcome mat in front of that front door. It's actually that people will first step onto. As I said, 2.6 hours per day, people spend on social media. So there's something onto that first before they even get to your website. So make sure that you have a social media presence. Make sure you're leveraging that to create conversations and engage people and use that as a tool as an evangelism tool to draw people into the community that you want them to be in. That's the key for me. That's so good. Dave, people are going to want to follow you. So let's talk about it personally. And then we'll link to all of the sites in the show notes as well. But you're Aussie Dave online on all your channels? On Twitter and Instagram, I'm Aussie Dave, A-U-S-S-I-E. It's not O-Z-Z-Y, A-U-S-S-S. That's probably a different Dave. Yeah. Aussie Dave on Twitter and Instagram and Aussie Dave Adamson at Facebook. Facebook. So that's like Australia Dave, Aussie Dave. Great. And then we'll link to all of North Point's accounts, the six campuses and so on, which is great. So this has been super, super helpful. Dave, thanks so much for helping us get our heads around social media at the start of a brand new year. And again, if this has been overwhelming, just pick the little bits that you can and start a conversation with people who aren't yet in a relationship with Jesus and those who are and it's just a way to communicate that really wasn't possible a decade ago. Yeah. It's so good. And if anybody's got any questions, Kerry, I'm more than happy to answer or help answer. I love helping the Capitol seat church. So please hit me up on Instagram or Twitter or Facebook and I'll help in any way that it can as long as you teach me something as well, because we're always learning. That's cool. Dave, thanks so much, man. It's a pleasure. Thank you. Well, how fantastic was that? Isn't that great? You know, that's one of my projects over the next two months at Ken X's church as I was indicating in the interview, we're going live with an online campus in the first quarter of this year. That's sort of my responsibility. So hey, when it doesn't go well, you'll know who to blame. But anyway, so we're making a lot of those decisions now on the final form, all of that is going to take. And so I look forward to chatting with Dave more and some other people more on that. But man, isn't that just a treasure trove and you're going to absolutely want to follow him and make sure if you're on Instagram, which most of you are, follow Ozzy Dave. That's A-U-S-S-I-E as in Australia, Dave. Ozzy Dave, that's who he is on Instagram. He's a great follow. Make sure you do that. And you can even hit him up if you've got questions, okay? So he is very open to that. Thank you so much for listening. I really hope this was helpful. Hey, next week we are back with one of my favorite leaders, Jenny Catrin. She is back on the podcast. She's got a brand new book. She talks about what it means to be an extraordinary leader and how do you become a well-rounded leader? Just a great conversation. Anytime with Jenny is great time. And so you're going to love that. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss anything. And if you want to be one of those awesome people who leaves a rating or review, that would be great. I really hope today's episode helped you lead like never before. You've been listening to the Kerry Newhoff Leadership Podcast. Join us next time for more insights on leadership, change and personal growth to help you lead like never before. [music] (upbeat music) (gentle music)