Had a chance earlier this week to speak with Kelly Jasper with the Augusta Chronicle for an article in today’s paper. The article was on the use of social media in ministry, in particular Twitter. You can check it out here. At the bottom of the article, they give a listing of local pastors and notables that are on twitter, too.
I was reading a Nielsen report on social media networking (facebook, twitter, etc.) and some of the highlights struck me. Your can download the full report here but here are some bullet points:
Here are some questions/thoughts to consider, some of which I’m asking myself:
2. Find someone on your staff that will or does and utilize them to get your church connected.
I am constantly blown away by the innovations coming out of LifeChurch.tv. They have invested much in bringing on talented and innovative staff for their web development, also known as Team Digerati. The interface for the web campus is armed with several top social networking tools. If you get a chance, you should really check out one of their web campus worship experiences. We’ve been talking through more and more lately about how to increase the level of connecivity across all of our online presences. I think one of the projects I would like to work on one day would be to put together a team and develop an online worship experience as dynamic as this.
There is a lot of chatter right now about if true Biblical community can be experienced online in this environment or not. Some say the lacking component is the physical presence aspect. Still, for many others, they are already finding their own “community” in social networks, chat rooms, forums, etc. It’s a discussion that we had this morning at CCC. I would be interested to hear your take on it. Post a comment or as always, send me a tweet at @ajwired.
Last Sunday we ran across a glitch over at the west campus in our student ministry venue. The team had hooked up the Mac Book Pro to run ProPresenter for the morning on the projector. Whenever we hooked up the projector, it would switch it to where the projector (external output from Mac Book Pro – DVI out) was the default desktop, and the built in computer LCD screen was the secondary monitor. Usually a simple fix right? Open up System Preferences, go to display, make sure mirror desktop is unchecked, hit the arrangement tab to switch them around…..no go! We tried every reboot-disconnect-reconnect-display setting that we knew to try…still nothing. On monday we discovered what the issue was. It was a small update that Apple had released that a lot of people were not aware of. If you’ve already discovered this on your own, that’s great. If not, here’s the fix:
1. Pull up the display preferences.
2. Turn off Mirroring.
3. Click the “Arrangement” tab.
4. Click and drag the white bar from one window to the window you want to be the default/primary monitor.
Who knew? You could move the small white bar. Hope that is helpful.
My own what? Gravatar is a Globally Recognized Avatar. What’s an avatar? Well, it’s the photo image that shows up when you post a comment on a blog, on a forum, etc. See the image to the left. If you haven’t set a gravatar, when you post a comment on most blogs, it will show the default gravatar icon for that blog. A gravatar get’s associated with your email address so whenever you post a comment, it knows to use the image you setup.
So, here’s how to get your own custom gravatar…it’s simple and free. Go to gravatar.com and click the Sign up now! link. It will walk you through the process from there. Hope to see your mug on here soon.
If you’re a web designer, then you’ve experienced the surprise and frustration of completing a site only to find that it works on one browser but not on another. While this is mostly an issue with Internet Explorer 6 and older, there is still a need to make sure that your websites are cross compatible. Here are a couple of tools I used during development to check to see if a design and the style sheet are working on multiple browsers and operating systems. Good tools to add to your arsenal. Both are free.
Wanted to pass along a way that your church or non-profit can save some serious dough when it comes to buying software or hardware. Someone tipped me off to this a few months ago, and it has meant big savings for my ministry area at cedar creek. We have setup a non-profit pricing account with CDW.com. I bought the Adobe CS4 Web suite and After Effects CS4 and saved over a grand…..that’s for the full version, not just an upgrade.
The way it works is that you complete a credit application (financial person can do that for you) and submit a copy of the letter/form stating your non profit status. Once approved, you go to their website, look for what you want, send over the cdw product number(s) that you want a quote for. Your sales rep. sends back the quote at non profit pricing, you sign/approve, items are shipped, they bill you. They sell Apple products too. Any kind of electronic you can imagine, they can usually get their hands on unless it is higher profile items like high end projectors or something. Here’s the link to the non-profit section or you can call them at 800.750.4239
If you live in the world of professional design, graphics and video, at some you’re going to tangle with Photoshop. There aren’t too many videos that I produce that don’t utilize photoshop on some level, and definitely for most graphic stuff. I came across this list of some pretty incredible movie posters that were all edited and created using photoshop. I think my favorite is Lord of War simply because of all the detail and time it probably took to create it. Check them out here.
I think I read somewhere that Twitter has grown at an insane rate over the past year…like 1400%. With the growth has come a bumper crop of Twitter helper apps, most of which are free. Here’s a mega list of more Twitter apps than you could ever use.
 Alan Jones is the media pastor at Cedar Creek Church in Aiken, SC. He is a husband, father, pastor, designer and entrepreneur. Click Here to learn more. |
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