When I’m recruiting to the kidmin network, I often send them a link to the facebook group in my initial email so that they can get signed up right away. Communicating through Facebook tends to be more casual and easy, especially for a grout that doesn’t quite know each other very well yet. The benefits of using a facebook is that you can upload photos, use built in documents (maybe for everyone to list email, phone numbers & staff positions) and conversation threads to discuss/comment on ideas or needs.

I’ve seen a few cool uses of our Austin Facebook group over the last year. On some occasions, a member will post pictures of their facility just after we had a lunch meeting at his or her location so that everyone who didn’t make it can see the facility as well. Just this week, another member posted some videos his team made for large group teaching time for everyone to see. One member was doing a vision night for his volunteers and used the group to recruit help for childcare so that all of his people could attend his event. Last Easter we got behind the eight ball and needed palm fronds and put out the request on the group… we had more than we needed by the next day. We also set up all the network lunches as facebook events within the group. This way we get an idea of who is coming and who isn’t since everyone can RSVP. This works really well.

Just know that people are busy and activity on the group is often sluggish and limited. Austin’s group has more than 50 people on it and weeks will go by without any activity. Conversations within this forum have to be intentional and it takes commitment from several people to make connecting through the group a priority. There are limitations with just about any tool, but Facebook is probably as good as anything out there for connecting.

Well, yesterday during the main afternoon session, I spent the entire time meeting and talking with people. While away from my computer, some other blogger (Jonathan Cliff) changed my birthday. So, since last night, people have been wishing me a happy birthday. I think someone even brought me a cake. Very funny, huh?

Now you know a great prank. Have fun with it… just be ready to get punked by your own prank.

Our Kids Ministry already has a facebook group, facebook.com/kidsquest. All we did was update the facebook page like crazy. Last year I did a lock-in and I gave 5-8 of my leaders access to the Kids Quest twitter account. It worked well, but only for parents on twitter. If you’re using a facebook fan page, your status updates will sync to twitter, but not the other way around. So, I had a few of my staff just posting status updates with pics as often as they could. As soon as the update published, facebook sent it out as a tweet as well.

The parents loved the updates. We told them where we were on our travels, showed them pictures of what the kids were eating and let the parents know where we were on the drive home (so they could know what time to arrive). I even created “notes” every day with the content of what I would be teaching that day and giving the parents prayer points. It was a good system and the parents went nuts. They felt like they were a part of the camp.

Next year we plan to have even more interaction. On one day we held a contest asking the parents whether they thought the girls room or the boys room was cleanest. A few hours later we uploaded a video. The parents really got into this. Next year I think we’ll do even more stuff like this to keep the parents extra engaged, even creating opportunities for parents to interact some with their kids. I also want to play with the idea of a live feed. I’m not 100% sure you can actually do a live feed with the internet service there, but we could possibly upload the services a few hours later just so parents and families can see what their kids are experiencing.

Click here to jump over to our facebook page and see the kind of content we were posting.

Below is the clean room video contest we posted while at camp.

Thanks for your support!

Facebook Fixer is a script (or underscript rather) that causes web pages to do things they’re weren’t intended to do. Don’t get intimidated, it’s easier to do than you think.

Depending on what browser you’re using, you may need to enable your browser to run underscripts. Click here for a listing of browsers and what you need to do. I use both Firefox and Chrome. For Firefox I had to install the GreaseMonkey add on and Chrome didn’t require anything as it natively allows underscripts. Once your browser is ready, click here to install Facebook Fixer.

Once installing Facebook Fixer, you’ll notice a difference immediately. However, you might want to first visit your “account” from the top right menu and select “configure Facebook Fixer.” This will allow you to totally customize your Facebook experience. Here are a few of the things you can do:

• Big Profile Pictures and Photos
• Big Album Pictures
• Video Download Links
• Load Full Albums
• Homepage Customization
• Localization
• Translation
• Age and Sign
• Calendar Integration
• Keyboard Shortcuts
• Re-Title
• Error Page Reloading
• Menu Bar Transparency
• Automatically Check for Script Updates
• and more…

What interested me the most was the calendar integration. It’s really nice having facebook tell me when everyone’s birthday is, but I really like having birthdays in my personal Google calendar. Now I can click on any friends profile and there is a link to import their birthday directly to my calendar. Since Google is my primary email and calendar, as soon as I click that link, their birthday is scheduled on all my calendar devices. I love it!

I’ve only played with a few features so far. A few seem trivial and some annoying, but I can simply turn them off. Other features are down right amazing. Thanks hackers!

Thanks everyone for jumping on board. You can see the viral affect already at work. Yesterday morning we started with four fans. I posted the badge on this blog and threw out a link in a twitter update (which did get re-tweeted twice). However, as of right now we have over 75 fans. Many of those came from the viral nature of pages. Those who became fans essentially advertised the page to all of their friends. A few of you promoted the page by “sharing” and that too promoted the site.

The funny thing I noticed was that many of my leaders and volunteers from Gateway were fans. Many of them I didn’t expect to be fans becasue they may not follow my blog. However, on of my leaders became a fan and she updated her status and invited everyone she knew that worked with kids and she got a great response (even one or two members of my staff). Ha!

So, on this page we’ll try one or two more things like this. I’ll send a message (which shows up as a notification) to all the fans and encourage them to come kind of action (post on the wall, invite another CM friend or respond to a discussion question). All of these things promote the page. Whenever a fan does something on the page, all their facebook friends will see it in their time line. So, we’ll take a look at how the page grows into the weekend and early next week we’ll take a look at advertising and see how that works.

Oh, and if you missed all of this, read my post yesterday about this experiment or click on the badge above to become a fan of this new facebook page.

So, what can you do? Well, the people at facebook would like you to integrate with twitter, but they’d rather have it the other way around. They’ve created a twitter app for your pages that will update your twitter account whenever you write on your page’s wall. Not nearly what I was looking for, but I guess it’s okay. So, when it comes to the twitter integration that I love with my personal facebook page, I’ll just have to wait until they have this for pages.

So, let’s play around with this page I created a few weeks ago. It already has 4 our 5 fans and those are only from people who we’re probably searching for something children’s ministry related on facebook. But if you’re interested in learning more about pages, this week we’ll play around with several of the page features and document it for this blog tutorial if you will. We’ll see the viral nature of this page as it grows through word of mouth, badges like the one below and we may actually do a little paid advertising just to see how it works. Interested in taking this journey? If so, do the following things below this ad.

Children’s Ministry | Promote Your Page Too

Let’s experiment:

• Click on the badge above to link to the Children’s Ministry page and become a fan.
• Just below the image at the top-left, click “suggest to friends.” Don’t suggest to your mom, uncle and brother-in-law, but to people who are chidlren’s ministry minded. This way we’ll see the fans increase the way they are supposed to.
• At the bottom of the left hand column, click on “share.” It will allow you to either send a message or post to your profile. You may have already sent a message through “suggest to friends.” Instead, post to your profile and tell people why they should become a fan.

We’ll give that a day or two and see what happens to the fan base. Also, if you’re interested in seeing the behind-the-scenes of a fan page, I’ll make you and admin so you can play around, add links, upload photos and create discussions on this experimental site. I don’t think there is a limit to the number of admins, so if you want in, just comment below (when you fill in your “email” to comment, use the email you use for facebook and I’ll invite you to be an admin via your email… don’t worry, no one sees your email on comments except for me).

*** Disclaimer. If I decide to try the advertising for this page next week, I may bump everyone as an admin. I’m not sure how the advertising works, but I know that it’s something you pay for and I don’t want a curious admin adjusting my advertising budget… that wouldn’t be funny.

So, here’s a little comparison. Here are the things that both groups and pages can do:

• Wall discussions
• Discussion boards
• Photos
• Videos
• Send messages to members/fans
• Create related events

What can a group do that a page can’t?

• Be obscure – remain totally hidden to everyone but those in the group.
• Be exclusive – only allow who you want in the group if you roll that way.

What can pages do that groups can’t?

• Access to applications – certain apps have been developed exclusively for pages
• Page Statistics – kinda like analytics for you page
• Demographic messaging – send notifications to all your fans or fans of specific gender, ages or locations
• Vanity URL – Once you have enough fans, you can claim a vanity URL like www.facebook.com/yourname
• Advertising – You can drive people to your page through advertising where you determine demographic targets and pay by clicks or impressions

The other big advantage of pages are that they are more viral in nature. Unless the administrator of the group you belong to sends out a message, you may forget you are in it. Other people won’t know you’re in it either. With pages, all of your friends will see you interact with the page as it will show up in your feed. So, people find pages rather quickly. In addition, pages ave viewable outside of facebook. That means the information on your facebook group can be seen by anyone. That also means it can be indexed by the search engines unlike groups or anything else within the facebook walled garden.