Social Media Sunday

One of my great joys is doing social media for the Episcopal church I attend, Trinity Episcopal Church, in Tariffville, Connecticut.  I got started as a social media explorer for fun and adventure, and I became the person making the most noise about our parish's need for a new website.  A couple of years later I've found myself on Trinity's vestry, managing the social media, leading the communication team, and serving as the webmaster. 

That'll teach me to make noise.

On June 30, 2013, we held a "Social Media Sunday" to encourage parishioners to engage with our parish social media channels and to spread the word about our church to their friends and followers.  You can read all about it on the #chsocm (Church Social Media) blog here.

A key to great engagement on Social Media Sunday was the announcement I made in church before the service began.  This both alerted the congregation that their pewmate just might be using their smartphone in church, and invited them to participate.

In case you're interested in doing your own Social Media Sunday, I offer you the pre-service announcement I made. And be sure to let me know about your event; I'd enjoy following along.

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Welcome to Social Media Sunday! 

Obviously,

• Moses wasn’t using TripAdvisor to find a nice, reasonable hotel in the desert
• Martha wasn’t on Pinterest looking up recipes to serve Jesus
• David wasn’t posting his latest psalms to his YouTube Channel
• Jesus wasn’t live tweeting events (although all the Beatitudes are 140 characters or less, making them perfectly suited for Twitter!)

However, our faith has gone viral since the very beginning. Paul might not have had a smartphone, but he used the social media of his time: Epistles, which continue to spread throughout the world today. 

Today, we are asking you to join us in being a part of making the Good News go viral.
I did a little number crunching, and if even a minority of you who are already using social media post about Trinity today, almost 5000 of our friends and family will learn something about us and our church. 

You might want to scoot over and make a little more room in your pew. 

I invite you, today, to be a part of the easiest evangelism you will ever do:

• Check in on Facebook or Foursquare
• Post something about Trinity on Facebook or Twitter
• Take a photo of something here and put it on Instagram
• Tweet interesting points from the sermon

Please use the hashtag: #tctville so others can follow along. 

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, come up to the Parish Hall after church for Trinity’s Social Media Help Desk. We can help you get started on Social Media and answer your questions. 

To paraphrase Acts 1:8 

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses on Instagram, and in all of Twitter and Facebook, and to the ends of the earth. 

Go now to love and tweet the Lord!

#twitterjail

I'm a sometimes moderator in the church social media (#chsocm) tweetchat that happens each Tuesday at 9pm over on Twitter.

Last Tuesday, one of our esteemed moderators (@azrork) finished up the chat from Twitter Jail.  What is Twitter Jail?  It's when Twitter cuts you off, and you're not allowed to tweet for a period of time.

Twitter has limits on various account activities.  These include:

• number of tweets an account is allowed to send per day (1000)
• number of daily direct messages (250)
• how many accounts that can be followed in one day (1000)
• number of tweets (including retweets) that are allowed in "semi-hourly intervals" (the exact number is not officially stated by Twitter, but rumored to be around 100 per hour)

For most of us, this doesn't pose a problem.  I would have a difficult time sending 1000 tweets in a day, and I can assure you that most of my followers (including my children) would unfollow me if I did. 

But, if you're moderating a tweetchat, responding to tweets, and retweeting the conversation, you can easily hit the 100 tweets per hour ceiling, and when that happens, you'll get a message something like this:

Sigh.

And you might feel something like this:

But, never fear. Twitter Jail only lasts for 30 minutes up to several hours.

What to do if you're put into Twitter Jail?  Do what our brilliant #chsocm moderator did: plan ahead and have a separate twitter account from which to tweet when you're in jail. Or switch to another platform if you still have more to say (Facebook, Tumblr, etc.). Or just use your virtual imprisonment as a suggestion to step away from your device and go fold a load of laundry or something.

Either way, you'll be back to the tweet life soon.

Starting a blog. Again.

I thought it was about time to get back to blogging, so I...

Look! A squirrel!

Squirrels are cute, considering they are essentially rats with bushy tails, but those excessively friendly ones make me uneasy. The one in this picture was stalking us on a family picnic on Roanoke Island, NC a couple of years ago. It was far closer than a "wild" animal should be, and those beady eyes were chilling. Can't you feel the fear, just looking at it?  Maybe you had to be there.

I once read an interesting factoid about squirrels: when their nests get too messy, they simply leave them behind and build new ones. As the mother of three teenagers, that frankly makes a lot of sense to me.

Back to blogging. 

I had a little-used Wordpress blog called finewithme, on which I posted 11 times in 8 months a couple of years ago.  I enjoyed the writing I did on that blog, but it was largely ignored (by me and others).  I was never quite sure what I hoped to do there, and I couldn't figure out how to transition it into some of the circles on the Venn diagram of me.

So, like the squirrel with the messy nest, I'm leaving that blog to build another. Maybe I'll visit from time to time, maybe not. I expect that I will write here about things related to my life as an educator, an Episcopalian, a social media fan, a wife and a mom, and more.

Obviously we'll be singing. And of course we'll have some laughs along the way.

Thanks for coming along.