I’ve recently read the book Contagious by Jonah Berger and he lays out five STEPPS every business or group that has a brand, product, or message should think through if they want they want to be contagious. Let me make a distinction before I break down Berger’s STEPPS. I believe there is a difference between building a youth program and building God’s church. You can build a youth program in a church but not function as the church if you know what I mean. Lots of kids gathered in one place does not mean we are functioning as God’s Body with Him as the Head. The Bible has everything we need to build his church. Slick marketing techniques will never produce the kind of fruit that the supernatural power of God produces, but that does not mean we can’t do a better (at the mechanics of being contagious) job of spreading the message we have been entrusted with.
First STEPPS: Social Currency – Share the best of what represents you
Social Currency is defined by Wikipdia as “It derives from Pierre Bourdieu’s social capital theory and is about increasing one’s sense of community, granting access to information and knowledge, helping to form one’s identity, and providing status and recognition.”
So the questions we could ask as a youth ministry are,
What do we do best?
How can we share it?
Where is the best place to share what you do best and will reach the most amount of people?
For our youth ministry, I like to film our band and out games. Those are two pieces of content that our kids value and will most likely share. I video our games and put them on our Youtube channel, not because all our kids subscribe to it (they do not) but because I can share it on other platforms like Facebook and Google +. I have also started sharing smaller clips using Instagram’s video because the majority of our kids respond with likes and comments there even more than Facebook.
I have recently started letting kids use the Photobooth on our Mac. They discovered you can change the lens to make really funny pictures. The other night they must have taken 20 photos with all kinds of people in them. I took all those pictures and posted them as an album to our FB page and my personal page so that kids could tag themselves and share as they pleased. In the future I can also those pictures and create more sharable promo pieces like this
If you’d like to purchase Contagious you can CLICK HERE
Now it’s your turn.
Answer thee questions in the comments, I’d love to hear you work through the process.
What do we we do best that is worth sharing? Worship? Games? Life change? Missions?
How an we share it? What’s bests? Photos? Video? Tweets?
What’s the best platform to share it? Where are your kids that would help them like and share it? Facebook? Twitter? Instagram? All of the above?
NEXT: STEPPS 2: Spiritual Triggers
Jonah Berger describing Social Currency