Church Signs: The Original Tweets

Think about it. Those back­lit signs with the manually-applied char­ac­ters that churches use to recruit parish­ioners are the orig­i­nal tweets. Today’s Toronto Star pro­files these signs fea­tur­ing clever (under 140 char­ac­ter) procla­ma­tions like:

“A Toyota’s not the only thing that can be recalled by its maker”

“Want to talk to God? Try knee mail.”

“Remem­ber, even Moses was a bas­ket case once”

Fact is, those anti­quated church signs can teach us alot about how to tweet, and frankly about how to com­mu­ni­cate in gen­eral. Take note:

• The churches aren’t sell­ing them­selves: The signs never say “Come to our church”, “Check out our new pews”, “We have the tasti­est wafers!” Instead, they sell an idea—usually spir­i­tu­al­ity, church-going, etc. They’re talk­ing about some­thing big­ger than them­selves. In this case, God, who sup­pos­edly is much, much big­ger than us. Con­sider how many tweets are wasted talk­ing about a new menu item, a sale or a new account. It’s too inward-looking. Look out; waaaay out­side your­self and talk about the big­ger issues that mat­ter to your com­mu­ni­ties of interest.

• They have per­son­al­ity: Some are witty, some are wel­com­ing, some are really, really scary. The point is, each has a dis­tinct fla­vor that ide­ally reflects the val­ues of the church it stands in front of. What’s your per­son­al­ity and how do you express it?

• They are (often) share­wor­thy: Brevity forces cre­ativ­ity. You’ve got one shot, one sign, one mes­sage. Even though the medium is cheap, a lot of thought goes into mak­ing an impact with a sin­gle church sign. I’ve seen much pricier media buys that haven’t had nearly as much impact as those signs. A tweet, or any piece of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, is an oppor­tu­nity to be talked about. It’s not enough just to be provocative—you want peo­ple to say the right thing about you. So, what do you want them to say?

When we talk about social media, the new­ness of the medium often keeps us from remem­ber­ing that the same old rules of com­mu­ni­ca­tion apply. Say some­thing. Stand for some­thing. Be mem­o­rable. And do it in under 140 characters.