Depending where are you living, mobile phones are becoming an essential tool for daily work. You might be away from home, or away from the office, so you might not be available by regular telephone. Or even far away from your computer so you can’t check your e-mail (unless you have a handheld mobile device with Internet access).

But someone with cellular phone is a warranty for almost 100 percent immediate localization. Advertising and marketing companies have realized this quality. Advertising and marketing through cell phones guarantees the public objective will receive in short time the message, avoiding recalls and expending time to locate the client, or skipping spam filters through e-mail.

Mobile marketing is expanding continuously, according to MMA (Mobile Marketing Association) and they say that it is only a matter of time for investors to realize that ROI is worthy in this area.

New Technologies in Information and Communication (NTIC) have developed in a very short period of time. Companies have also applied this technologíes to their plans and strategies to be more lucrative. A consequence is the development of systems to protect customers from publicity and unwished advertising, raising new barriers between clients and corporations.

Not so long ago we only had to knock a door to get someone’s attention. After the popularization of TV, corporations went to the living-room through the advertisements on TV, but remote controls appeared to save the customers (and lo… zapping appeared), new mean, new barrier.

Internet was the next step. Popup windows with advertisements found a new barrier with firewalls, or new navigators with popup blocking system (such as Opera or Firefox among others). E-mail it is still the most common way for massive marketing and advertising, but spam filters are spread over the web.

In cellular phones is not very common to find spam filters for SMS (yet). Mobile phones are the new media in full expansion that allows public to be reachable with a very high rate of success.

When we apply marketing to preaching the Gospel, we can study the tendencies of the market and search new means that provide a easier way to reach people (less barriers to overcome). I want to congratulate the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Philippines for their new campaign “Can You Text Me Now?” (see ANN full report). Seventh-day Adventists will have available their own SIM with an Adventist look and features. (For all details see the report at the link above).Bible verses stored at the SIM, with features such as “Bible verse for today,” a summary of our fundamental beliefs and so on will be available and ready-to-send through SMS. Each Adventist church member with one of these mobile phones will be potentially involved in Evangelism. Most of our contacts in our SIM directory are non-Adventist friends, associates, neighbors, coworkers, and so on. This allows us to connect with people we already know and bypass spam filters. God is giving us new means for communication, new ways for preaching the Gospel. As new tools are created or found, we can apply these methods to preaching the Word of God in anticipation of Jesus’ soon return. Each one of us should think about this: How many people do we have registered in our mobile phone directory? How many of them are non-Adventists? Did I give to all of them the message? Maybe “yes,” but with this new tool we could do a “follow-up” work with them.In other countries this project is not available (like in Spain, at the moment) we always have the option to type some verses and send them by SMS to our fellow people and beloved ones. This will be a private initiative, but I know of a big bunch of people that are already doing so.

What are your thoughts on using new modes of communication to share the Gospel?

Moderator’s Note: Pedro Torres is a pastor and a doctoral communication student in Spain and wrote this blog as a means of collaboration and idea sharing.

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Moderator’s note: This week’s guest blog comes from Laura Byrd, executive director of Joshua’s House, a brand new family life ministry based in  Tennessee.

As I try to provide useful materials and information for people, I am learning that one word is key. Accessibility.  In our fast-paced society one of the easiest things to remember is that often our audiences are drained for their time and resources.  It is our job then, as communicators, to make the information they need as accessible as possible.

One of the biggest ways we can help is by giving them everything they need.  For example, if you are writing on the importance of…say…recycling, try to find a website or a phone number your audience can use to find the recycling center nearest them. (One great place for this would be earth911.org.)  It took me about a minute to find that link, but that one little step can make a world of difference for your readers. Here are a few things you can try to make your work more accessible to your readers:

*Provide Examples - You can paint word pictures or provide examples of your own concoction, examples with pictures are even better.

*Provide visual aids - Did you know that most Americans are either visual or tactile learners? Tap into these learning styles.

*Make the next step easy - If you are calling your reader to action or giving them something to do, make the next step as easy as possible - so easy that they barely have to think.  If you are reporting on a piece of news, give your readers a way to find out more information.

*Give your readers a chance to respond - This is easy for online publications, but this can be done for print as well.  The main point is to give them a chance to process what they have just read.  This can be as easy as asking a question for them to think about at the end of your publication.

Think about it. If you were going to a publisher would you be more eager to work with a publisher who gave you everything you needed including information on how to complete the tasks you need to accomplish, or a publisher who gave you a daunting to-do list and that’s it.

Yes, accessibility might take a little bit more time on our part, but it is most certainly time well spent.

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Our SAC blog is moving from a driving theme of time management to blogs and new media opportunities. I picked up a book today called “PR 2.0: New Media, New Tools, and New Audiences” by Deirdre Breakenridge (2008). As I read this book, I’ll share some insights with you.

For this week, here’s some advice from MarketingProf’s Get to the Point e-newsletter for small businesses where today’s e-newsletter featured blogging advice from Seth Godin:

A blog post is not a PhD dissertation. “Bloggers don’t have to say everything at once,” says Godin. “We can add a new idea every day, piling on a thesis over time.” Take a look at his blog’s archive and you’ll see what he means. Entries range from brief notations to lengthy discussions, but—taken as a whole—each continues to develop his central themes.

People like lists. How often do you see magazine cover lines and online headlines trumpeting, say, The Top 25 Reasons You Need to [Fill In the Blank]? They’re fun, and almost certain to drive traffic to your blog.

No one likes an online dead-end. Go ahead and link to other sites, even if it’s a hyperlink in the middle of a paragraph. If you have interesting content, you haven’t lost your readers forever—they’ll come back for more.

Social media is about conversation. Writes Godin, “Your readers care about someone’s opinion even more than yours…their own. So reading your email or your comments or your trackbacks (your choice) makes it easy to stay relevant.”

The Po!nt: Since the blog format enables you to make continual improvements, it’s never too late to integrate solid new ideas.

Source: Originally posted at Seth Godin’s blog and featured in the April 23, 2008, edition of Get to the Point: Small Business e-newsletter.

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The phenomenon of blogs fascinates me.

Blogs are essentially a public journal, a soapbox for commentary and sharing. Wikipedia reports that blog search engine Technorati tracked 112 million blogs as of December 2007. With the popularity of personal blogs, a lot of companies and organizations had an “aha!” moment and thought, “If blogs are so popular with the people, let’s give them an inside look at our organization.”

A Blog is a grassroots activity. People who are interested stop by to see what you–a person or a company–are interested in. Say something smart and snappy, and people are likely to come back for another look-see. The following you attract may be large (such as a news organization’s blog) or rather small (a handful of faithful readers who read and comment) with any number of lurkers.

Blog readership growth takes time–just like many grassroots activities. With a couple years of blogging experience now, I’ve discovered more readers stick around with shorter blogs. Frequent–or consistent–posting helps as well. Photos are always eye-catching–but not always necessary.

A comment is like a cherry on top of an ice cream sundae and the potential for dialogue that happens in comments is like extra whipped cream.

Yet, it amazes me how for every comment there are 10 spam comments. Before starting this blog for SAC, I asked an organizational blog manager for advice. For an organization blog he suggested four things:

1. Choose a blogger you can trust.

2. Provide a little coaching as to why the organization’s blog exists.

3. Have a good SPAM filter in place and/or moderate comments.

4. Have fun!

So, what are your thoughts about organizational blogs? Is it worth the effort? A waste of time? What’s been your experience? Come on–share and learn!

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What are you doing?

No, really; right now. What are you doing? Or, perhaps the better question is, what are you willing to tell me that you’re doing right now?

Since the phenomenon of this question was first put to the Internet community two years ago in the form of Twitter.com, one might argue that the practice of blogging has possibly reached critical mass. I, myself, have posted to my own blog at a near miniscule frequency ever since I began using Twitter.

Oh right—what is Twitter? Well, the simplest answer to that question is, it’s life between blog posts. Look at it this way. You might regularly post entries on your blog that tell your readers about significant events or thoughts in your day to day life. Yet, chances are good that you don’t post an entry to say that you took a trip to the local smoothie shop for a blueberry peanut butter açai. But what if there were some people who might like to know (and whom you don’t mind knowing) that you like blueberry peanut butter açai smoothies?

This is what Twitter is about. Think of it as a blog, but one in which entries are no more than 140 characters. Moreover, it’s much more suited to the now as opposed to the what happened or what will happen. This is especially true because Twitter is accessible by an untold number of conduits—be it Twitter’s own Web site, instant messenger clients, text messaging, desktop applications, or third-party Web sites optimized to look best on mobile phones—especially the Apple iPhone.

An even better explanation of Twitter is waiting for you when you watch this short video.

So, why am I writing here about Twitter? Because it occurred to me that a service that is all about the now is very much what we, as communicators, are about. It occurred to me that a service which allows potentially tens of thousands of people to quickly and easily be informed of something might be very useful to our communication ministry.

I’m sure each one of you could dream of a lot of ways Twitter could be used, but a few that I thought of might be updates from constituency sessions (even the General Conference Session), goings-on at Pathfinder Camporees, special events taking place this coming Sabbath at a church in your Conference, ad infinitum.

It seems to me that a simple means to communicate a short message to any number of constituents who can follow those messages no matter if they’re home, or traveling with a mobile device, could be a valuable tool to communicators. Should we give it a try?

I’ve just created a Twitter account for my office, Florida Conference. I plan to start encouraging coworkers to let me know of things that could be shared with Twitter followers. If you’re interested, the address I created is http://www.twitter.com/FloridaConf. I truncated this account name since there’s a limit to how many characters a username can be.

If your organization starts using Twitter, be sure to submit feedback to this forum to share your ideas on how to use Twitter for communication ministry.

Lee Bennett is associate director of communication at Florida Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. His personal “tweets” can be followed at http://www.twitter.com/leebennett

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