» social media

Understanding this generation

radiantfirst — Wed, 12 May 2010 02:18:32 +0000

Student Life has done it again. Year after year Student Life has been a leader in understanding teenagers and the world that they live in. Having worked for Student Life for several summers, I believe strongly in this organization and have grown to admire their passion to help teens to discover God’s word in a creative way.

I love this piece they created and can’t wait to share with other youth leaders in our youth ministry.

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Using FBML in your facebook pages

radiantfirst — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 22:23:35 +0000

I was recently introduced to FBML by a friend of mine. Basically FBML (Facebook Mark Up Language) allows you to drop HTML into your facebook page. This is useful in creating facebook pages that look like a website and less like a typical facebook wall. I created one for a film race we are doing with our student ministry. Doing so allows you the ability to get the look of a website with the community that facebook offers. I think in the future I will be developing alot more facebook pages this way with the plan to abandon micro-sites that were once so hot.

Here are the steps I used to create the page:
1. Create a facebook page
2. Get 25 fans
2. Once you have 25 fans go to facebook.com/username and change the url so that your page has an actual url you can advertise
4. Search fbml and click add fbml to my page
5. Develop your html document in dreamweaver or another web development program
6. Upload any images you are using to outside service such as flickr or a web server
7. Replace the path of the images with the outside path you created
8. Go into your code and copy from table to table (the max width is 790)
9. Go to your facebook page and edit the page
10. Edit the fbml and past the code in there
11. Once your code is pasted you can go to your wall settings and make that fbml page be your landing page if you so desire

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Reality TV for your youth group (part 2)

radiantfirst — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:06:33 +0000

I posted about this earlier here. In January our student ministry embarked on a reality tv show format for a four week series we called True LYF. You can see all the videos on the facebook fan page we created. Four four different weeks we followed various students in our ministry and challenged them to do various spiritual disciplines such as (bible reading, prayer, scripture memory and fasting). The idea was to expose these disciplines to students in a fun and thoughtful way that was similar to that of the show “The Biggest Loser.”

Below is the promo video we created for the series.

True LYF Promo from LYF on Vimeo.

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Using social media to bring traffic to your website

radiantfirst — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 02:50:43 +0000

When the internet (web 2.0) first started to get big, we created websites and people went to them to get information. It was simple. Now that the internet is less about information and more about communication (web 3.0) the struggle to get information out there amidst the communication phenom-on is becoming increasingly difficult. Websites that used to hold valuable information are slowly becoming age-old dinosaurs while social networks such as facebook are now the number one visited website surpassing even google. While this is not a huge problem to loose sleep over, one way you can bring people to your website is to tease them through social media channels such as facebook and twitter.

One thing I try to do on a daily basis is to post something from our youth website onto our facebook fan page by copying the link and writing a short description. The facebook fan page then automatically sends that information to our twitter feed via the facebook/twitter link. Doing this on a regular basis reminds the students and parents in our ministry that yes we do have a website and there is important/valuable information for them on there.

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Lessons learned from creating a talkshow for teenagers

radiantfirst — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:06:26 +0000

In June of last year I stumbled upon some videos from some students in our ministry on facebook. They had created a little following from a talk show that they created using their webcam. I spoke with them and encouraged them that perhaps they could use this show for greater purposes and offered to help them in this endeavor. In august of 2009 we launched whatisyourproblem.tv, as well as a facebook page, a youtube channel and a video podcast on itunes. At the time we weren’t totally 100% positive of the direction or the purpose but we decided to move forward. Since doing the show and 22 episodes later we have created a following of more than 2300 fans on facebook and have really created a unique dialogue among this group of teenagers. Each episode their is some comedy and towards the end we try to focus on a specific problem sent in from the viewers. During one month we ran an ad campaign on facebook that targeted teenagers in our area. This campaign really helped to bring more fans, but overall the fans came from friends of our show.

Creating a talk show has been beneficial for several reasons. #1 it has created awareness of our student ministry to our community. #2 it has helped teenagers in a very real and authentic way deal with some very real problems they are facing. #3 it has provided an outlet for our youth ministry to say that yes we too can have fun and cut up some of the time. #4 it has provided an outlet for several teenagers to use their gifts and abilities to further the kingdom in a very unique way

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the #1 youth ministry resolution…use text messaging services

radiantfirst — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 03:25:22 +0000

If you are like me you’ve waited long enough and finally are fed up with not being able to properly communicate to your students via text messaging. I did some research earlier this week and came across a service I tried a while back but decided not to early on because of the ads that came with the text messages which I hate. Now the ads are gone and the service is no longer free, however this site is worth checking out. Tatango.com is a text messaging service that allows you to text groups of people and unlike most other text messaging services, this one allows you multiple admins and the ability to create subgroups which is perfect for any youth ministry. Check out Tatango.com today…

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Facebook ads for your youth group

radiantfirst — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:01:28 +0000

I recently launched a new ad campaign for our youth group through facebook. Once you have a facebook fan page setup you can go to your fan page and click promote with an ad. The great thing about these ads is that you can target them to 13-18 year old students that live within a certain mile radius of your city. You can also decide how much you want to spend and choose between clicks or impressions. Creating a facebook ad campaign for your youth group may help get exposure in your community due to the high volume of students that are on facebook. Visit facebook.com/ads for more info.

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Creating a student talk show

radiantfirst — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:09:53 +0000

Recently we launched a new website or micro-site called whatisyourproblem.tv. The idea came to us when a couple of our students were creating videos on facebook and were really getting some attention. We got to thinking that maybe there is some stock in their idea and maybe the church or in our case the youth ministry could support their efforts and help them produce the show at a higher level. We spent the last several months figuring out details and this past month we have been developing different episodes and creating the website. The website was actually fairly easy to create using a wordpress template from themeforest. Once we created the website, facebook fan page and youtube site we were ready to go. Creating fun sites like these can be great avenues for students to share with their non-christian friends as a vehicle to starting spiritual conversations, becoming familiar with a youth ministry and going to students instead of expecting them to come to us. This is still a pretty big experiment, however giving students opportunities to take ownership and lead is always an experiment worth taking.

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That shotgun approach to communication

radiantfirst — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 23:30:01 +0000

It used to be that everyone got their news from the morning newspaper. Then came tv and the internet. Now the chance that you heard the latest headline is from a twitter post or news article mentioned on facebook. Today more than ever we get our news and information from a wide array of sources and more often it comes from someone we know.

When it comes to communicating news and information to teenagers, we can’t expect to send home a monthly newsletter and that be sustainable. It’s almost like we have to sometimes use every communication device possible in hopes that the shotgun will hit something. Below are some ideas and thoughts to communicating to your group.

1. announce it on the website
2. announce it at a large meeting through slide/person
3. create a video announcement for a service
4. twitter about it
5. send a facebook update through your fan page
6. send out a mass parent email newsletter
7. mail out a postcard
8. send out a mass text
9. word of mouth. word of mouth. word of mouth
10. did we mention word of mouth

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Why you should blog your ministry trips/events

radiantfirst — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 19:13:47 +0000

We just finished a week long local mission trip for our youth ministry called Lead 222 Servant Leadership and one of the things we did this year for it was blog daily on our website. Doing this helped parents, other students and anyone else who was interested in the progress of the trip see how we were doing. We posted pictures, videos and wrote about certain experiences. The hardest part about doing something like this is being disciplined and proactive to update everyday. Because we use drupal as the content management system on our website, setting up the blog was relatively easy. If you don’t have a blog on your website or don’t have a website you can always get a free blog from wordpress or other blogging sites. I personally would consider buying a domain name that offers wordpress hosting through the hosting provider. It really doesn’t take more than 15 minutes to update everyday and doing this really reasures parents that their kids are having a solid time and can get a glimpse of what they are experiencing. After doing this blog we plan to do the same thing with our camp and other events coming up so that we can better tell the story of our ministry.

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