God has a viral marketing plan.  His current PR all-star is Tim Tebow, quarterback for the Florida Gators.

Regardless if you like the Gators, or even football, bear with me a moment and let me show you one simple way God gets people to take action on His “product” through Tim Tebow.

Every Saturday night in the Fall, a young quarterback dons his blue and orange uniform and goes out onto a field to play a game in front of millions of eyes watching his every move.  There’s no question, this young man is a great athlete, a great competitor.  However, that’s not what sets him apart from the rest.

There have been so many great athletes in so many sports.  Tim Tebow is not the greatest athlete of them all.  He’s not the best quarterback to have played the game.  He’s even been criticized by many pundits that he can’t cut it as a professional football quarterback.  While he received a Heisman trophy in his sophomore year (the only sophomore to have received the trophy – ever), he missed out last year when another player was voted the Most Outstanding Player, thus receiving the Heisman.

But – there’s something else about this guy.  Something that makes him stand out from the crowd.  Something that makes people watch him a little closer – on the field, on the sidelines, and in his daily life.  People pay attention to what Tim Tebow says and does wherever he’s at.

Why?

Because of his religious beliefs? No.

Because of his faith?  No.

Because of his actions? Bingo.

Tim Tebow walks the walk that he talks.

Countless sports pundits have written articles about Tim Tebow and his faith, religious beliefs, etc.; however, I want to turn your attention to Tim Tebow’s viral marketing for God and how every business can learn something from God and Tebow.

I mentioned above that Tebow puts a uniform and pads on to play football on Saturday nights.  He does something else too.  Something rather small that has a huge impact on God’s viral marketing plan.

Every time he puts on that uniform, he puts black stripes under his eyes.  Lots of football players do this.  It’s called eye black.  It’s supposed to reduce glare from sunlight or stadium lights to help players see better.  Tebow adds a little something on top of that eye black – an abbreviation of a Bible verse in small, white letters.  This is where God’s viral marketing takes off.

At some point in every game that I’ve seen this guy play, the TV cameras get a shot of Tebow without his helmet and you can see this chapter and verse abbreviation.  If you’ve watched one of his games, I’ll bet you’re like me and wonder, sometimes aloud, what that verse says.

This happened to me tonight, when Florida beat LSU.  I hadn’t seen a shot of Tebow up close until late in the fourth quarter when the CBS camera caught him on the sidelines without his helmet.  I saw “1 Thess 5 (something)”.  I couldn’t make out the last couple of digits and immediately I asked my wife “What’s that verse?”  She was trying to read it too, even before I said anything.  When she told me the verse was “1 Thessalonians 5:18″, my response was, “I wonder what that says.”

Then, I did what millions of other people across the world did at that very moment.  I searched for it on Google.

Result # 1 came from BibleGateway.com, which serves up one page for every single verse in the Bible.  I then found out that the text of 1 Thessalonians 5:18 reads:

give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

There’s a whole other post built around Tebow’s circumstances this week (coming back from a hard hit and concussion in his last game) and the relevance of this verse., not to mention the genius SEO and marketing of BibleGateway.com, which also allows you to see dozens of translations for each different verse.  As a Christian, I’m enamored by the effect of this guy on the rest of the world.  However, as a marketer, I’m amazed at how something so simple and seemingly unnoticeable takes a single, targeted message to literally millions of people.

A little less than an hour after I saw Tebow on the sidelines, I was sitting here at my computer reading RSS feeds in Google Reader.  One of the feeds I subscribe to is Google Trends.

If you don’t know, here’s what Google Trends does:

With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.  (About Google Trends)

You can follow the Hot Trends feed, which provides hourly updates of the hottest topics being searched on Google.  If you are an active online marketer or in any way involved in the media industry, then you should already be following this feed.  If not, you should subscribe now.  You don’t have to follow each update as it happens.  I generally scan the feed once or twice day to see if any of my niches have something I need to jump on.

Back to Tebow…

Minutes after CBS showed the close up of Tebow, the phrase “1 thessalonians 5 18″ went Volcanic on Google.  Google Trends rates search terms in order of hotness with “Volcanic” being the hottest a search term can get.  It was the number one search term on that hourly update in my RSS feed.

I wasn’t surprised though.  Every Saturday that Tebow plays football, his verse of the week becomes the number one search phrase on Google for a period of time.

You think any Sunday morning pastor has that kind of reach from the pulpit?  No way.  God reaches an audience through a football player every Saturday night that pastors simply don’t have the opportunity to bring their message in front of.

And that, my friends, is the key to God’s viral marketing plan.

Sunday morning pastors have a limited reach.  For the most part, their audience already has what God is trying to sell – eternal life through Christ Jesus, right?  Pastors, preachers, ministers, etc. are often really “preaching to choir” on Sunday mornings.

In order for God’s marketing plan to thrive, He has to take His message out to a larger audience – say, millions of people that haven’t tried his product on Saturday night in between beer and birth control commercials.  Talk about a targeted audience, eh?

These are the customers that God is really after.  These are the people that could really use His product.  But, how can He get His message out to all those people?

How about some TV commercials?  Seriously?  How many hokey commercials have you seen for a free Bible?  What about those Scientology characters out there?  They advertise on TV.  They’ve got some pretty cool commercials; however, they’re old and stale now, and they kind of freak me out whenever I see the Scientology pitch at the end.

TV commercials might get you some traffic, but that’s a lot of effort and you have to really come up with something cool to get the skeptics to take action.  God wants to reach the skeptics too.

God has figured out that His message, when made direct and to the point, doesn’t always sit well with people.  Some people need a slight nudge instead, a viral message.  A message that is subtle, yet stirs up enough curiosity to force people to take action.  And the action is done in a way that people think that it’s on their terms, not God’s.

God has a complete message contained in the 66 books of the Bible.  Getting that message across in a single instance isn’t practical.  So, just using a little bit of the overall message to give some of the effect is a good start.

The big issue, however, is delivery.  I think we all know that a TV commercial during the Saturday night football game probably won’t get the kind of response that God’s looking for.  Sure, a few folks will tune in and search the message on Google, but not the kind of audience that He’s really after.

Instead, God needs a messenger.  Just any messenger won’t do because God really needs to sell the message.  He doesn’t need to be pushy about it, but it needs to be convincing and real.  God needs a messenger that walks the walk of his message.

That’s precisely where Tebow fits into God’s viral marketing plan.  The overall air time of the message is so very small compared to the probably dozen or so Miller High Life commercials that were on during the Florida v. LSU game tonight; however, everyone watching the ball game knows that there is something different about the messenger delivering God’s message from 1 Thessalonians 5:18 when compared to the two delivery truck guys arguing about which type of Miller beer is better.  (By the way, Miller High Life was not even a blip on the Google Trends radar tonight.)

The guys in the beer commercials are paid actors, while the guy on the football field is the real deal.

People all across the world watch every time Tebow steps onto the field and squint to see which verse he is wearing tonight.  When they see it, they go to their computers, open Google and search to see what it says.

It’s a Spark.

That’s exactly what God is looking for – just enough to get us to thinking about Him, about this Tebow guy and what makes him different and so happy all the time.  How can this guy always see the silver lining?  What really drives this guy?

Tebow’s not perfect.  He’s human.  Just like you and me.  He makes mistakes, fails and sins.

However, it’s not Tebow’s flaws that make him stand out from the crowd.  It’s his willingness to be genuine; to become God’s viral marketing plan; to forsake all the secular things that could be his as the star quarterback at a school like Florida.

I remember when Tebow was selected as part of the Playboy all-star team.  I forget the exact name of the award.  What I do remember though is that when the Playboy people called Urban Meyer to notify him of the award, Urban immediately responded that Tebow would pass on coming out for the Playboy weekend to party and be in the photo shoot.

Meyer and Tebow hadn’t discussed this beforehand; however, Meyer saw in Tebow what the rest of us see and knew without asking that such an event would not be of interest to Tebow.  Meyer already knew what kind of messenger that Tim Tebow was.

It’s not one game, one speech or any one thing that makes Tebow such a good fit in God’s marketing plan.  It’s a lifetime of action and choices that follow from belief in God’s product.  If Tebow didn’t appear genuine to everyone watching, the marketing plan would not be effective.

Think about it.  How many athletes point to the sky, kiss a cross or thank God when they score or win a game?  How many of those do you believe?  How many live their daily lives consistent with a professed faith that make us wonder what’s so different about them?  Mediocrity does not sell.

Tying It All Together.

By now, I hope you get the substance of God’s viral marketing plan through Tim Tebow.  I also hope that I have made clear the form through which God uses Tebow to apply this plan (regardless of your personal beliefs).

Whatever your message is in your own business, there’s a way to drill down to the core and produce something worth exploring further by your potential customers.

Delivery is crucial.  Your message has to sell, but your delivery of that message should be tolerable and genuine to your intended customers.

Take your message to your customers.   These are the people that really need your product.  Where are they now?  Go there with your message.

Choose the right messenger.  Are you using the Miller High Life truck drivers or do you have a Tebow on your team to deliver your message?  More people will believe your Tebow than your paid truck driver actors.  Tap your existing, satisfied customers to help deliver your message.

If you thought AdSense and AdWords was a big deal up until now, hang on.  Google is opening up an entirely new can of worms by allowing third party networks to compete with AdWords advertisers.  Here’s the email Google just sent me:

Hi,

We’re writing to let you know about an upcoming update in your AdSense account designed to help you generate the maximum revenue from your ad units. You’ll soon be able to allow multiple ad networks to show on your pages, which means that advertisers from external Google-certified networks will be able to compete with AdWords advertisers for your ad space.

If you’re unfamiliar with what ad networks are, they’re companies that partner with advertisers and publishers to buy and sell ads on sites they don’t own themselves, similar to AdSense. Ads from these networks will compete with Google ads to show on publisher sites, and the ad generating the highest revenue for publishers will be displayed.

To ensure the quality of the ads appearing on your sites, we’re certifying all participating ad networks for adherence to our standards for user privacy, ad quality, and speed. You’ll also have control over which networks can show ads on your pages — you can choose to opt out of receiving ads from specific networks, or all networks completely. This means you can continue to show ads from only AdWords advertisers if you’d like.

Finally, some ad networks use tools similar to Google’s interest-based advertising to show more relevant ads to users on the sites they visit. These ad networks won’t be permitted to collect data from your site for the purpose of subsequent interest-based advertising, but we’ll allow those who comply with user privacy guidelines to show ads using these tools. You’ll have the ability to opt out of showing ads based on user interests from these ad networks, and we’ve changed our requirements for third-party ad serving to reflect this. More information is available at http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=94230 .

These new capabilities will automatically be enabled for your account, and you’ll see a new section in your Ad Review Center where you can allow or block specific ad networks. Please note that we’ll gradually be adding new ad networks to AdSense accounts over the next few months, so you won’t see any immediate impact on your ads or your earnings.

To learn more about this launch and managing the ad networks appearing on your pages, visit the AdSense Help Center at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=13522 and watch our video demo at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HyJPOVLd3I .

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

More on the official AdSense blog.

Tonight, I was browsing Google Reader and cruising past a couple of my latest posts.  I opened them up just to see what kind of ads Google was serving (you should do this on a regular basis).

Quick aside here: I’ve had a problem lately with shady advertisers appearing on one of my sites via Google AdSense ads. While some may say, “A click is a click”, I’ve got a relationship with my readers and want to continue to foster that relationship by holding onto their trust.  Now, there’s no way that I’ll catch (and block) all of the shady advertisers; however, I’ll stop the ones that I see or the ones that readers point out to me from advertising on my sites.

Back to the point – To my surprise, I saw an advertiser that I recently filtered out from displaying on my site appearing in an AdSense ad on my feed.  WTF, I thought.

I login to AdSense, and sure enough, it’s in my blocked advertiser list – or, one of them anyways.

I didn’t realize it until tonight that you must block competitive ads from your content, search results and feeds to keep them from appearing on your sites at all.  As far as I can tell, there’s no way to merge the three lists.  Fortunately though, a quick copy and paste to each of the other two fields solves this problem.

Just a heads up for those of you who use the competitive ad filter.

Do you have your privacy policy yet, which is required to comply with the new AdSense terms and conditions?

Be careful.  Privacy policies can be a trap for the unwary.  You may not be subject to federal law privacy requirements unless you create and break the terms of your own privacy policy.  The FTC takes privacy issues seriously.  Don’t make promises you can’t keep.

Google has decided to offer a little guidance . . . sort of.