Meet the Coolest Pastor on the Planet

T here are a handful of people on the planet that I will gladly work for without a fee. (If you are wondering if you might be one of them, you probably aren’t). One of those people is Phil Vaughan. My eldest brother once called him the “Coolest Pastor on the Planet”.

Phil lives in Colorado with his Wife Donna, and two boys, Austin and Carter. He has been Pastoring at Southeast Christian Church in Parker for the last five years. He studies non-profit organization, climbs 14ers, and is a technophile like me. He is one of the best Parents I know, and his wit and sense of humor are simply hard to come by.
Through the prodding of others, Phil has decided to share his world through a blog. My guess is that he will be successful at this (as he is with most everything he does, except maybe four wheeling), and I wouldn’t be surprised if one day in the future his blog turns into a book.
What Phil needed most was design and implementation. He didn’t want a blog that came from Blogspot or something canned from WordPress.com. He wanted something fresh and original, and he needed his blog branded and equipped for the social media world in which we now live. Phil turned to me to help make this happen.
Below you’ll see a shot of Phil’s new place on the web, which goes live tonight. You should stop by and take advantage of the opportunity to get inside this guy’s head.

The Finished Product:

Phil needed his new custom blog hosted on the web and he asked for my advice. This was a no brainer. Check out Bluehost if you need awesome, fast, reliable hosting. I have been with them from the beginning of my web career and they have never let me down.

T he menu is up! I was sitting in Wendy’s for a little fast food fix and found myself admiring their menu. Clean, colorful, appealing, and straight forward. I thought about the fact that somewhere, there was a graphic design artist who paid his mortgage designing menus like this.
I was inspired to offer a menu here at Martin Ray Vaughan.com.
First, because in my line of work you rarely see this kind of simplicity. Typically in web design or videography websites you do not see prices. Instead, you contact the artist and eventually discover the price tag. So to me, it was a refreshing approach to allow a visitor to paruse my site, look at my style, and then know up front what kind of investment is involved. Secondly, I’m always looking for a reason to sit down and do some design work. This menu is a far cry from a fastfood menu, but I wanted it to be clean and inviting, and simnple. I imagined a six year old pointing at it, saying, “That one!”.

Y ou believe in your business, and that’s a great thing. There is nothing like pouring yourself into an idea or a vision and knowing that you are doing exactly what you were created to do. If that is where you’re at, take a moment and relish in that fact. Now: ask yourself if you’re doing all you can to sell that vision to your customers. Does your potential client base know your vision? Do they know what you offer? Or, do they even know you exist?

Today’s marketplace requires a strong online presence. Whether you’re selling candles or printer cables, most of your clients can be found in one centralized place: the web. Internet World Stats puts the number of Americans online at 77.3%. You can not afford to overlook this statistic.
A recent client came to me and needed a makeover. They realized they had a few holes in their business model, and those holes were related to their online strategies. This was my approach:

1. A new Logo and a new Website. The mark of a great website is the meeting of functionality and beauty. The site must be inviting, easy to navigate, and engaging. It must promote a conversation. The logo must convey the very heart of their organization. It must be simple, powerful, and memorable.

2. A social media campaign. There is more to this than meets the eye. It isn’t just signing up for a Twitter account. Social media from a business perspective is about engaging clients (and potential clients) in meaningful dialogue that will not only reveal their needs but highlight your ability to meet those needs. This requires relevant and fresh content.

3. Powerful Video. Every marketing strategy will benefit from online video. There is nothing like a cinematic trailer or commercial to grab your customer’s attention. There is plenty of bad video out there, made by marketing people instead of by film makers. This is where I shine. I am a film maker who happens to be a salesman at heart.

4. Training for autonomy. When the above three elements are in place, a synergy occurs. It’s important that my client learns to run the engine of thier new online presence without me. I will train their staff on Social Media and blogging, and give them the tools to continue to provide content that will engage their growing audience.

I’ll close with some statistics from Mashable.com, who recently asked some of the corporate giants if they’ll be investing more in online marketing this year:

Brands that were cited for “effectively getting their message across via social media” include Old Spice (chosen by 15%), Pepsi (8%), Starbucks (7%) and Ford (6%).
50% of respondents said they use a mix of in-house and agency to handle social media outreach.
80% said they were planning iPad-based advertising and/or an iPad-based app this year, while 20% said they were “not planning much” of either.
87% said social media was “important” or “very important” to achieving their biggest marketing goal this year.

Head on over to my contact form and let’s talk about your business. You really can’t afford to do nothing.

Recently I was consulting an accounting firm on their online presence and it occurred to me that some of you in my small readership might benefit from a refresher on the importance of understanding how today’s social media storm relates to your marketing strategies. While there are plenty of in depth (and honestly, more informed) sources out there on the web concerning this phenomenon, those of you in my social circle might have wandered here and may benefit from this article.
Gail Goodman recently points out the paradigm shift in Entrepreneur Magazine:

You can’t just “talk at” customers anymore. They now expect to be part of the conversation and part of your business story. Social media has irrevocably changed the email marketing landscape.

While the idea of being a leader or innovative thinker in your industry as a way to gain customers is not a new concept, the methodology by which you convey this has drastically changed in the last decade. Years ago email became a powerful weapon in your company’s marketing arsenal. Being able to blast out 10,000 messages at the click of a mouse with instant delivery and little cost was revolutionary. When you add the social media layer on top of this, what happens is really fascinating. What Goodman calls being “part of the conversation” occurs. We now have the tools to draw our clients back into dialogue. It’s as if the customer relationship has come full circle. At first, we saw technology has an advantage to efficiency, but quickly realized that it had the potential of dumbing down our marketing and creating an impersonal environment wherby we no longer really heard what our customer’s wanted.
Today, however, the social media storm has allowed us to once again initiate meaningful conversations. By taking a few steps in the right direction, your company can once again harness the power of the immediate feedback that occurred in the Ma and Pop Country store when Farmer Brown would walk in and say, “Get me in some of them heirloom tomatoes,” and you had a no-brainer on your next supply order.
I will point my readers to three people at the end of this article who can really take these concepts into much deeper waters, but for those pressed for time, here are five things to consider:

1. Update your website. Don’t settle for a dated website that shows you are a decade behind the curve. Get current with your CSS and XHTML. If that didn’t make any sense, hire someone who knows what that means.

2. Plug in to the Social scene. At the very least, you should be on the big three: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You may find as you dig deeper into Web 2.0 that you’ll enjoy other sites like Google Buzz, Delicious, Skype, and StumbleUpon.

3. Connect it all together. Your email marketing, newsletters, website and Social pages should have a sense of connectivity and cohesion. This is the concept of branding, which is a whole other beast. But for starters, make sure everything from your email signatures to your newsletter to your website invite people into meaningful conversations.

4. Provide relevant, value added content to the web (and your potential clients). Let’s face it, if you’re an accountant, you are just one fish in a very large Ocean. But let’s say you are writing articles once a week on your blog about the tax game in your specific city. This will generate interest, conversation, and ultimately recognition in a potential client’s mind. This is a good thing.

5. Give back. This relates well to Number four. You must remember that your potential clients and you share a human connection. Promote people you like, products you believe in, and services that have made an impact on you. If you take all these steps in this article to gain client interaction and still treat them like numbers, you will ultimately fail.

For further reading and in-depth research, I would point you to three close friends of mine. Francisco Rosales lives outside of L.A. and has helped many clients explode their online business by focusing on conversion and usability. Francisco and I skyped on several occasions and he opened my eyes to the value of social marketing. Eren Mckay runs several websites, one of which is Embracing Blogging. She not only knows how to play the game of social marketing, she loves Jesus with all her heart and believes raising her children in a Christian home is the highest calling. I trust what she tells me. Finally, Nicholas Cardot is a web guru that runs Site Sketch 101. Go over to Google right now and type in “how to blog”, and you’ll see Nick’s website ranked 4th out of 354,000,000 results. This is no accident. Nick knows his stuff and he’s become a trusted friend.

With that, I leave you in the Grace and Peace of our Lord, and I will now demonstrate the entire point of this article by asking you to take a moment and share this article by Tweeting or sharing on Facebook.

Marty

I hesitated about writing this post, although it is on my heart and, I think, timely for our current struggles in interpersonal communication. My hesitation was that I didn’t want so-and-so, or so-and-so, to read this and think that I was passively aggressively talking about them in a blog post.
I’m only beginning to warm up to the fact that my family has a history of passive aggressiveness. Trying to be a cycle breaker, I am beginning to speak my mind even though sometimes it scares the ever-loving crap out of me.
A buzz phrase that has been lingering around for a few years now you may have noticed is “being fully present”. This is the art of living not in the past or in the future but right now. It is also the art of mindfulness. David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done, helped bring the idea of mindfulness front and center in our culture by sharing an old martial arts ideology “mind like water”. In plain English, this means keeping our balance in a chaotic world. Allen asserted that if we learned to organize our life effectively, we could stop the incessant to do lists rattling around in our heads while we are sitting in front of a friend or a loved one.
Have you seen that blank stare in someone’s eyes before as you were talking? They are two feet away but their mind is in east Kansas, thinking about something else. Work, kids, what they’re going to say after you shut up, or maybe wondering if you’re going to shut up. We’ve all been on the receiving end of this communicative middle finger and it’s not a lot of fun.
Now. What about when you’re mid-sentence in a conversation and the person across from you is looking down at their smart phone? We’ve all probably been in this position today. It is rampant.
The blank stare has been around since David mentally checked out on Bathsheba while she droned on and on about how the camels were particularly grumpy today and the sand storm totally ruined her entire day’s wash.
The smart phone scenario has been around for only a decade. It’s actually brand spanking new in the bigger scheme of things, and I suspect an awakening will take place in the not-so-distant future where our culture will recognize what’s happening and push back against it. Soon (I hope) it will be serious faux pas to have your phone out in view while in the presence of another person. Period.
The obvious irony is that these devices were meant to connect us – to bring us all closer; and yet I believe that unless monitored closely, it can become the greatest hindrance in communication our modern age has ever seen.
We’ve all been guilty of iSnubbing, and I’m no exception to the rule. But lately I have been evaluating the kind of information I am gaining while ignoring the presence of another person. Here’s a short list of some of that invaluable info:

1. Alex “likes” the band U2. Good to know.
2. Jacob just moved in our game of “Words with Friends” with the word borborgymi. He’s clearly cheating.
3. John took a picture of his lunch before digging in. That’s a nice looking gorganzola stuffed chicken breast!
4. Stacie is having another manic Monday with a pile of laundry staring at her.
5. Shelly’s chicks in Farmville were hatched! What a relief! I had stayed up many a night worried that the Farmville wolves would come and steal them away.

My work has a no email Wednesday. Unless it is a dire emergency, emails are off limits. I’m thinking about leaving my iPhone on the charger that day as well. No phone, no email, and no distractions. Are we really having to re-learn how to be “fully present”? My Grandparents would seriously laugh at this. I can hear my Granny saying, “Fully present? Where else would you be?”.
Where are you? Would those closest to you say that you’re showing up?
I am motivated by this one idea: when someone feels like you really – I mean really – care about them, and they feel like they’re not alone in their struggles, being fully present is a no brainer.
Today after writing this post I saw this commercial…even Windows is getting it.

I think it’s safe to say at this point we are all either on a social media site or sitting next to someone who is, at this moment, on a social media site updating their status. Now that Smart Phones like the iPhone and Nexus One are replacing the relics we used to carry around a few years ago (remember how cool you throught the Razor was?), becoming socially linked up is as easy as dialing up your Mother on Mother’s Day to thank her for spanking you as a child and making you break up with that loser you were dating in the 10th grade.
I will attempt to summarize for us noobs (which by the way is a shortened, slightly derogatory version of the nomenclature “Newbie”, meaning newcomer or layperson) what is really going on in the Social Media world in a single post.
Consider this your primer on the Web 2.0.

Not long after Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet in 1989, the Army said, “Hey, we might be able to use this!” and Web 1.0 was born. Practically the only way to get there was through AOL. Some of you might still be receiving software from AOL in your mailbox.
In those days, the Web was static. Meaning, it showed you some information and you used that information in your every day life (the number for Pizza Hut). The Web was a essentially a one way conversation, and we the general public could only passively view the information presented to us. Not a big deal considering that up to this point Radio and Television were essentially the same arrangement. We could no more change website content than we could re-write the ending to a Happy Days episode.
The landscape of the internet (and music and television) became radically altered in 2004 with the introduction of Web 2.0. Actually in 2003 a website called Friendster was launched out of Mountain View, California. This site required user input to create it’s content.
The web we know today operates on this paradigm shift. We are now in the world of user-centered design and interoperability where our input creates collaborative content. The web has become dynamic. If your reluctant Grandfather says of this new concept, “Garbage in, garbage out!”, he’s actually right.
From this platform we enjoy such content as blogs, collective information sharing sites, and video-sharing sites. Names like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Wiki are now household.

Industrial to Social

The landscape of how we communicate is forever changed, along with how we gather and distribute information. Now it is possible for a group or even an individual to reach a mass audience, and to do so without the time lag of traditional media. With Web 2.0 comes the risk of compromised information, collective group think, and plain old ignorance handed down as fact. Take Wikipedia as an example. Hundreds of thousands of individuals have contributed to the online encyclopedia, and it is up to the collective whole to police the information for errors. It has taken a few years, but most of us now use Wikipedia sparingly and consider it grain of salt research. High School and College students have been instructed by their teachers not to even think about putting Wikipedia in their bibliography.

Numbers Game

Now consider someone like Glen Allsopp. At the tender age of 15, Glen builds a website. At 17 it becomes apparent that he understands the Social Media game inside and out. Thousands follow him on Facebook and Twitter. He understands how this phenomenon is wired and what makes people respond. He is a shy young kid who grabbed this industry by the cahones. At 18 he cashes in. Being chased by Nissan, Hewlett Packard and Land Rover, Glen drops out of his Freshman year of College and takes a job in South Africa, making 5 figures a month. A month. After a few great emails, I consider Glen an internet buddy and I follow him on Twitter as he traipses across Europe staying in 5 Star Hotels. The Fortune 500 are still chasing down his genius. He has an affinity for good ale so you might try looking in Amsterdam.

Take Away

I would leave you with this thought. Digital community may be a nice tool but it does not replace real, physical community. You have too much control over the conversation in your digital life and very little risk. Relationships take risk. We can not become fully known unless we allow someone to wrestle from our grip the painful, the ugly, the unbecoming parts of us we can easily hide in our Facebook updates. You may be able to squeeze something profound in 140 characters or less in a Tweet, but will it leave you vulnerable?
With the World becoming more connected, why are sociologists at Duke finding that lonliness in America is running rampant? In just a few short years the number of people in our lives that we can turn to with matters of the heart has dropped by one third and those that have no one has doubled.  Apparantly when it concerns the most basic need for love, affection, and belonging, there’s not an app for that.  So my challenge to you is this: use social media as tool and not as a substitute.  A means and not an end.  Unplug and plug in.  In the meantime, my social bookmarks are plastered all over this site, so let’s be FB friends or connect on Twitter.