I’m going to copy, paste, and edit an email exchange I had earlier this week. It all started when I ran across a blog post of someone who was running Google Ads on his blog and decided to write a post about one of the ads he read. That ad was from EveryStudent.com (ESC), a Campus Crusade website.

More and more I’m believing that the way we have handled the “response” part to our eMinistry has to adapt and change. More and more people aren’t taking the traditional paths we’ve set up for them to interact with us. They are doing their own thing…but in this case, he is inviting conversation. But how will we find out about his invite? This is why I think we need to expand how we cover “response”.

This also is a cool example of how ppc ads can penetrate into places we never quite expected.

A reply:

Good question, Rob. How did you find it?

I replied back:

I should probably update this post, but it’s a primer on how to monitor what’s going on.

What I think would be an interesting strategy is to have a few volunteers run their own blogs — or “corporate blogs” like an ESC-related blog…or one ESC blog with a few authors. The point is there’s some people part of your ministry who are designated “blog responders”.

Their role isn’t very different than those who are email mentors or chat leaders. They use a different tool - blogs. They write about what is appropriate on their own blog(s). If there are a few responders, they are loosely networked through links but nothing very official-looking.

Their role is to monitor the blogosphere for posts made about key phrases like “EveryStudent.com”, “Campus Crusade”, etc. You can also monitor any time your URL is used in a blog post. These responders monitor this activity then go out and comment and engage the blogger there on their blog.

These responders use their own blog as their link back. That way, for example, a responder would comment on a blog post someone made about ESC and his comment links back to his ESC-related blog so that the conversation would either continue on the original post, on the responder’s blog, or both. The responder would continue to monitor that post for a hopeful continued conversation. The responder’s blog would also prominently point to the gospel presentation back on ESC.

Does this make sense? The idea is that there isn’t much difference in training to engage people in blogs than there is in email, discussion boards, or chat. It’s just that to blogger it’s more effective (and authentic) if the responder has a blog (a voice online) elsewhere to show they are human. More discussion can happen there too. It’s just with this we have to be more intentional in monitoring.

With the proliferation of blogs, people (and this example is a great one) aren’t always going to engage us in the ways we originally wanted (email us from our site, chat with us on our site, discuss with us on our site). They have the ability to engage with us on their own turf. We can go there. After all, they did invite us to comment.