Social Media | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Facebook Tips: Free Church Directory Replacement

This Facebook tip could apply to any organization with members that publishes a directory, but my experience has been with church directories, so that’s the example I’m using for discussion.

The way these directory projects usually work is that a photography firm approaches the church with an offer of a free printed directory. Each family or individual member in the church gets a free photo sitting and an 8″ x 10″ portrait, along with a copy of the printed directory, and an opportunity to purchase additional poses and prints.

Of course, few families get just the free photo. When these firms take your pictures, they retain the copyright. You can’t even legally scan the photo and use it in your family Christmas letter. That’s why they tend to get significant sales; I remember with one of these in which our family was involved, our photo package was about $400.

I’m not begrudging Olan Mills its profit-making opportunity, but just as web 2.0 tools are disrupting other industries, Facebook could provide a better free directory for churches and other organizations. One that’s really free.

The answer is through a Facebook group formed by the church. Everyone who joins a Facebook group has his or her profile picture added to the list at the bottom (just like a church pictorial directory). You can use the messaging function to contact anyone who is a member. For those with whom you have closer relationships, you can add them as friends.

Here are some Facebook functions that might have application for an on-line church directory:

Members can upload pictures and videos (try that in a printed directory!) and can tag their friends. This would be especially good for pictures from church picnics, potlucks, youth group outings, short-term mission trips and the like. Then, when Facebook friends of your members see these things show up in their News Feeds, it may open up an opportunity for discussion if they are interested in finding out more.
Members could put prayer requests on the Wall, or the Message All Members function could be used to send requests out to everyone.
Message All Members could also be used to send alerts about weather-related cancellations to everyone’s cell phone. That’s particularly helpful in climates like Minnesota’s.
The pastor’s sermon text could be put on the discussion board, with an opportunity for members to ask questions or make comments.
Video of the pastor’s sermons could be uploaded for shut-ins to watch, or for people who were out of town on Sunday.

As I thought about this concept, I wondered whether some churches might have something like this going already, and Mars Hill Church in Seattle instantly came to mind. Mark Driscoll is the pastor there, and I’ve heard mp3s of some of his sermons that made me think, “If any church in America has a Facebook group, it would be Mars Hill.”

Sure enough, here it is. Actually, I guess there are some related groups, too, such as “Mark Driscoll is my homeboy.”

I don’t think Mars Hill is using Facebook as a replacement for the church directory; for one thing, I know they have several thousand members, while the Facebook group has several hundred. And the Facebook limit for a group to be able to message all members is 1000, I believe. For the great majority of churches, and the ones likely in the market for photo directories, that limit isn’t a real problem.

Oh, and by the way, I just checked out Olan Mills, and they now have a free on-line directory service, too. Good for them, that they’re responding to changes in the market. Here’s a sample Olan Mills on-line directory (The password is secret. No, really it is secret.)

If your church has lots of members who want professionally posed photos and prints, a service like Olan Mills is for you. (They say they do more church directories than anyone else.) But if you want your directory to be part of an interactive on-line community, a Facebook option would be better.

The other reality is printed church directories tend to get out of date fairly quickly. People die. Others move away. New children are born to current members. And hopefully, if your church is growing, new people are joining.

Broadening our discussion again to include both churches and other nonprofit or not-for-profit organizations, I think it’s better to have your multimedia on-line directory in Facebook for free, with candid and action photos of people, and to distribute photocopied text-only member listings with updated contact information more frequently. This provides a better basic information directory for everyone, and a richer experience for those who are on-line. And the money your members would spend on posed photos could instead be used to support your shared cause.

To make this kind of directory work, though, you need to have a plan for what you want to accomplish with it, and key individuals who share the vision and will keep the momentum going. But with that vision, and with a core group committed to using it, I believe Facebook can be a powerful tool for connecting a community.

Technorati: Facebook, church, directory, Olan Mills, organizations, nonprofit, not-for-profit, churches, directories, free, Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill

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Jott: Phone Blogging

Jott is, as I described earlier, a great free service you can use to send yourself (or others) email and text messages. You’re out and about. You hit your Jott speed-dial number on your cell phone. You speak your message, and Jott transcribes your speech reasonably reliably. You get a handy message in your inbox that you can put into your GTD workflow.

Now Jott has announced a bunch of new features, including letting you speak your Twitter tweets (see the example from my test in the graphic above) or your blog posts. You can link your WordPress or Blogger blog to your Jott account, and then when you dial the number and it asks you, “Who do you want to Jott?” you answer “WordPress” instead of “me” and whatever you record is transcribed and posted to your blog.

Here’s what happened when I tried it earlier today. It isn’t perfect, but it does also include a link to the audio file on the Jott site. Maybe it would transcribe better if I wasn’t a Minneso-o-o-o-o-tan.

This has limitations: if you want to include Technorati tags, you need to add those later. There’s also a limit on how long a message can be (it’s longer than Twitter’s 140 characters, but it does cut you off after a few sentences.) I think the post’s title is always the same, too: Jott Blog Post.
But this does further illustrate some of the wonderfulness of Web 2.0. Applications talk to each other. They work together. And they just work. There are WordPress and Twitter applications in Facebook, now there are in Jott, too. Shel Holtz also has a nice Jott review focusing on the Twitter experience.

I think this is a great move for Jott, for search engine rankings if nothing else. When people use Jott to blog, the post includes two links to the Jott.com domain: one to the main page, and one to the audio file of the post. But obviously the main benefit for Jott is the visibility on blogs; as lots more people will run across it and will give it a try.

Why don’t you? It’s free, like everything else you see on this blog.

Technorati: Jott, Free, text, WordPress, Twitter, GTD, Blogger, Shel Holtz

Facebook Business Tip: Make Geographic Network Primary

Some employers have policies against their employees indicating their work affiliation in public communications of a potentially controversial nature, such as in letters to the editor or emails to public officials. They don’t want the employees’ individual positions on a particular issue to be misconstrued as the company position.

The everyone-is-a-world-wide-publisher era of the web presents additional challenges to these policies, particularly in social networks like Facebook and MySpace. But with thoughtful personal practices and policy development, employees and employers can find ways to preserve employees’ rights to expression without dragging the company name into controversies.

In Facebook, for example, you can avoid this issue by making your geographic network primary, and your employer network secondary.

I first saw this potential problem when I visited Wal-Mart’s Roomate Style Match group in Facebook and saw the “lively” discussion on its wall, with many people voicing strong anti-Wal-Mart opinions and others coming to the company’s defense.

The substance of that argument isn’t the point of this post. The point is that the primary network for each discussion (or argument) participant is listed next to his or her name. That’s fine for people in college, where wide-open discussions are fair game (or at least were before the advent of campus speech codes.)

It’s different in the work world. Employees are free to participate in these kinds of discussions as private individuals, but employers understandably wouldn’t want their names drawn into the fight.

So here’s the solution: If you haven’t joined a geographic network in Facebook, do it now. Then go to your Account settings in Facebook, choose the Networks tab, and click the “Make Primary” button next to your geographic network. Like this:

Your Networks profile will look like this:

Then, when you participate in a discussion, instead of having your employer’s name next to yours, your geographic location would be listed.

So, here are the implications and applications for you:

As an employee, just do it. Change your primary network to your geographic or regional network. It’s probably better for you anyway because it will make your primary network broader.
As an employer, you should consider making this part of your public internet communication policy for employees. If they participate in Facebook, MySpace or other social networks, they should take care that the company’s name is not directly attached to discussions of a political or controversial nature. The method I have described above accomplishes this for people using Facebook.

This essentially preserves what companies have been trying to accomplish through policies about use of the company name in letters to the editor or letters to government officials. These longstanding policies can’t prevent people from finding out that a writer of a controversial newspaper article works for your company, but they have to dig a little to find out.

Likewise, by making the company affiliation secondary in Facebook, your company’s name isn’t directly attached to the communication. People can discover where the writer works, and the “digging” online is a little easier, but the company name isn’t right there next to your opinion.

In a future post I will discuss why employers blocking Facebook access at work, or barring employees from attaching their work email address to their account, is counterproductive. Yes, counterproductive, even though some shortsighted companies list productivity concerns among the reasons to block Facebook.

Technorati: Facebook, Business, Networks, productivity, MySpace, employers, work, employees, Wal-Mart, policies, email

Google Will Spur Facebook Growth

Facebook‘s so-called “walled garden” is about to get a lot more like the blood-brain barrier, which is good news for people who want Facebook to become their all-in-one networking utility.

And the privacy concerns some are immediately raising seem to be reflexive rather than reflective.

In biology, the blood-brain barrier protects the brain from chemicals in the bloodstream. Likewise, Facebook puts up a barrier to the wider internet that prevents spam messages from getting through.

Facebook announced today that extremely limited versions of its users’ profiles will be available for viewing through Google, Yahoo and other search engines. Techcrunch rightly notes the grave implications for some start-ups looking to fill the people search niche. An SEO blog also notes benefits for companies that want to be found online (and therefore for their customers, who are looking for them). Other reasonable analyses are here, here and here.
Many of the objections raised today are the standard response of those who see a privacy threat in every aggregation of online data, or worse yet, a conspiracy. Like this laughable Flash-in-the-pan that tries to connect Facebook’s Terms of Service (in which users are saying, in legalese, that they have the right to upload whatever they put on Facebook and that Facebook has the right to display it on the internet) to everything from global climate change to the JFK assassination.

In essence, the Google bots will come in a month from now (after everyone in Facebook has had the opportunity to opt out) and will index profile content. But when your (or my) Facebook profile comes back in the search results, all anyone will see will be something like this:

Hard to see a big threat there. And those with phobias about privacy implications can opt out, so no one outside Facebook can search for them.

For the fearless, this is a great development. I will be able to do a Google search for people I know and find out whether they are in Facebook, so I can send them a message or a friend request. But because people who aren’t Facebook members can’t send a message without joining, we don’t have to worry about this opening the spam floodgates.

It will, however, encourage lots more people to join Facebook, as they see Facebook listings for people they know showing up high in the Google results, and as they discover they need to be members to send a message to them.

Facebook has been growing at over a million users a week already; this will only accelerate what Newsweek called its “astonishing” growth.

Technorati: Facebook, Google, Techcrunch, privacy