Marketing and Management Thoughts

There is no doubt that Facebook is an online mega-site that every person and ministry needs to decide how they will interact with. I realize there are many opinions on how and in what ways you should use these sites, how much information to publish, and how much time to invest in it.

This post isn’t about that, but rather how facebook came about. How did a kid, who dropped out of Harvard, reach a net-worth of 1.5 billion by the age of 24. Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) has done just that.

Times Online article | Rolling Stones article

Earlier we’ve blogged about the importance of having a presence in online communities like Facebook and Twitter. Talking with some pastors and other friends of mine in ministry has raised an interesting point.

How does one separate their close friends, from those who know them because of their ministry? Facebook has actually built in a number of features to help you grant and deny access to various parts of your profile! Most people don’t realize this is even possible.

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If you have been using Twitter, visited a friends twitter page, or seen Facebook status show up with weird URLs in them you have likely been noticing shortened URLs. (Learn how to update Facebook with twitter)

These shortened URLs have come about because of the limit of characters you can use on twitter (140) so posting a long URL to a blog post (such as this one at nearly 90 characters) would take up nearly your whole message. Instead you can post http://tr.im/2h6l and use that to access the article about Facebook and twitter.

I personally use the tr.im service and have enjoyed it (they keep stats for you so you can know how many people are clicking on your links and from where/when).

Here is a list of the 11 Best URL Shortening Services out there. Check it out if you use twitter. I’d encourage you to pick one and bookmark it for easy access.

Warning!

While these URLs are very convenient for a service like twitter, I would avoid using them in printed material. If you have a web page you want people to go to from your church bulletin, use the full address. It will help them remember your domain name to tell others, and will have less problems with people typing them in wrong.

Example: we used http://tr.im/2h6l above and it links to our blog here at nineteen05. Clicking doesn’t have any issues here but what if you were typing and the L looked like an I… Now we’re at a German Internet sales magazine article… 2n6l leads us to an article about mobile phones and security… 2n6i to a NYT article on a potential role of Chinese savings into the financial crisis.

With that warning given, we encourage you to use these url shortening services online. But when it comes to print you are far safer to write out your full address.

Another followup to the Building Community series we did several weeks ago because I stumbled across Chris Forbes’ free e-Book “Facebook for Pastors” that does a pretty good job at explaining Facebook and its ministry possibilities.

It is a great supplement to what we wrote about in much greater details than I chose to in our blog and in a short 33 pages (several of which are the intro) lay out it quite well.

The bottom line on Facebook is there are people connected to it. It is not a web site or an Internet product; it is a network of people. Each person in the network is someone for whom Christ gave
himself. That is an important perspective for a pastor, wherever people gather, there are opportunities to minister.

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Download the ebook for free

One of the great things about this whole web 2.0 thing is how different websites work together. This is done by them providing access to their system through something called an API. But what it means for us, less work!

So how does it mean less work? As someone in ministry (or even working full time) the prospect of being able to trim time off of our list of to-dos is very exciting. So here is how you can post on your blog, and have that update your twitter account, and Facebook status for free. Follow these 3 simple steps. (more…)

Following up our post on Facebook and MySpace I thought I would showcase a local church (for us here in Minneapolis/St. Paul) that many of you have heard of before, Bethlehem Baptist Church (who have a beautiful, albeit huge, website) and a snapshot of their Facebook page. I actually stumbled accross their page a while back when I read a wall post stating, “YAY MY LIFE IS COMPLETE. THE CHURCH HAS A FACEBOOK.”

Pretty cool and is an example of a church that as created the page, and doesn’t do a lot of upkeep (seems primarly for the youth group). Mainly it is for photos and probably communicating with the youth who are already on facebook.

It seems like everyone and there mom is on Facebook these days. What started as a school project has become a global phenomena in a matter of years. While there still isn’t a clear picture as to how these social networks can help organizations meet their goal, it is clear that a presence can have a positive effect.

Having worked developing social networking sites beginning in 1999 I hope to shed some light on the subject by explaining the differences, and suggesting how to effectively use the services for your church or organization.   Please give feedback at the end as well. (more…)