RevCyn

Many Facebook users are confused by the difference between "Pages" and "Groups," and between the new "Groups" and the old "Groups."  Here's a brief-ish primer. Pages If you're wanting to create a Facebook presence for your church, what you want is a "Page."  See my church's page at http://www.facebook.com/libertyuu for an example.  To create a page, go to another page and scroll down to the bottom.  On the bottom of the left column will be a link that says "Create a Page."  If you click on that, it'll walk you through the steps.  With pages you can post status updates which will appear in the news feed of the people who "like" (formerly "fan") the page.  You can post blog posts or videos or whatever, just like with your own personal status update.  You can create invents and invite all the followers to them.  Pages also have the advantage of getting their own distinctive URL, which make...

One of my Facebook friends asked me for this information, and I said I'd write it up as a note, so I decided to write it up as a note here so that others could learn, if interested. This can be useful information for anyone, but I think for ministers who friend congregants it's a particular must-know.  The basic concept is that in Facebook you can create "lists" for your friends, and then you can do various things with these lists, including blocking access to certain information.  This is somewhat different from "Groups" which I'll talk about another time, if it seems like people need to know. Step One: Create a Friends List Under the account link on the top left on your blue bar in Facebook there is an option called "Edit Friends."  Click on that.  Then there should be a button on the top that's labeled "+ Create a List."  If it's not there, look on the left-hand column.  Sometimes my menus look different because I...

As ministers, we all know too easily the arguments to not "friend" members of our congregation on Facebook and other social networking sites.  It blurs the professional boundary we try so hard to establish.  It leaves you open to people seeing something you don't want them to see if a friend tags you with an embarrassing photo or video or comment.  And people will assume you know things they've posted there and forget to tell you.  It's definitely a valid decision to not friend, particularly if the privacy controls overwhelm you.  All of this is true. But if you're comfortable playing with the security parameters, most of these concerns can be mitigated.  So here's some of the other side from someone who does friend congregation members. Pastoral Care:   I don't see everything that members post, but occasionally I do see pastoral care needs on Facebook that I'm better equipped to respond to for having been a Facebook friend.   For example...

One of the biggest questions ministers have about Facebook is "should I friend my congregants"?  Both a "yes" and a "no" answer are reasonable answers.  I do friend congregants, although not minors in my congregation, and here are some tips to keep in mind if you do: Create friend groups.  This can be done by clicking on "Friends" in the left hand column from your Home page, and then clicking "Create List" at the top of the page.  Create a group called something like "Church" or "Congregants" and then put all your congregants in it.  Nobody knows what groups you have but you.  Unless you post it on your blog like this!  Remember that each new friend will have to be immediately put into the groups, and this can be done when you're friending them directly.  Now that you have a group, you can do some important things with it.  First, you can click on this group (again in the left hand column, under friends--click ...

Last Sunday I did that presentation on Social Networking with my parents in the Detroit area, but I'm still immersed in Social Networking because I'm working on a webinar on the subject for our district... and I'm procrastinating on sermon writing, of course. What better time to blog? MySpace Having heard an NPR report and read a New York Times article (see below) which suggest that while Facebook is gaining popularity overall, MySpace is still more popular with certain minority groups, I wonder if UU churches might be further perpetuating our problem of addressing primarily white culture by being on Facebook and not MySpace.  I, and my church, have Facebook accounts and not MySpace ones.  Looking for UU churches on MySpace, I encountered only a couple.  Thomas Jefferson Unitarian Church is one.  So I decided the other day to try to create a MySpace account for the church.  My idea was to see if I could, like I did with the Ning page I set up a while ag...

I spent the morning working on a PowerPoint slide explaining how I do social networking (for a presentation that I'm helping my father on for an organization named SEMCO ). So the picture below is how one minister does social networking for a congregation. It basically amounts to this: I try to blog once a week, and I try to post on the church's Facebook page once a week. The rest pretty much automatically happens. Added note: Of course, now that I've done this picture, things seem to be not working anymore.  It's been over an hour since I posted this, and it hasn't fed into either my Twitter or the church Facebook.  Perhaps it's just a blogger delay? Second Addition:  It did eventually work and go to the Twitter and the Facebook, just like it should.  Meanwhile, I've unscrambled the picture a bit.  Here it is below:

Some thoughts on the new social media, as I'm wool-gathering this morning: In the last year and a half, I've started writing/using a blog, Twitter, and Facebook. I've also created a Facebook fan page for my church. Right now these things are all interwoven, and I see each as enhancing my ministry in different ways. Blogging My blog is a public site, with no hidden posts, so it's entirely open to the public. My blog is http://revcyn.blogspot.com . That might seem pretty obvious to the people who read it directly from my blog, but I also have the blog posting automatically to the church's Facebook fan page, and people comment on it there more than they do back at the home site. I sometimes also let it post to my personal Facebook page. Since in both places it comes through as Facebook "notes," it's not always apparent to people who read it there that it's really the blog from http://revcyn.blogspot.com. Having the blog post to Facebook has p...