Social Media

Northland Church in Longwood, Florida is taking their live worship services to Facebook. The church has created a Facebook app that streams live worship services and provides live chat during those services.

Northland’s Director of Digital Innovation, Nathan Clark, says,

"At Northland, we often talk about the need to take the church to the people, versus asking them to come to us. For us, it was a wakeup call to realize that we were doing precisely that online—asking people to come to our...

There are a couple of great posts written lately that I think are worth checking out.

• Tim Schraeder, the communications guy for Park Community Church in Chicago, talks about Park’s Twitter policy...or twolicy. Basically, there isn’t a policy beyond using common sense. But he does lay down some knowledge about using Twitter, what to tweet and the weekly schedule he uses for Park’s twitter updates. Click here to check it out.
• The fine folks at Church Marketing Sucks have a guest post from...

Google seems to be getting more serious about social media. They’ve introduced Buzz which lets you follow contacts thought your Gmail and link to other sites like Flickr, Picasa and Twitter. Since Google Wave seems to be a little bit of a flop at this point in terms of widespread use (although it may catch on more as a business collaboration tool), maybe folks will adapt to using Buzz. Here’s a video explaining the basics:

So what are your thoughts? Have you tried it yet?

I recently wrote about my experience with the cable company Comcast. Basically problems arose for a couple of years all because they had my address wrong. And after multiple phone calls, no one was ever authorized to make a change over something as simple as a street number.

We used that negative experience to ask if our churches have policies or procedures in place that prevent us from providing the best service we can to visitors and members.

Since that post, Comcast has done some positive...

Here’s a slide show featuring predictions (in 140 characters or less) from some social media types of what the trends may be for 2010.

A few of the highlights include:

• "Social media begins to look less social...more "exclusive" - getting value...while filtering out the clutter." - David Armono, Author, "Logic and Emotion"
• "Content will get more widely dispersed, especially across mobile platforms as phone are getting smarter." - Tamar Weinberg, Mashable Community & Marketing Mgr.
...

I came across this video on Church Crunch talking about the return on investment that comes from using social media. While most of the the businesses and organizations featured focus on money as a measure of success, I think there are still lessons for church communicators.

Church Crunch brings up a good point saying it’s important to measure any sort of campaign you do. If you’re promoting a Christmas event using social media as one of the tools, what kind of response are you getting?...

I’m finally riding the Google Wave and to be honest, I don’t really get it yet. I realize it’s potential for live collaboration, but I just don’t have very many friends on there yet. So I figure, the more people I know on Google Wave the better. Church Juice has three invites we’re giving away and there are three ways to enter.

• Leave a comment here saying why you want to ride the Wave.
• Tweet the news about our Google Wave giveaway while giving us a mention (@churchjuice).
• Become our friend on...

The latest issue of Collide Magazine just made its way to my desk and boy do I really like the cover story. “How to Fail @ Social Media” takes a look at the common missteps people take when using tools like Twitter and Facebook. While there are 11 steps, I’ll share four of my favorites with you so I’m not giving the whole article away.

• “Step Three: Try to grab an audience before you add value or content.”

The basic idea here is people get so excited about a project they’re launching, they...

Facebook recently rolled out yet another change to the design of its site. This time the tweak had to do with the way information shows up in the news feed. Facebook is trying to keep up with the trend of live search by streaming peoples updates in real time. Because of that, there are now two different ways to get the latest news from your friends: in real time or a summary of what Facebook computers think is the most interesting to you.

As soon as the new look rolled out, there were instantly...

The Wall Street Journal ran an article this week declaring the end of the email era. The general argument is we use the internet far differently than we did when email was first popular, so the way we use email has changed too. We used to go online by dialing up and checking a bunch of email in one setting. Now we’re far more connected. We can always be online, even from our phones. Because of that, email seems slow, just like postal mail. It’s far quicker to text message than wait for an...