Tech you might want to use: Twitter
Twitter is a free online “micro-blogging” service that allows you to post short updates (text based and limited to 140 characters) via SMS, instant messaging, the twitter.com website or several applications designed for the service. –wiki–
We used the service a few weeks ago in conjunction with a three day fast that we did as a church. Over the three days…Chris Spadlin who taught a message about fasting the previous weekend sent out “updates” about the fast via the twitter service throughout the day. People could subscribe using SMS (text messaging) on their cell phones, via instant messaging or by visiting the LifeChurch.tv website where we could pull in an RSS feed of the updates. It is currently completely free…except for the charges that a person might normally have for receiving SMS messages.
Twitter is a platform for SMS applications and it doesn’t cost the thousands of dollars it typically takes just to get started.
Here are some possible uses for your churches/ministries:
- Have users subscribe to your twitter feed via SMS and send out a weekly thought/prayer/mico devotional
- Use twitter to allow people to signup for activities/events (this definitely require some programming on your end, but will work)
- Have people subscribe to a special twitter feed to be reminded of an event or church experience/service via SMS
- Create an interactive element where people can SMS during a worship experience/service and incorporate the feed of all of the responses into the experience in real-time
- Allow people to subscribe to the feed of a mission trip leader as he/she sends out updates throughout the day of what God is doing through the trip
What are some other ideas?
Visit 
We currently use Twitter to push out events and we may expand to news as well. We’ve only just begun and we haven’t even formally announced it yet, but it will be really interesting to see how people use the service. Twitter is fascinating for so many reasons, but it’s really cool to see SMS technology function seamlessly with dynamic web publishing.
On a larger scale, I firmly believe that every single church with an existing web presence should be carefully researching and implementing tactics for the mobile web. It really is where a large segment of the population gathers information, and that segment grows exponentially each day.
David,
I agree with you. I personally using my phone to view a significant portion of the web content I access each day.
Glad you are already making use of Twitter…love to hear more about how it works when you announce it.
I never really thought about using Twitter seriously, but then again, I never thought of it in the way you just presented it.
I will defiantly give it a try now.
Twitter is a pretty powerful platform, although only a certain demographic is familiar with text messaging and use it regularly. Email is still very powerful in getting the word out (I always look forward to getting the Internet Campus email every Thursday). I think it would be very cool to subscribe to this blog for instance via email (instead of RSS). I’m not sure if there is a Wordpress plugin that can emailing of new posts (or if your hosting environment would support such a feature)
Scott S
Good news!…you can subscribe via email to swerve…just scroll down and look at the right side of the is page.
I do agree that agree that the percentage of SMS users in the US is still not all that high. But I also remember when that was true for email.
Bill Seaver first told me about Twitter, but I hadn’t seen it in this light. I’ll definitely be looking at it differently now.
Great ideas on using twitter in the worship experience. There is a site called localtheory.com that has caught my attention. It has a product called mobkastr which is used by
the blue man group, among others. The platform is optimized for SMS text messaging to assure a broad audience, but can also support audio, image and video delivery. Might be worth
checking out. Have a great weekend
Bobby,
You might want to check out Jott.com too. It’s a free service that will transcribe a voicmail you leave at jott and then email it to the contact of your choice including yourself. I use it like a mobile notepad, it’s great while driving.
Kyle
P.S. I must admit I got this from Seth’s Blog.
[...] Via Smart Mobs, we learn about how churches are using Twitter: [...]
You also have to check out the Jaiku. It’s even better with the chance to share your presence! And it’s Finnish!
Twitter
In my continuing quest to integrate as many web 2.0 applications into my life/business as I can … I give you Twitter.
Being a one-person company, I can’t always answer my cell phone but clients still want to know “where the heck is he…
[...] I first learned about Jott in a comment over at the Swerve blog in a post about Twitter. You may have seen that post yesterday. I was intrigued by the idea that by calling a free phone number and leaving a 30 second message (or less), that message would be transcribed and then sent to myself or a contact as an email or text message. [...]
We’re currently testing Twitter for multi-campus coordination — since we broadcast our services live. The idea is: the main campus floor manager would “tweet” what’s going on during the service so other floor managers at the satellite campuses can get updates and synchronize their services. Tomorrow is actually our first test-run after setting it all up. We’ll see how it goes.
(By the way, we’re thinking of utilizing this as an AUXILIARY communication method, not primary. We use Clearcom for that.)
I love the idea but I’m having some trouble in learning how it all works. I don’t suppose anyone would mind emailing me to provide some technical assistance, would they? wclaytonbell@gmail.com…
[...] When I first heard about twitter, it reminded me of the Dullest Blog in The World, but my spark was following Cole’s line of interest and experimentation. So I quickly talked over some of the growing list of twitter viewing/publishing tools and interesting things people are doing with twitter. Wow, the library in nearby Casa Grande Arizona has rigged a library RSS feed that auto twits. Twittervision is hypnotic and becomes yet anther net-addiction. John Edwards has 2228 friends. Andy Carvins ponders if twitter can save lives? Churches are tweeting while others look at ways to use it to monitor server status. [...]
I’ve tried setting up my immediate family with tweeter accounts to figure it all out. We have found a major problem - U.S. Cellular is the most reliable cell provider in our area but since they are not a “national carrier” they don’g support 5-digit universal codes and messages don’t move quickly from the web to users phones.
I found an alternative that allows both test AND/OR voice broadcasting (even has a neat text to voice utility). Check out jyngle.com which has been on the news following Virginia Tech tragedy.
BTW, I tried using the test to voice feature to send my wife a love note - it didn’t come across as real genuine!!
I recently wrote-up a quick Twitter primer, for those interested:
http://seansperte.com/entry/what_is_twitter
[...] I don’t know if you have heard of Twitter or not, but it is a pretty cool service. The basic idea is that it is a way to let others know what you are doing. There are tons of ways to use this for more than that. Check out this post from LifeChurch and see if it is something that you can put to us in your ministry. I’m considering implementing it in at least some way in our student ministry. Check it out! Author: Danny [...]
[...] See more technical applications of using Twitter [...]
[...] 3) Twitter. For those of you who use twitter…we just started a twitter called “swerve” that you can follow at http://www.twitter.com/swerve. If you don’t use twitter, you can read more about it here or in my previous post. [...]
[...] 3) Twitter. For those of you who use twitter…we recently started a twitter called “swerve” that you can follow at http://www.twitter.com/swerve. You can get text messages or instant messages each time something new is posted to swerve. If you don’t use twitter, you can read more about it here or in my previous post. [...]
What is Twitter and How Can I Use It?