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Everyone's On Facebook...And Your Church Should Be Too.

Verizon is in the process of shutting down a social network they've been running called "Verizon Community". They're moving over to Facebook. That speaks a lot of the power of Facebook as a media/marketing strategy.

And it's something churches should take advantage of. In fact, if a church chooses not to have a website or simply doesn't have the resources - Facebook would be a pretty good thing for them to look at.    

LifeChurch is an organization that takes full advantage of the technology offered by Facebook. And in doing so, they get tons of viral opportunities to advance their mission. You can see an application on Facebook developed by and for LifeChurch here.

Mashable.com has a full article on the shut down of the Verizon social site and the switchover to Facebook. Here's a few points of interest that I noted:

• Rather than ask users to try and get their friends to sign up for Verizon Community (lame!), they simply see that their friends are signing up for your network via the News Feed, or, via an application invite. Verizon has simple apps for downloading ringtones and sending text messages from Facebook, which also broadcast to the News Feed when installed.
• Setting up a Facebook Page is free, versus the hundreds of thousands of dollars that could be sunk into design and development of a custom social networking site. Of course, improving the experience by developing relevant apps costs money, but there are dozens of firms that specialize in doing just that.
• Setting up a Facebook Page is easy - it doesn’t even require a developer.  

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Tags: technology, facebook, verizion, lifechurch, social media

Using Twitter At Church

I read a story about a church using Twitter in their worship services as an experiment. Pretty cool idea. Not sure of its usefulness as of yet, but very innovative nonetheless. I guess my main question would be, was it done merely because it was cool, or was there an end result they were looking for.

The church ran the Twitter feed on their big screens as the service was going.

Some of the tweets were:

• “Nice shirt JVo,” 
• “I love this song,” 
• “So glad they are doing Lenny Kravitz,”
• “Somebody turn Jimmy’s guitar up,”
• “Westwinds rocks,”
• “Thank God for coffee at church”

Some of the more thoughtful tweets were:

• “to be selfless, humble”
• “The more I press in to Him, the more He presses me out to be useful”
• “sometimes healing is painful”
• “I have a hard time recognizing God in the middle of everything.”
• “It is easy to give Him credit after the fact but it is my prayer to see Him now.”
• “God is challenging us to live for Him in a culture that rejects Him—His own peers did that”
• “He has given me so much”

Still a new idea, but I would bet that eventually there will be a usefulness for Twitter in church.

Source: Vertizontal

Who's Really Using Twitter, Facebook, IM's And Text?

This morning I read an article by The Barna Group on the use of blogging, texting, entertainment and podcasting by society within, and without the church.

Some points I found interesting:

• Political liberals were among the most active users of technologies. They were more likely than the norm to have a personal homepage, to maintain a blog, to post comments on other people’s blogs, and to watch online videos as well as above average in their use of search, texting, and email.

•Currently, nearly four out of five Americans (78%) who access a computer have sent an email in the past week. As proof of its mainstream status, computer users over the age of 50 are just as likely as younger adults to use email.

•text messaging and instant messaging (IM) are used by smaller, though devoted segments of the population. One-third of computer users (33%) have used IM in the past week, while 30% of Americans have sent someone a text message via a mobile telephone. One of the reasons younger adults email rates are merely "average" compared to older residents is the younger set’s heavy reliance on IM’ing and texting to stay connected.

•10% of Americans with regular access to a computer have a personal blog

•Just one-quarter of computer users (23%) has a personal webpage or home page on a social networking site (such as Facebook or MySpace).

Complete stats can be found at The Barna Group.

      

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Tags: church, technology, social networking, blog, texting, IM