How would you run a viral/2.0 campaign?

Apparently there are only 24 hours in the day.  Go figure.  I have been hard at work getting a new blog organized for this thing that may or may not happen on January 15th, so blog energy and time have shifted over there for the past few weeks.

But . . . quick question for those of you who are all hooked up in the blog and 2.0 world, "If you were running ("standing" in our tradition) for some kind of national church office and wanted one aspect of your campaign to utilize Social Media, Blogging and all things 2.0 to get your message out there what would you do?"

• Widgets and Blog bling?
• Facebook Fan Page?
• Podcasts?
• ?
• ?

In the meantime, The Corner just sent me this comforting, yet disturbing image,  Jake Bouma gives us the funny video Christmas List, Yo and DAIO just let me know about A Cavalcade of Bad Nativities.  Enjoy.

Comments

[gleaminglark]

podcast AND blog bling.
visual and auditory.

[toby]

I've been working on figuring out the same thing myself for Stafftool. The biggest boost I've gotten this far is when it was mentioned on a popular blogger's linkroll. Traffic to the site went up around 100x in one day. If you had some stuff other people could put on their own blog that would link to yours that would be cool. The facebook fan page hasn't done much, no one knows about them really, so they're hard to get off the ground (at least in my experience), but they can't hurt. Maybe try to make some sort of funny viral video or something, although I'm not sure how appropriate that would be :) If you find anything that works, let me know!

[Vox]

I second the video idea. YouTube is (for the moment at least) the Big Thing on the Internet. If you can get a funny or deep (or both) video up, you can probably snag a lot of traffic, especially if you mention your blog address somewhere in the video.

[Bob]

remember who the folks are who would be voting for you....older, elected by their presbyteries, solid church government types is my guess. Don't get too techy for them, they're not there. Have your church's website be the main weblink to give out for interviews and press releases and have something on the homepage upper top left that folks can click on to explore more about you. That click can take them to testimonials from your congregation's members, your presbytery, and other ministers and well-known elders. And yes, that page ought to have some youtube videos of you with some "sound-bites" that show the viewer that you have *vision* for the future and for our church.

[Bruce Reyes-Chow]

GL - Thanks! We will!

Toby - We are going to try and be creative without being weird. Some just may not appreciate the humor that I/we do.

VOX - Sounds like the Video thing will be there.

Bob - Yes, good to keep in mind. We will have a link from the MBCC site to my moderator blog, so hopefully that will help.

[Neal Locke]

One thing that makes for "viral" is "useful." And in the context of the internet, and especially a campagin, that boils down to information.

In the Web 2.0 world, that means crowd-driven information. Although those who will vote for you will probably not be too tech-savvy, those who work for you will, and we can make it easy for non-techies to find a wealth of information about you, your background, your positions, your events, whereabouts, etc:

This is where wikis come in handy. Check out Pete Ashdown's wiki from his US Senate race -- he didn't win (ran against Orrin Hatch) but got a lot of positive press coverage for the wiki, and I think it be a good model to follow:

http://peteashdown.org/wiki/