The Seabourns

social media

Using Facebook

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“How do I use Facebook to share Christ with my friends?”, asked the student.

Kay and I were asked this question several times last week. We were in College Station, Texas participating in Grace Bible Church’s GO missions conference.

Perhaps you have been asking this question also.

Our internet ministry colleagues in Ethiopia have invited people to join in a day of using Facebook to share God’s love with Facebook friends. 244 people will spend time on Saturday, November 24th using Facebook as a platform for reaching out. Maybe their plans can help you with some creative ideas.

The objectives of this Facebook outreach are to encourage students to share the good news with their friends and to create multiple opportunities for them to know Jesus. Some of the strategies we are going to use are

How are you using Facebook to live out your faith among your network of friends?

 

Online meetings not a church

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I read an interesting blog post today over at ChurchCrunch. Based on a federal court ruling, online worship is not a church.

Very interesting. I wonder if candidate websites are not politics, hence do not qualify for use of campaign funds to operate? If Amazon.com is not business, hence the discussion about collecting sales tax should cease to be an issue?

If activities are defined by traditional trappings, then where do we draw the line?

Update: Reading the full journal article here, which is written in a very readable style, is helpful and enlightening. A critical issue in the court’s opinion is that the worshipers were not associating together in some form. So if worshipers are interacting through messages, tweets, etc., then perhaps the legal definition is different. The article makes a very good note that legally-required board meetings of for-profits and non-profits are often conducted by virtual technologies.

Could Twitter measure spiritual climate?

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This article has me thinking: Is Twitter a national mood ring?

So, I’m intrigued: Could Twitter be used to monitor the spiritual climate of a target area over time?

I know someone who uses Twitter to identify hurting people who might be more open to spiritual conversations. He uses Twitter’s geographic search to look for people in his zipcode area and nearby areas. He searches for words like “suicide” or “depressed” or “divorce”. He then direct messages them a short encouragement. If they respond, he engages in direct message ministry. Because they are nearby, he can invite them to his church, or to an event, or something more geographic.

This paragraph intrigues me:

In fact, other research groups have also begun to examine Twitter data and have demonstrated that it can be used to predict the box-office success of an upcoming movie. And Twitter data yields much more detailed polling when compared to traditional methods, enabling real-time feedback for issues that are of local, national or international interest.

This person first did this as a job for a local politician, finding prospective supporters and donors based on issues, filtered by the geographic area of the politician.

So, I wonder about spiritual issues. I wonder if it is a way to “measure” the impact of a billboard campaign or a Jesus Video distribution or other ministry strategies.

What do you think?

Does social media work?

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Does social media work? How can social media be harnessed for the Great Commission?

I just read an amazing story from two weeks ago.

November 9th: Jon Acuff, a copy writer in an IT department in Atlanta, explains how it began here in this original blogpost. God led him to start a project to raise $30,000 by 31 December for a kindergarten in Vietnam.

November 9th: Abraham Piper interviewed Jon as the project started here in this blog post.

November 9th (15 hours later): Jon Acuff blogs how the project has reached $24,000 on the first day.

November 10th: Jon Acuff explains how $30,000 for a kindergarten school in Vietnam was fully funded in 18 hours.

Be wise about your friends

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A few weeks ago, I entered into a saga that I think is instructive to all of us as we learn to use social networks more wisely.

I am a member of LinkedIn, which is a social network of professional contacts. Many others that I know are part of LinkedIn.

Through LinkedIn, I received a request to connect with someone from California. LinkedIn gives 3 options for each request: Accept, Decide Later, I don’t know this person. Since I didn’t know this person, I chose I don’t know this person.

He wrote me back to explain more of the context in which he thought we knew each other. He indicated we had worked together on one or more phone calls several years ago. He mentioned several other organizational leader’s names that were on the call. I still didn’t remember him, so I responded that perhaps he was thinking of someone else but I didn’t recall ever being on the phone call he mentioned. He wrote back really unhappy because he claimed that my I don’t know this person put a black mark on him. Later he wrote that my name had been mentioned on the call but perhaps we never actually talked.

In all this, he never owned the fact that he had indicated a connection that did not exist. He was upset that I had black marked him in the LinkedIn system.

I did not even know that I don’t know this person black marked a person.

So, I asked my friend and social networking expert Rob Williams of Orangejack LLC if he had any information about the black mark concept in LinkedIn. His reply:

I finally found some documentation from LinkedIn about this. Here is some information from the LinkedIn Customer support:

Review invitations you receive carefully. If you do not know a person that has sent you an invitation you can:
1. Click “decide later” which will archive the message and not prevent the member from sending you another invitation at a later time.
2. You can use the “Reply” link and send a message back to the inviter, i.e. Thank you for the invitation to connect however I’m afraid I cannot accept it at this time. LinkedIn is a powerful tool for managing my professional network and designed to help me maintain the connections I have. It is a LinkedIn best practice to only connect directly to those whom I know well and would recommend. I’d like to be able to give a referral to any of my connections when asked. If I don’t know you well enough to do so, LinkedIn isn’t as powerful for my network. Please understand and remember to invite me to connect after we’ve had a chance to work together.
3. Click the “I don’t know” button which will place a mark on the sender’s account that tells LinkedIn this person may not be using invitations correctly. This also prevents them from sending another invite to you in the future.

What I haven’t found is how many “marks” an account can accumulate before being penalized. Seems the number is around 5 and the account can be frozen. I just can’t find much about it officially — and that’s kind of disturbing to me.

Rob

Thanks, Rob! If there are a number of “marks” that send someone to detention hall, we should all know about it up front. It looks like the “decide later” is a way to do away with a person without confronting them!

All this is to say that we are all learning to use social networking. This is sometimes a steep learning curve.

Many see Facebook as a way to proliferate their number of “friends”. Often, it seems the Facebook standard is to “friend” anyone and accept all “friend” requests. Maybe some are trying to compete with Michael Phelps’ 4300 Facebook friends.

I’ve got someone I’ve never even talked with wanting to claim a connection in LinkedIn because of the access and credibility it will give him to others who, although they may not know him, might say “Keith knows him so I guess he’s OK.”

I encourage us all to be “wise as serpents, harmless as doves” in this brave, new world of social networking.