In a week where we wondered whether Twitter was worth a billion dollars and 37Signals was ready to play along, here’s some Twitter news for free — no deposit into the Whuffie bank necessary.

Tweet, Tweet, Ka-Ching: Twitter is Changing the Way Nonprofits Make the Ask
Can your church learn from these nonprofits on Twitter?

• @donorschoose 2,242 followers; see whose followers are the most generous
• @12for12K 2,729 followers; #GG24 – Go Global September 24-30 – one-hour ad sponsorships
• @livestrong 38,339 followers; awareness rather than direct fundraising
• @Twestival 11,824 followers; promote offline, fun meet-ups to raise money
• @NWF 17,151 followers; #nwf to report wildlife findings, encourage conversations

Effective Twitter Backgrounds
Highly customized backgrounds can look cool, but present challenges:

• Layouts don’t always work well with all screen resolutions. Don’t let your Twitter page have a visible panty line of a background graphic that has to tile because it isn’t wide enough.
• Easy does it with the fire hose of contact information in graphical running down the left-hand column. Remember, we can’t click on that stuff so keep it short and memorable.

If you’re up for making your own, try out Free PSD Twitter background template from Fuel Your Creativity.

9 Scientifically Proven Ways to Get Retweeted on Twitter
Dan Zarrella is Mr. ReTweet and also the guy who has a DIY redirect on Twitter if you leave out the second ‘r’ in his name. See Dan’s presentation (or the e-book if you subscribe to his blog) and the FastCompany write up. Highlights of what it takes to get a ReTweet based on his analysis of boatloads (twoatloads?)  of tweets:

1. Use links, but not TinyURL
2. Please and retweet work.
3. Avoid boring words like going, watching and well.
4. Higher reading comprehension is ok.
5. Punctuation is fine except for semi-colons.
6. Original content, rare/unusual words, breaking news.
7. Proper nouns and headline format.
8. Avoid negative emotions, swearing and self reference.
9. Late afternoon, especially on Friday

How To Measure The Value Of A Fan Or Follower In Social Media

• CPM – Use tracking URLs to see what kind of clickthru rate you get from your number of followers, or number of referrers from Twitter (although some traffic from Twitter clients will show up as direct traffic)
• Goals and funnels – measure completed actions
• Direct feedback – responses to questions, input on features

10 Code Snippets to Interact with Twitter
Add some Twitter goodness to your church site in PHP, Ruby or PASCAL. Maybe not PASCAL, but it sounds so French and the author, Jean-Baptiste Jung, is from the French speaking part of Belgium.

OK, your turn. Who else had some Twitter mojo this week?

When your pastor is an old friend of Senator Ted Kennedy who officiates at the prayer service and funeral, you can expect to attract some attention—even on Twitter. His participation swelled the pride of the senator’s supporters in our parish while it infuriated parishioners who were opposed to Kennedy’s agenda. In the process of providing updates via the @StCharlesChurch account I run for my church, I learned a few lessons for how churches can use Twitter more effectively.

We first shared via @StCharlesChurch that our pastor was close to the Kennedy family along with a link to a homily to that effect. Later, we tweeted a change to our celebrant’s schedule — the most popular feature of the website – to reflect the fact that our pastor was going to be out of town because he was serving at the Kennedy funeral. We also tweeted about our pastor appearing on a national news program to discuss Kennedy and later provided a link to the transcript. This was all in accordance with our Twitter strategy.

Without getting into the details of the Twitter responses we saw, here are some tips for Twittering churches.

• Have your church’s profile link to a social media-specific (or Twitter-specific) welcome page that gives an overview of your church and how you use the account. You can easily point to this page to explain why you are providing certain updates. In this example, I could have explained that the parish’s Kennedy coverage on Twitter was related to our goal of sharing information when our parish or clergy are in the news.
• Be prepared for divergent responses that come in different forms.
  • Positive responses came through in private DMs and other non-public channels. Negative responses came in public @replies and were often retweeted.
  • This split makes me wonder if something similar happens in other campaigns that attract negative publicity. Does the public side of such a discussion—for example, searching Twitter—sometimes show only one side of the story?
• Regardless of how you feel about the funeral itself, the content of the @KennedyNews Twitter account is a good example of how to handle funeral coverage in a nuanced way. (Except for the background image and avatar, which are too stark.) The feed gave an insider’s view, including photos and the funeral program, while avoiding the ick factor. It’s hard to strike that right balance when tweeting live from a funeral, as the Rocky Mountain News learned.

Is your church on Twitter? What lessons have you learned in practice or while thinking about whether your church should start?

At the last Northern Va. Search & Social Media Meetup, I facilitated a discussion of how businesses can use Twitter. After working my mojo on the summary to churcify it, here are the key points translated for church marketers.

How Can Churches Use Twitter for Business?

Determine your Twitter type:
(Based on Jeremiah Owyang’s 4 Twitter Types)

1. Pure Corporate
2. Mostly Corporate with Some Personality
3. Mostly Personal with Some Corporate Ties
4. Pure Personal

The consensus of the group was that #2 was the most effective.

What are purposes of a church Twitter account?

Attract new members

@missionpie tweets which types of pies will be made that day based on freshness of available produce

Customer service

• Network Solutions – respond to customer frustrations and problems

Crisis communications

• Southwest responds to damaged plane

Overall branding

Fundraising

How can a church get noticed on Twitter?

• Look at your competitors’ followers and start following them; retain those where some interaction is taking place
• Google alerts of your brands, products, competitors to see the conversations taking place
• Follow and use relevant hashtags
• Retweet to gain attention and participate in the community
• Get listed in Twitter directories
  • WeFollow.com
  • twellow.com
• SEO tactics

When is the best time to tweet?

• Tuesdays are popular (Mondays are too busy)
• Depends on your market and audience
• Try different options to see what works for you

Who should own/run a church’s Twitter account?

• Consensus was that marketing/communications should in the way that it’s another channel
• If the account is purely for customer service, it may make sense for that dept. to control it.

Remember, though, that every customer service interaction is still a marketing/branding event.

For churches, it makes sense to have someone involved in the communications ministry to be involved, whether that’s a staff person or volunteer. If the account is the church’s official account then it must be registered with an email address belonging to the church to keep control of it.

How do you handle escalations or hand-offs on Twitter?

• For customer service, provide an email or phone number to move the interaction out of the Twitter stream
• Refer parishioners/guests to a blog or site with more information

How can a church monitor what’s being said on Twitter?

• Google Alerts
• Search.twitter.com (you can grab an RSS feed of any search; you can also save a search inside your own profile for easy access)
• Paid monitoring:
  • Radian6.com
  • Trackur.com
  • Mashable’s list
  • Marketing Pilgrim’s list, I
  • Marketing Pilgrim’s List, II
• Remember to build in a process for managing and responding after hours and on weekends

How can a church track the effectiveness of tweets?

• Run specific contests/promotions/coupon codes only through Twitter.
  • Mervis Diamonds runs Twitter-only promotions that are different from their Facebook-only ones.
• Use a URL shortener with analytics, such as bit.ly
• Include campaign tracking code in your shortened URLs

What are good mobile Twitter clients?

• UberTwitter
• TwitterBerry
• TinyTwitter
• TweetDeck mobile app
• m.twitter.com (mobile version of Twitter)

How does a church track the “@names” of their customers/prospects?

• Doesn’t seem to be built into attendees’ customer relationship management (CRM) systems yet, but expected to be another common field soon

Where can I find a Twitter strategy template for my church?

• This is a good start even though it was originally designed for UK government offices:
  • Overview
  • Template PDF

Follow @NoVaSSM on Twitter for ongoiong tips. And my @churchmojo account for Twitter and church marketing tips.

At the end of the evening, we also turned to SEO and Facebook.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

What are some helpful SEO resources?

• SEOmoz On-page Optimization (distributed at the meeting)
• Jon Cassady recommends Search Engine Marketing, Inc. by Mike Moran/Bill Hunt
• MarketingSherpa.com
• MarketingProfs.com
• WordTracker.com
• Google Tools
  • AdWords Tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
  • Google Insights http://www.google.com/insights/search/#
  • Google Trends http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?sa=X

3 Pillars of SEO

1. Good content
2. Links from other sites
3. Your site’s architecture

Anyone using Bing as their primary search engine? No.

Facebook

Should I create a Facebook Page for my business?

• Facebook Pages Overview
• Facebook Page Tips

What’s the difference between Facebook Pages and Groups?

• Mashable overview

If you had been there, what would you add to the discussion? What challenges do churches face in social media that are different than those of small business?

When He-Said, She-Said Spills Into He-Commented, She-Commented

Does your church allow comments on your site? If you ever consider a policy on comments and moderation for your parish, this column from the Washington Post’s ombudsman will give you some more areas to explore.

An article about a man who pretended to be employed to avoid the presumed shame of losing a job turned ugly in the comments section. His estranged wife noted that the man wasn’t downsized, but was “fired for pooer performance.” His teenaged daughter commented later that he had mental problems.

These comments generated even more remarks in response.

The Post’s ombudsman wrote in the column, “Legally, The Post isn’t liable for comments. Under federal law, responsibility rests with the commenters. But journalistically, what about accuracy and fairness? Is it all right to say someone is mentally ill without proof? What if [he] wasn’t fired?

The column goes on to discuss the tradeoffs of removing a comment that has already generated many comments in response.

How would you handle such a situation at your church? It’s a difficult one to assess, particularly in a way that meets the higher, compassionate standards a community expects from a faith-based organization.

You better have a good answer before you add comments to your church’s site.

[Add your thoughts to the comments. I’ll try to moderate them appropriately!]