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

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.

Over the weekend one individual contacted me to let me know that he would be removing me as a friend from Facebook because he was “going to make a shift with my Facebook use – going to just mostly family stuff.”

Perhaps he was tired of receiving my status updates or perhaps he didn’t want me to view photos from his personal life. Whatever the reason for ending our Facebook friendship, I figured that many people would benefit from a thorough overview on how to protect your privacy on Facebook. Below is a step by step process for protecting your privacy.

Keep Reading

Check out Nick O’Neills post on the subject. It’s amazingly helpful and will help you cultivate friendships without feeling like you’re overly exposed.

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.

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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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.

The Three Steps

1. Install & Setup TwitMe on your blog
2. Activate the Twitter facebook application (here)
3. Blog and watch the magic happen!

First you need to install (or if you have an account here at insights for church, you only need to activate) the plug-in Twitme (Download it Here). What this plug-in does is post a tweet to your twitter account whenever you post something to your blog. It does more then that but that is the excited part for us here. All you need to do is supply your user name and password for it to work.

Next you activate the twitter Facebook application. With hundreds of millions of people on Facebook and some tens of millions joining each month this is a dynamic and quick way to update your status.

One more quick trick

Facebook has a feature that allows you to import your blog posts directly into Facebook into their ‘notes’ application by editing the import settings. All you need to do is paste in the URL to your feed (for word press users this is the address of your blog + ‘/feed/’ so the feed for us here is http://nineteen05.insightsforchurch.com/feed/).

Why do all this?

One of the biggest secrets to advertising is customer impressions. How many interactions does someone have with your brand/you. As a church leader this generally translates to this:

The more times someone hears from you during the week, the more your message and relevance increases for them, leading to more life change, and a greater commitment to Christ.

If it is as simple as taking 5 minutes to set something up, to maximize on what you are already doing. I say go for it!

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.

What is the difference between Facebook and MySpace?

MySpace is often cited as the fore bearer to Facebook. While chronologically correct there are many differences between the two services. The most crucial to understand is the way they go about networking. MySpace has traditionally had a very broad sense of the word. Everyone was a part of a giant pool, and then you made friends within that pool. Facebook ignored the giant pool and instead made many localize pools based on proximity. Initially these networks were geared around universities and from here they added companies and metropolitan locations.

While it doesn’t sound like a big difference the sense of community was drastically different. For college students who were using MySpace they were in the same pool with the rest of the world, and now with Facebook they were in the same pool with their peers at school. It became instantly easier to locate friends online. In the early days as well official school email accounts were required to register with the site and this minimized the number of fake accounts created (this is no longer the case at all).

Instead of creating personal networks out of the Global pool like MySpace, Facebook letting users interact in pre-formed communities set them up to overtake MySpace as the social network king of the Internet.

Because of this takeover of popularity the bulk of this post will focus on Facebook, but the principles and concepts and apply to other social networking sites as well (MySpace included).

How to we leverage them for our Church?

As I mentioned in the introduction, everyone is trying to figure this out. It is important to understand the Facebook business model in a general sense: they sell information. Everyone who is on the site fills out a semi-detailed profile that Facebook analyzes against the whole and they can then identify trends. It is basically a global focus group. So we should not expect to make any money from our work in social networking.

We can build up our community, and this is the major reason to get involved in these social networking sites. Likely a church of 200 members I would expect to have between 80 and 130 members on Facebook (far less for MySpace). With so many members of a church already using a service like Facebook it makes sense to enter into that service with the intention of offering additional interactions with the church.

This is the crucial point to remember. Our social networking work should be focused on meaningful interactions with our members. These interactions change from network to network because each network has a different focus. Facebook has traditionally focused on wall posts (public messages between friends), notes (private messages between friends), photos sharing, and groups (essentially it is a profile for a group/organization very similar to a member profile with a wall, notes, and photos).

If you church doesn’t already have a Facebook group, I would encourage you to make one. It would only take 10 minutes for someone with an existing Facebook account. Most groups don’t do much activity-wise but are a way to self-identify with a group of people.

Small groups have also made dynamic use of groups by communicating with members through them, posting photos and video following events, and helping people remember names (at least I use it for the last part and I know there are more).

This Issue of Friends

Most social networking sites have some sort of friendship system integrated into there community system. This raises the question, who do we extend/accept friendship from? I would personally avoid going out and adding hundreds of friends within days of creating an account or group. However its important to note that as ministers we need to focus on inclusiveness and not exclusivity.

Being friends with someone on Facebook doesn’t mean you have to get coffee once a month, or even need to go out of your way to say ‘Hi’ to them more then you did before. Friendship on Facebook (and many other sites) is a way to signify some level of relationship.

If someone adds you as a friend (and you do know who they are in real life) I would encourage you to think twice before not confirming their request. While subtle, it is an indication to them that there is not a connection between the two of you. If this is a member of your church, or neighborhood it sends a message that you will minister to them, but not ever open up to them personally.

What to use for Content?

One thing I strongly cation against when posting anything to your profile, or elsewhere, to avoid the desire to post what you wish were true, or to exude the image you wish others had of you. Don’t write under hobbies ‘Memorizing the Whole Bible’ unless you are well on your way. If your favorite movie happens to be rated ‘R’ it is still your favorite movie (mine is Gladiator, then the LOTR trilogy).

The Internet has ushered in an age of unprecedented openness and authenticity if we are willing to embrace it. As ministers this can feel difficult because we often struggle with our image as leaders of the church. It is important to know that your members also struggle, and need to see that. While I might not make sense to list your favorite books or movies from the pulpit, it can be done easily online helping your member feel closer to you because of it.

Whatever content you post to any of the subjects we will discuss will either make your members feel stronger identity with you, or feel distant from you. The closer they can identify with you, the more opportunities you have given the Spirit to speak to them through you everywhere else.

How have your or your church used networks like Facebook or MySpace successfully?