Second Baptist Church in Houston, TX has over 53,000 members and some 22,000 people attend worship at one of their five locations on a typical weekend. This year more than 2,000 people affiliated with the church gathered at Discovery Glenn in the heart of Houston to participate in a flash mob with a purpose. The video of this event has gone viral with over 750,000 views to date.
Writing for Church Marketing Sucks, Kevin D. Hendricks summarizes the effort:
The video featured more than 2,000 pastel-clad “spontaneous” dancers raising arms to an auto-tuned worship song in celebration of Easter Sunday. It’s eerily reminiscent of the Resurrection Sunday Dance from Budapest in 2010, a video with more than 1.5 million views on YouTube (to be fair, any flash mob video featuring spontaneous choreography should be described as eerie). Titled “Dance Your Shoes Off,” at the end of the video the dancers removed their brand new shoes which were later collected and donated to homeless people, adding a service element to the whole experience.
Technological Shift
Videos have become a common way churches share their message. Does your congregation upload video on a regular basis as well as of special events and marketing initiatives? If so, what content has produced the most hits?
Jeremy Scott, Editor-in-Chief at ReelSEO.com, wrote about why the event was a success and how the video went viral. He attributes the success to:
- Exposure (sheer size of the church)
- Non-offensive (no preaching or Bible verses)
- Good deeds (each participant donated pair of new shoes for someone in need)
- Multiple audiences (mass appeal)
So What?
What was your initial response to the video? Would your church as a whole or any ministry within it ever engage in a similar effort on a smaller scale? How would your media and/or marketing teams craft a video and position it in such a way that it would have the greatest chance of going viral?