Tag Archive - social media

Review: SongBook by Gospel Software

August 24, 2010 in for Churches

SongBook by Gospel Software is similar to Song Manager, with some more advanced features.

It is primarily a tool for managing music and assisting musicians, and doesn’t include the additional rostering functionality that you’ll find with Elvanto and Planning Center Online.

Some of the extra features SongBook brings to the table are:

  • 2650 songs already loaded and ready to use,
  • the ability to generate PowerPoint slides,
  • view songs by service (e.g. Sundays at 9.45am), and how many times the song has been sung in a given time period,
  • the ability to create user accounts (e.g. for musicians and worship leaders at church)

It’s also possible to add in other elements to a set – i.e. you could use SongBook to create a basic service structure for your services:

SongBook costs US$15 per month (i.e. $180 per year) for fewer than 200 people. See the pricing for other account structures.

If you use SongBook I’d be keen (and so would other readers) to hear of your experience.

3 ways to easily export your tweets

August 9, 2010 in Christian Living

Sometimes it can be useful to export your tweets (or someone else’s).

  1. Searchtastic. Type in a Twitter username, press enter, and you’ll get a link to download an Excel spreadsheet of all the tweets for that user. This is my preferred tool – it’s free, easily, and reliable.
  2. TweetScan Backup. This is also a very handy tool that allows you to select what you’d like to export – your tweets, your friends, direct messages, @replies, followers, favourite tweets – or a full archive. It will then export as a .CSV or HTML file.
  3. TwitPrint. You’ll need to sign-in with your own account (i.e. you can’t get an export of another user), but TwitPrint does include some handy features, e.g. the ability to only print tweets that include particular keywords. It will also enable you to get a pretty print-out of your selected tweets. A similar tool is Print Your Tweets.

For more on this topic, check out ‘10 ways to archive your tweets‘ from Read Write Web.

On a related note, Twitter Export allows you to export a list of the friends or followers or a particular Twitter user, as a .CSV file.

Update:

  1. twDocs is another nifty tool. One of the good features of this tool is the ability to choose the file type you’d like to export to – e.g. PDF, TXT, CSV and more.

Curious Twitter bio for a pastor

August 8, 2010 in Christian Living, Pastors

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?!

Viral Heat: What are people saying about God?

July 26, 2010 in Christian Living, for Churches, Outreach, Pastors

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.

Facebook reveals when we’re happiest, and when we’re saddest

June 3, 2010 in Christian Living, for Churches, Outreach, Pastors

This is an intestesting representation of the status updates of Facebook users:

“Every day, millions of people share how they feel with the people who matter the most in their lives through status updates on Facebook. These updates are tiny windows into how people are doing. They’re brief, to the point and descriptive of what’s going on this week, today or right now…Grouped together, these updates are indicative of how we are collectively feeling.”

The graph is available for 22 countries – here’s Australia:

Try adding the positivity and negativity metrics, and see the interesting results. It surprised me.

See the full details on our Gross National Happiness here (and check out your own country, if it’s not Australia!).

Thanks @andyjamo for putting me onto this.

Posters to promote your church’s social media channels

May 24, 2010 in for Churches, Outreach

My church has been slowly ramping up its social media presence – with a Facebook Page, and a Twitter account. We’ve decided to promote this to the local community, by placing the following posters in our church noticeboard:

If you’re thinking of doing something similar for your church or ministry, be sure to check out Facebook’s guidelines, and Twitter’s guidelines.

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