Tag Archives: Facebook
Facebook pages or groups
Posted on 31. Aug, 2009 by Kenny.
Last week I posted a video about integrating social media in our ministries. One great way to do this is using facebook. I’m still a noob at using facebook specifically for ministry related stuff, but I thought I’d explain the differences between groups and pages and how you want to use both.
First of all, you probably want to use both. Both have different functions. Groups have been around longer and of someone has experience with only one, it’s probably groups. However, most people are using groups to do things where they probably should use pages. Let me explain.
Groups
Groups can be big or small, but they’re mostly suited around connecting people around ideas, thoughts or specific people. The discussion boards, photos, links and allow for great connection, discussion and collaboration. I’ve used groups for book discussions, a biggest loser group and for a Children’s Ministry collaboration group. The real advantage of the groups is your ability to control access and obscurity. I’m in some groups that are open to anyone, other groups that are close and you have to be approved to join. I’m also in an obscure group that no one can see except the people in the group. This is the primary advantage of groups. The disadvantage to groups is obscurity. You can join a bunch of groups and completely forget you’re in them unless the administrator sends everyone a message.
Pages
Pages are just like groups with a few unique features. People don’t join pages, they become fans. There aren’t any limitations either, anyone can join. Pages have access to discussion boards, wall posts and photos just like groups, so the experience can be similar. The idea behind pages though is that they are not designed to be obscure. They’re for everyone to see and intended to be viral. When an admin post on the wall, it shows up in every fan’s feed. So one update can be seen by every fan and every friend of every fan. That’s a huge impact. Pages were designed to be marketed too. A few months ago, facebook opened up vanity URLs. That’s when I snagged www.facebook.com/kennyconley. They also allowed pages with more than 1000 followers to get their vanity urls. Check out www.facebook.com/starbucks or www.facebook.com/mcdonalds. Oh, and when it comes to pages, you can advertise. For instance, you could advertise to age demographics for communities and such. Doing a big outreach event? Create a facebook page and advertise.
So, if your church has a presence on facebook, you want to use both. You might use groups to communicate with volunteers or certain ministries where you can share schedules, training and these kinds of things. However, your church needs a page. Your student and children’s minsitry needs a page. As you post updates, friends of your fans see learn about you and potentially become fans as well. Who knows, maybe they’ll come visit physically eventually because of what they experienced on facebook. Also, if you get enough fans, you could grab a vanity url and have the address: www.facebook.com/yourchurch.
So, go start some groups and pages people!
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The Facebook Landgrab
Posted on 13. Jun, 2009 by Kenny.
By the time you read this, you may have been too late.
Facebook just opened up the ability to grab vanity URLs that point to your profile page. Up until now, your profile page would look something like this: www.facebook.com/394058872990049458 (or something like that). Now you can replace that meaningless number with something easy to remember, like your name!
If you’ve logged in to facebook anytime recently, they’ve had an ad telling about it. I have been thinking about it, but I actually forgot and was about an hour late. How big of a deal is this? Well, in the first 3 minutes, 200,000 URLs were reserved. Crazy. I guess it’s important to some people. It will be interesting to see how many end up going in the first day.
So, if your name is John Smith, you’re probably out of luck. Oh, and if you’re name is Kenny Conley and you’re not me… you’re out of luck too! 
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A healthy balance of ADHD, Narcissim and Stalking
Posted on 04. Jun, 2009 by Kenny.
This seemed to be circulating as twitpics yesterday as I saw it in two different places. Now I’m just passing it along to you in case you haven’t seen it. Twitter has evolved quite a bit. When I said twitter a year ago, 9 out of 10 people didn’t know what I was talking about. Now it’s gone mainstream (Conan O’Brien mentioned it the other night on the tonight show). Most people have heard of it, but several still don’t know why they would use it.
Not that this is convincing reason for anyone looking into twitter, there is a certain amount of truth to this diagram.
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Should I use Picassa or Flickr?
Posted on 02. Apr, 2009 by Kenny.
I’m a little stuck? Tell me what you think?
Currently I’ve got a little bit of a mess when it comes to photo management. I’m using Windows Live Sync to synchronize photos between my wife’s PC and my Mac. So when I take pictures and upload them to my MacBook, they sync over to her computer. The same happens when she uploads her pictures. It works really well this way. This means I don’t really use iPhoto to manage my photos because new photos will be added to my directory through synchronization and won’t import correctly into iPhoto.
The bigger problem though is distribution/sharing of photos. Recently I’ve been uploading photos to facebook as it’s quick and easy. However, I have family and friends who are not on facebook but they do frequent my blog. In addition, what happens when facebook becomes another myspace. I don’t really want all my photos on facebook if and when that happens. This also means I’ve got to upload photos to facebook and then upload them to my blog as well. It just seems like more work than it’s worth.
So, I’ve been looking into using Flickr or Picassa. It seems like the ideal solution. With pro accounts, I can upload most, if not all, o my photos to an online directory. Then I can embed/share albums to facebook or my blog. This way I’m storing my photos on flickr/picassa and just sharing them to other applications that friends and family use to see them.
So, which one do I use. It looks like both have good facebook applications and wordpress plugins. However, flickr cost $25 a year and I get unlimited photo uploads and photos can be as big as 20MB. Holy Cow. This seems awesome. Picassa on the other hand is a bit more expensive. They do not have unlimited storage, but an incremental storage capacity for incrementally more money. It looks like it can get pretty pricy.
So, picassa is more expensive; however, Picassa will manage your photos on your computer like iPhoto. In addition, Picassa will also do some decent photo editing. This is a nice toolset. I have Adobe Photoshop, but there’s something nice about a program that organizes your photos, edits your photos and stores them online as well.
What do you suggest? I’m thinking of using flickr for online storage but still using Picassa as a desktop client to edit photos and organize. I’m certainly open to ideas as I’m still not certain.
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Twitter Tricks: Twitter Feed
Posted on 06. Nov, 2008 by Kenny.
This one is my new favorite. I’ve found that when I twitter that I have a new blog post, a lot more traffic goes to my site. Because I make twitter update my facebook status, I sometimes get facebook friends to visit my blog who usually don’t. So I like this.
WordPress had a plugin that would send a tweet whenever I published a new blog post. It would even tweet when I edited a post. I loved this. Any tool that automates tasks are golden. However, this plugin had a flaw. Maybe it was me, but I couldn’t get around this. I often future date my posts (like this post. You may be reading it on Thursday, but it’s actually Sunday night as I type it). I do it to keep the content coming at regular intervals. Well, I found that this plugin I was using would tweet a new post as published immediately upon posting a future dated post. No good, so I stopped using this feature. But now I found it’s replacement.
Twitter Feed will follow any rss feed you designate (it doesn’t have to be your own). You can set Twitter Feed to access the rss address every hour to see if there is a new post. If there is, it will send a tweet about it. Brilliant. Now I know that within an hour of “publishing” new posts, my twitter will let everyone know.
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Facebook is overpopulated? Ugh! Here we go again…
Posted on 21. Aug, 2008 by Kenny.
In the past week I’ve gotten the following message three times through my facebook inbox:
Attention all Facebook members.
Facebook is recently becoming very overpopulated,
There have been many members complaining that Facebook
is becoming very slow.Record shows that the reason is
that there are too many non-active Facebook members
And on the other side too many new Facebook members.
We will be sending this messages around to see if the
Members are active or not,If you’re active please send
to 15 other users using Copy+Paste to show that you are active
Those who do not send this message within 2 weeks,
The user will be deleted without hesitation to create more space,
If Facebook is still overpopulated we kindly ask for donations but until then send this message to all your friends and make sure you send
this message to show me that your active and not deleted.
Founder of Facebook
Mark Zuckerber
Okay, this is going to sound just a little harsh and if I hurt anyone’s feelings, I’m really sorry. Come on, this is the dumbest email I’ve ever seen. I’m absolutely amazed that anyone would send it along to anyone… yet I got it three times. Honestly, does anyone really think that facebook needs your help to know if you are active or not? If this really was an issue, don’t you think you would have gotten a message from facebook instead of a message from facebook sent you to via your facebook buddies? No really, facebook is a very powerful application and they really don’t depend on it’s users to pass along critical information to ensure that everyone gets it. Last of all, the name isn’t even right. It’s Zuckerberg… not Zuckerber.
I realized something though. All three of these messages I was sent was from teenagers. I think this is significant. Most of us (older than teenagers) have been getting these kinds of emails for years. You know, send this message on to 20 people or something bad will happen, or send this on to 50 people and Bill Gates will give you a copy of Microsoft Office. We’ve gotten used to these scam email chains (most of us). But the next generation hasn’t. This is new for most of them. Many teens I know don’t regularly check their email. Actually, many of them change their email every 24 days. They are much more prone to check wall posts, facebook mail and their text messages. So most of them haven’t experienced the email chain like the rest of us. I’m sure many who forwarded this message had a feeling it wasn’t true, but who really wants to take that chance? And if I really might win a free copy of Microsoft Office, it’s totally worth annoying all my friends, right? Hold on everyone, I’ve got a feeling we’re going to be seeing a lot more of this stuff. Here we go again…
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A cool little tool for my socially minded peeps
Posted on 10. Jul, 2008 by Kenny.
Okay, I’ve been using this service called Digsby for about 3 months. It’s actually made a big difference for me as I’ve become more and more spread out over multiple email and social services. Other than my church email, I have a gmail account, yahoo account, email for this blog, IM capabilities for yahoo and gmail. In addition I’m fairly active on facebook and twitter. Those are a lot of sites to stay on top of. Well, Digsby is a social network aggregator and brings it all together. Once you load it, you have one touch access to all of those services and more. You can chat with a friend on Yahoo while your checking your Gmail, chatting with someone using facebook chat in addition to updating your twitter status… all without having a single web browser open. For me it’s a no brainer. Now, if you want to be alerted everytime one of your 500 facebook friends signs on and everytime a new tweet comes across the wires, you can set it up that way. Or you can have is running in the background ready to be checked or used whenever you are ready.
Here is another use you might have for Digsby. I have good friends who are missionaries in West Africa. For a while, the only way to contact them was through America Online Instant Messenger. Because I wanted to have contact with them, I signed up for an AIM account for free, but I had to install it on my desktop. With Digsby, it isn’t necessary. With Digsby you can just create an AIM account and then enter your username and password information into the AIM component on Digsby. No need to install AIM, Yahoo or Google Talk software on your machine… just run it all through Digsby. Honestly, it’s been a great application for me. So, if you’re connected to more than one web email, IM service or social network, you might want to consider giving Digsby a spin.
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Final Twitter Post… for now :)
Posted on 14. Jun, 2008 by Kenny.
Okay, I’m going to wrap up my series of Twitter posts with this one, sharing one more resource and a cool story.
I noticed that a lot of the bloggers I follow on twitter have installed and application that sends a twitter feed when they write a blog. It’s a great add-on. Now for most of these people, I already subscribe to their blog feed, so I’m going to read their post at some point. This application though provided another way for me to get to their post. However, there are many people on Twitter that I don’t subscribe to their feed. Through this little application, I’ve found some new blogs that I now follow. So it’s a great tool. Using Google I found this great post here. It has the 10 best twitter tools for wordpress blogs. I’m sure you can find the same tools for type pad, blogger or whatever blogging service you use. I installed the Twitter Updater which does what I just said. I also tried the “Twit This” application but I couldn’t get it to work. Because my Twitter feed update my facebook status, people who only follow me on facebook are more likely to follow or even discover my blog. You can’t tell me this isn’t great stuff.
Oh, and now for my story. I’ve actually heard a few people complain about linking your twitter feed to your facebook feed because it just looks kind of silly. True, I won’t argue with that at all. However, I know many people who don’t update their facebook status very often, so they either have an out of date status or no status at all. Those who twitter are more likely to update more often, so people following them on facebook see their update more often. *** I did notice that if you start your twitter with @someone’stwitterID (a personal note to someone), facebook will not bring that update into the status. ***
But here is what is cool. I was driving to camp last Sunday and made a snide remark on twitter about driving through East Texas in the dark. A friend who I haven’t seen in over 10 years and recently became a friend on facebook contacted me the next day and said, “you’re in East Texas… we should meet up.” Three days later I had a little reunion at Cracker Barrel for breakfast as I drove back home. Because Twitter, facebook and this blog are all interconnected, I have a greater possibility to communicate to the most people possible. Isn’t that what technological advancement is all about, merging services and devices to where they all talk and work together.
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My Twitter experience
Posted on 08. Jun, 2008 by Kenny.
I said in my previous post that I’m not quite the early adopter that I’d like to be. Matt McKee had been talking about it for well over a year before I finally decided to try it. The biggest reason I didn’t twitter was because I don’t text. Well, I didn’t. I had a data plan, so I paid out the nose to be able to email people… which would irritate me when they would text me instead. So for me, twitter was a cool idea but without text, it wasn’t as convenient.
When I was between jobs this last year, I didn’t have a data plan. I found myself sending text messages more often. I fount that text messages was actually the best way to stay in touch with some family and friends. Then, just before Orange, I decided to really give Twitter a go. I fell in tech love.
I didn’t find that twitter created a new community, but it enhanced the blogging community. Most of the people I follow in twitter also blog, so twitter is usually all the fun, information and sometimes useless stuff that will never make it into a blog. I see some great potential for twitter. To me it is really just about fun and enhancing the blogging community, not really anything more. However, I feel that twitter or something inspired by twitter is right around the corner that could become one of my most valuable communication tools.
What do I use twitter for?
- For fun!
- To update my facebook feed (there are dozens of friends who have ABSOLUTELY no use for twitter, but because they are my friend on facebook, they are in a sense, following my feed. Here is the twitter app for facebook.
- To post updates on the front page of my blog
- I haven’t yet, but I need to install the plugin that sends a twitter out when I update my blog… I find those very helpful when others do.
I must say this though. My wife was not thrilled about my new found twitter addiction. I didn’t change my text plan with ATT and I had $35 in text fees last month. Oops!
If you’re interested, follow my twitter feed here!
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