3 Great Examples of Churches Using Social Media

I have long been a fan of seeing Christian organizations using the online tools in the world. Most of these orgs are very scarred of change and of new things, but there are people out there doing some very cool things. I was inspired to make this post by seeing Chris Brogan talking about Lifechurch.tv today. Looks like Chris checked in on this service this morning and had some good things to say. So with that, here are three great resources. Please add more in the comments section if you know of other resources.

1. Lifechurch.tv

Lifechurch.tv is a christian church out of Oklahoma, and they have a big presence online. This is not like an organization that has a few bits and pieces online. This group is seriously plugged in. They have a great website, Facebook, photos, videos, live streaming, Twitter - the whole nine. I have only poked around the site a little but Chris Brogan spent some time there this morning and wrote up his thoughts on watching the service live.

2. YouVersion

Lifechurch.tv also is the producer of YouVersion. YouVersion is a digital bible and community. I originally started using this online but they have massively expanded to most mobile devices, including the iPad. It is simple and clean, and the best part is the community. Many people read the bible and have thoughts they want to share about what they are reading or see what others are saying. This allows you to do that. People are forming community groups online around this service which allows people to easily interact online.

3. The Village

The Village is a church in Texas that I was turned on to by a friend of mine. He had been listening to the sermons online and loved the pastor. The church has a great website with three campuses around Dallas. They podcast their sermons every week - which are good. They are very active on Facebook and Twitter. I have never been to this church but I feel connected to the lead pastor, Matt Chandler. He has used all of the social media tools to document his battle with brain cancer. He uses a ton of video which connects very strongly with people and his blog. He was supposed to lose but he seems to be winning the battle. It is a really amazing story. They are doing a great job of creating community, not only in Dallas, but online. I do think that because of their online presence it makes their local presence even stronger.

If you know of other great examples please post them in the comments section. I love to see examples of people that actually get it and are using social media to build community and conversation instead of a bullhorn or have now idea how to engage.

What I Learned in Social Media This Week

This is not really new this week but I learned that there is no ultimate tool in social media. There is SO MUCH stuff out there that does a slightly different thing. It is a little painful at times because I just want to have what I want to have. Maybe we will just have to build it. OK - Enough of my rant.

This week I wanted to share The Twitter Tim.es. This has become one of my favorite tools in social media. I follow about 1200 people and as you know (or you will find out) if you follow over 30 people you are going to miss tweets. The alternative is to be on Twitter 24/7 and watch it all. When people ask me about Twitter and they think they have to watch every tweet like they do email, I give them this analogy. Imagine that Twitter is a coffee shop that is full of all of your friends. You walk in and you hear the conversations that are going on while you are there. When you leave you don't hear those conversations that take place while you are gone. The Twitter Tim.es is like someone is taking notes for you and you can see the summary of what your network is chatting about.

This works great if you have a group of people you follow that are all similar. If you don't, it is still great but your report is longer and more spread out. Twitter Tim.es is a page that refreshes each time you go to it and it aggregates what your network is talking about the most. The most discussed articles appear on the top. Here is a video that talks about Twitter Tim.es and will give you a good overview.  I have this open in one of my tabs automatically when my browser opens. I can scan the feed and quickly be caught up each day. This is a must have for me and getting the most out of Twitter.

The Twitter Times - Video Tour from Maxim Grinev on Vimeo.

What I Learned In Social Media This Week

Until yesterday night this post was going to be about something different. Then it happened. Seesmic finally released an iPhone app. FINALLY! I know I am a dork but I really like how @Loic conducts himself - in general and more specifically with his customers. So I have been rooting for them but that was seriously taking a nose dive. I just couldn't understand why they were not bringing an iPhone app to market. But now they have it. I have been using it since last night and I really like it. The one thing with Seesmics products is that they seem to take significant time to make sure the performance is there. This is the edge that will get me to consider switching from their main competition TweetDeck. TweetDeck tends to be very quick to market but the performance sucks. I guess that is the tradeoff.


Yesterday was a big day in social media because not only did this iPhone app come out but Seesmic released a preview version of their new Seesmic Desktop app. I have been unable to get this to load on my Mac but I have it running on a PC and like it to this point. It does everything I need in a nice clean interface.

TweetDeck was the first out yesterday with a new version of their desktop platform. As I mentioned above TweetDeck is quick to market but tends to lack in performance. Because they are quick to market they have more features. You can see in the video below some of the new features they have added in this latest release. The fousquare stuff is really cool. I don't care about Google Buzz because I never use it and I don't know anyone that does unless they just have a feed pushing to it. The other interesting thing with TweetDeck is that they are ditching the Adobe Air platform and moving to HTML5. Another hit for Adobe.

These are two companies with different approaches that will make for an interesting race for quite a while. TweetDeck has chosen to be quick to market and continue to add features that make for a very rich experience. Seesmic and Loic seem to be taking a much larger view of the world - more of a enterprise class software approach. They are building a platform that they hope developers will add functionality that will push their feature set further than they could by them selves. I like this approach for the long term because I think it makes for a much better product but it doesn't do much for my patience. I have harassed Loic over and over about the lack of an iPhone app. I guess I will have to find a new horse to beat. I KNOW! Hey Loic where is my beautiful iPad app to complement these other two? Being in software myself I understand development takes more time than people realize but being a consumer I want it yesterday.
A big day for social media. I will talk about Tap11 soon which is something I have played with a little bit and was the original topic for this week.

Peoplebrowsr is Listening and You May Not Know What They Do - I Didn't

A few times now I have written about about my issues with Peoplebrowsr and their user experience. (Dear Peoplebrowsr - I want to love you. Really I do, but... & User Experience is King - Please Tell Peoplebrowsr) I have wanted to love Peoplebrowsr for a long time but they make it so hard yet you can quite shut them out. If you take a look at them you can tell that there is something there but it is hard to identify what. After my last post and Twitter stream the people at Peoplebrowsr responded. They contacted me on Twitter, Facebook and they commented on my blog post. I was pleased to know they are listening and working to improve, although as of the time of this post they had not fixed the simple login issue I noted in my last post.

I was poking around on the site and decided to click on the data mine image at the top. It takes you to a list of options. It is somewhat of a random list but I selected Get Special Report option which allowed me to send an email. Later that day I was contacted by 2 people from Peoplebrowsr and I had a call with Becky Wang and we chatted about what was possible. What I found out was interesting. Peoplebrowsr has 18 months of all Twitter data saved in storage. They claim the only other people to have such data is Twitter. They have quite a head start on any competitors but at some point that advantage runs out because people are only going to care about that data looking back for so long.

They have a nice platform to respond and monitor the Twitter stream but they card they should play is being the experts in data and reporting. I can tell you from my experience at Tripwire that this is something we are struggling getting in the way we want. There are so many little tools out there this is an area of real opportunity. They should kill all the other stuff they do and focus. Be really good at one thing and not confusing at a bunch.

What I Learned This Week In Social Media

I was thinking about the things that I came across this week as I have been working in social media and I decided I wanted to create a series of posts of what I learned in social media this week. Some times that might be tools (I love finding the new shinny objects) and sometimes it might be about tactics or strategies.

This week I discovered some cool things. I am not claiming that these are all hot off the press by my own little ah ha's for the week.

Blackbird Pie is a tool that allows you to select a tweet and get an embed code. This is better than using SnagIt or Jing to take a picture. You just enter the text in the box at the top and here is what you get:

Here is the result:

Congratulations to our CEO Jim Johnson who is the @techamericaOR CEO of the year tonight. #OTA10less than a minute ago via HootSuiteMatt Hixson
matthixson

The second (and final for this week) is Topsy. A friend of mine turned me on to this company telling me that they were doing some cool stuff. This is a very cool search tool. Great for Twitter and the web in general. I wish they had an export feature to CSV - hopefully that will come later.

It picks up Tweets, blogs, websites, photos and you can filter that data and time. Go over and give it a try. You can see how many times each thing has been tweeted also. Nice clean interface.

That is it for this week's learning. A new adventure to come next week.

Thanks

Matt