Twitter is a really useful tool for staying in touch with people, meeting new people with similar interests, and keeping up with news on the topics that you enjoy.

More tools are becoming available every day to assist you to manage and grow your Twitter account. I’ve been checking out some of these tools, and thought I’d share what I’ve been discovering with you over a series of posts. This will help me to remember what I liked and didn’t like about different tools, and perhaps (hopefully!) be helpful to you too.

I didn’t find any of these first five tools particularly helpful for my Twitter management, but give them a go and share what you thought, and how they can be applied in a ministry context. Over time, I’m sure I’ll discover some crackers!

1. BrandChirp

BrandChirp has a 30-day free trial, and costs US$12 per month thereafter. You need to sign-up with your PayPal account, and if you want to cancel your account, you need to do this through PayPal.

• Brand Watch allows you to “follow Tweeters discussing your keyword, or reply instantly by clicking the related button.” This tool worked really well – mentions of keywords appeared almost instantly, and it’s very easy to follow the tweeters, or reply to their messages. However, it didn’t show me which people I was already following, and allowed me to follow people I was currently following. There’s also no way of sorting or filtering all of the mentions that start flooding in!

• Follow Stats shows you who you are following, how many followers they have and when their last tweet was. This function is less unique – other tools such as Refollow and Tweepi can give you these stats and allow you to unfollow.
• Target Follow allows you to follow the friends (followers) of another Twitter user, or follow users by search term (and even restrict by geographical location). Unfortunately, there’s no way of sorting this list, nor does the list reveal which of these people you’re already following. Tweepi’s Geeky Follow provides more tools for this type of following, and is free.

• Other features include the ability to ‘Automatically tweet the title and link of any RSS feed to your Twitter account’, and schedule your tweets (I’m currently doing this with TweetDeck, which is also free).

2. Friend or Follow?

This free tool will tell you:

• Who’s not following you back on Twitter,
• Who you are not following back, and
• Who your mutual friends are.

You can also export the results as a CSV file.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to bulk follow (or unfollow) people with Friend or Follow – again, you can do this with Refollow.

3. Twollow

Twollow offers a 7-day free trial, and accounts begin at US$14.99 per month. As with BrandChirp, you need to sign-up with your PayPal account, and if you want to cancel your account, you need to do this through PayPal.

The interface is basic, but I wasn’t able to test this out because when I tried to add my Twitter account I got an error message I haven’t seen before: “Invalid callback request. Oops. Sorry.”. This seemed to be a problem with the tool, and not with Twitter, so I gave up and cancelled my account.

4. Twitterator

“The purpose of this little script is to allow a Twitter user to “follow” a bunch of other Twitter users in one fell swoop—a Twitter friend list generator if you will.”

As you can see in the screenshot above, the interface is simply and gives you two options:

1. Enter a URL that points to a list of twitter usernames, or
2. Enter the list of usernames manually.

I’m not sure where to find a URL with a list of usernames, and I think that entering names manually could easily be done just by typing them into your browser. But perhaps I’m missing something?

5. TweetMetrics

TweetMetrics is a free tool that allows you to:

I had a lot of difficulties logging in to TweetMetrics with my Twitter account – it doesn’t use the same process as most Twitter tools, and repeatedly refused my password. Once I eventually got in I could see some interesting statistics that I haven’t come across in other Twitter tools (see below), but I wasn’t sure what I’d do with this information anyway. For example, what do I glean from knowing that my average tweet length is 104 characters?

Copyright 2010 Steven Kryger.
Post from: Communicate Jesus. Follow Communicate Jesus on Twitter.
Tools to manage and grow your Twitter account (part 1)

After writing ‘Avoiding church calendar overload‘ and pondering some of the comments and feedback I received, I’ve decided it would be worthwhile conducting a survey of church members to evaluate the effectiveness of current communications methods, to help plan future communications approaches.

The goals of the survey are to:

• understand how church members perceive the current frequency and effectiveness of communication,
• understand what communications channels church members regularly use,
• understand what gaps exist in our current communications, and
• understand what communications channels church members would prefer to be communicated through.

The survey hasn’t gone live yet – I’m asking for your feedback before it does! Take a look at the survey, and let me know what you think – what’s missing, and what could be included.

Thanks!

UPDATE

Following feedback from readers, the survey has been refined and updated. You can see the updated version here.

Related Surveys

A couple of examples and articles I came across as I prepared the survey:

• Communication Survey – a discussion at Church Marketing Lab.
• BranchCreek Summer Communications Survey
• St Matthew Lutheran Church Survey
• Church Communications Audit from United Methodist Communications
• The Church Communication Conundrum

Copyright 2010 Steven Kryger.
Post from: Communicate Jesus. Follow Communicate Jesus on Twitter.
Church communications survey

In a couple of weeks time, as part of my church’s ‘Weekend Extra‘ training morning, I’m running a seminar entitled: “Digital discernment: using new technology and social media to the glory of God”.

It’s a topic close to my heart – how to use technology in a discerning manner – neither writing it off, nor accepting it wholesale without consideration.

Here’s my question – what to include? What issues to explore? What questions to ask? How does the Bible help us to think through these issues? I’ve got my thoughts, but I’d love to hear yours. Are there any resources that I should check out on this topic?

Here’s a short interview with N.T. Wright to get you thinking…

NT Wright on Blogging/Social Media from Bill Kinnon on Vimeo.

God’s Technology is a recently launched video by David Murray that walks through four Biblical principles for approaching our use of technology. I’ve also ordered a copy of The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment by Tim Challies, to help me think through the topic of discernment some more.

Copyright 2010 Steven Kryger.
Post from: Communicate Jesus. Follow Communicate Jesus on Twitter.
A seminar on digital discernment

At Church by the Bridge we’ve started planning the calendar of events for next year (yep, in August!).

And as with most churches, there are a lot of events – all of them worth going to! For example:

• Prayer meetings,
• Carols under the Bridge,
• Annual Vestry Meeting,
• Women’s events,
• Anglicare Winter Appeal,
• Weekend Away,
• Connect Groups,
• PowerPoint training,
• Worship leader training,
• and many more!

As we prepare the calendar, three considerations come to mind:

1. We want to promote the events, without making church members feel overwhelmed by all that’s happening or obligated to come to everything,
2. There are some events that we’d really like people to prioritise, while others are good, but less essential, and
3. Some events are relevant to everyone (e.g. church weekend away), while other events are relevant to smaller groups (e.g. women’s event, or newcomers dinners).

I’ve been thinking about how to communicate these events most effectively, keeping the above considerations in mind, throughout the course of the year.

Here are four steps to a communications strategy for promoting events – I’d love your feedback on what your church does, and how this process could work better.

Step 1. I think the first step is to identify available communication channels. We’ve got quite a number of communications channels at Church by the Bridge:

• church news during services
• printed newsletter distributed at services
• printed quarterly calendar (example)
• weekly e-news
• website news
• website calendar
• Facebook page
• Facebook events
• Facebook advertising
• Event-based minisites (e.g. www.iheartkirribilli.com)
• Twitter account
• phone
• face-to-face
• Connect Groups
• meetings (i.e. communicating to people to a select group of people face-to-face)
• emails to all of church/groups within the church
• A6 postcards (mainly to promote events to people outside the church, e.g. I Heart Kirribilli)
• letterbox drops
• noticeboard (housing A3 posters)
• A1 posters (positioned in frame against the wall outside the church)
• community newsletter (example – though we haven’t printed a second edition!)
• community noticeboards

There are other communications channels available too – for example text messaging isn’t something we’ve explored, but I know of churches using FrontlineSMS for group messaging. Other channels that come to mind are online platforms like On The City, and video messaging (e.g. facilitated by TokBox).

Can you think of any other useful communication channels?

Step 2. Identify which audiences these communication channels engage most effectively with. For example, announcing an event in church will communicate with everyone who is in the service (and listening!), but miss anyone who wasn’t at church that week. Similarly, the church noticeboard, community newsletter, A1 posters, A6 posters are all primarily targeted at people who don’t currently attend the church.

Step 3. Categorise the events. The events can be categorised in (at least) six ways:

1. by type (e.g. training, church service, outreach),
2. by primary audience (i.e. church members, church members and local community)
3. by broad audience (e.g. men, women, everyone at church, local community, parents, Connect Leaders, etc), and
4. by importance – this category is to help members of the church if they need to decide between two events. For example, church services and the weekend away fit into the ‘essential’ category, whereas everyone doesn’t need to come to every outreach event that’s run throughout the year.
5. by regularity (e.g. weekly – church, quarterly, annually, one-off – weddings!)
6. by necessity (e.g. child protection training is essential for anyone working with kids)

By this stage, you’ve got a list of all events, communications channels, the audiences for each channel, and the six categorisations of each event. It’s sounding complex, but I think the clearer the planning, the better the communication to the people who need to hear about the events.

Step 4. At this point, I think a matrix would come in handy. I played around with several formats for this, and decided on a form. It’s rough and there’s information missing, but it should give you an idea what I’m thinking of. Check out the Calendar Communication Matrix. I’m thinking that events could then be entered into the form, one at a time, with each of the fields completed along the way. One of the many advantages of creating this form in Wufoo is that all the information can easily be exported out into other formats.

Once events had been entered, you could look at the spreadsheet and plan how each event will be communicated throughout the year, based on all the elements supplied in the form.

What do you think about this strategy? Would it be helpful? Is it far too complicated? How could it be improved?

Copyright 2010 Steven Kryger.
Post from: Communicate Jesus. Follow Communicate Jesus on Twitter.
Avoiding church calendar overload

I’ve been doing some thinking about rosters in an effort to assist the people at my church who work with them, as well as those who receive them!

While I’ve started looking at some tools (see 16 tools to build services and assist church musicians), the step before that and the one I’m keen to hear about today is one of processes.

At my church the basic rostering process goes something like this:

1. our administrator sends out a mega roster with the proposed roster for each service for the next three months. This includes all your regular church gathering activities – musicians, Bible readers, welcomers, prayers, service leaders etc.
2. people can respond to this mega roster, and indicate weeks that they will be unavailable to serve.
3. an update roster mega roster is distributed, and if you are unable to serve on a particular week, it’s up to you to arrange a swap.
4. each week, a reminder is sent out to the people on the roster for that week, including details of the structure of the service. The service leader might also phone the people serving.

This is a rough outline – it doesn’t always work like this, and different services operate in slightly different ways.

I’m keen to hear how your church does it, and what you think works well and not so well about the current processes.

Also, does your church post its rosters on the church website?

Copyright 2010 Steven Kryger.
Post from: Communicate Jesus. Follow Communicate Jesus on Twitter.
How does your church do rosters?

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech…Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel —because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth. Genesis 11

The place was named Babel because that was where God dismantled our common language, and now with tools of the same name, we are reversing this action.

Babel Fish from Yahoo! was the first online translation tool that I heard of – allowing you to type in text or a web address, and the ‘to’ and ‘from’ languages, and bingo – your text or web page is translated into a language you can understand.

Google offers a similar tool with Google Translate, that offers four times the number of languages to translate to and from. Both Google and Yahoo! also provide free tools to translate your website into other languages. This means that your website can be intelligible to people to who don’t speak your language. Think of the possibilities, for example, for church websites in regions of Sydney where a wide variety of languages are spoken.

babelwith.me was developed by LifeChurch.tv “to communicate with people around the globe…everyone from international church partners to individuals attending our Church Online.” They’ve made this tool available for free.

babelwith.me allows users to ‘chat’ (using text) online with people who don’t speak your language. 45 languages are supported (it appears, using the technology of Google Translate), and as you and your conversation partners type, your words are translated. Pretty nifty, don’t you think?

Imagine the possibilities here for mission – a family is preparing to do mission work in France, but their French is still very basic. They’d like to get to know the people they’ll be working alongside, so they have a conversation online, without the need to invite along a translator.

Can you think of any other ministry opportunities for these Babel-reversing tools?

Copyright 2010 Steven Kryger.
Post from: Communicate Jesus. Follow Communicate Jesus on Twitter.
Rebuilding Babel – three tools for translating text

Do you think this Twitter bio is serious? It can be difficult to detect sarcasm…

I could understand that bio if someone else wrote it for him, but who outsources the authoring of their Twitter bio?!

Copyright 2010 Steven Kryger.
Post from: Communicate Jesus. Follow Communicate Jesus on Twitter.
Curious Twitter bio for a pastor

Many of the election advertisements are really annoying me. Take for example this advertisement:

They annoy me because of the effect they are trying to have on me. They are trying to motivate me by fear, to not vote for the Coalition. There are lots of ways to motivate people.

• Guilt
• Obligation
• Gratitude
• Reward
• Punishment
• Social good

In this situation however, they’ve played the fear card, and rather than inspiring me with a vision for the future, I’m being scared into ‘you might think we’re bad, but they’d be even worse!’.

Apart from annoying me, this advertisement got me thinking. What is the tone of the advertising for our churches? We’re all advertising – from the poster out the front, to the postcard in the letterbox, to the  invitation to the ladies dessert and coffee night or the A5 promotional piece for the next Christianity Explained course.

A couple of questions to ponder and discuss:

• How do we seek to motivate people to join us at church and our myriad of events?
• What is the overall tone of these messages?
• What emotions do these messages attempt to tap in to?
• If you weren’t a Christian, and you saw/received one of these advertising pieces, what effect would it have on you?

Update: scaring Australians out of their wits was ‘The Pitch’ challenge on the Gruen Transfer tonight…

Copyright 2010 Steven Kryger.
Post from: Communicate Jesus. Follow Communicate Jesus on Twitter.
Is your church’s advertising like the Labor party’s?

Twitter is a semi-useful way of discovering interesting news and information (once you sort through the mundane), but RSS feeds are still my preferred way of reading my favourite blogs.

First of all – not sure what RSS is all about? Check out this post on Desiring God (via What’s Best Next).

For a long time I just accessed my feeds via Google Reader in the Google Mobile App. However, I went out on the look out for other apps to keep up with my feeds, and the app I’ve been most impressed with is far and away Reeder. There’s lots of apps for this purpose (MobileRSS, Feedler, RSS Runner, News Rush, NewsRack, etc) and I’ve tried out quite a few of them, but Reeder takes the cake.

There’s lots to love about Reeder – it looks good, it’s fast and there’s lots of options for saving/sharing posts.

The best thing about the app is how easy it is to star items. Slide to the left and a post is ‘starred’. Slide to the right, and the star is removed (see below). This is such a handy feature because this is how I keep from being overwhelmed! I regularly scan through the feeds (there’s over a hundred in my collection!), and star the posts that look interesting. The rest I mark as read. This enables me to have a list of the items that I want to read later, without a backlog of thousands of unread posts which ends up just making me feel stressed! Reeder is a pleasure to use, and helps me stay on top of my feeds in a way I’ve not been able to do before.

Here’s another review of Reeder. Would anyone like to put in a challenge for a better RSS app for iPhone?!

Copyright 2010 Steven Kryger.
Post from: Communicate Jesus. Follow Communicate Jesus on Twitter.
The best RSS app for iPhone

I’ve been doing some research into social media monitoring tools. These are tools that allow you to input particular keywords, and monitor what is being said. One tool I’ve come across is Viral Heat.

As I was having a play I discovered the ‘Social Trends‘ page where you can “Search your favorite brands, television shows, movies, or celebrities to get the latest viral stats”. I think these are basically just reports on topics that you don’t have to pay for.

I don’t know how, but ‘God’ got made it into the ‘brand’ category!

In the report you can see social trends for ‘God’ for the week on different channels, e.g. microblogs (i.e. Twitter)

You can also see trends on Facebook, blogs, websites and videos. Check out the full report.

It’s not particularly accurate (e.g. the mentions of God on Twitter and video were blasphemous!):

…but this could be a useful tool for other purposes. For example, I use Google Alerts to monitor what is being said about the Kirribilli community.

Check out Viral Heat’s Social Trends.

Interested in social media monitoring? Check out this wiki of 145 products.

Copyright 2010 Steven Kryger.
Post from: Communicate Jesus. Follow Communicate Jesus on Twitter.
Viral Heat: What are people saying about God?