What’s all this hype about Facebook? (Part 1)
If you don’t care about online trends or what technology tools are engaging people, then you can skip this post (actually you can probably skip most of my posts 
).
For the rest of you, if you aren’t paying attention to the online phenomenon of Facebook, you should be. I mentioned it earlier last week in conjunction with LinkedIn, but decided Facebook’s Internet presence is well deserving of a post (or more) of its own.
For millions of students, Facebook is old news. It originated as a school-only social network, but has stepped way out beyond that in the last year. It now has over 30 million users, with over half of those users joining in the past 6 months. Several students I know actually refer to Facebook as THE Internet…meaning, it is the only Internet destination that they visit. Along with zillions of other media stories, it was recently featured on the Today Show as a part of a segment on research involving the younger generation and social networking, its creator Mark Zuckerberg only being 23 years old himself.
So what is Facebook all about? To fully understand, it’s something you’ll have to join and experience (even after which, some of you may still not get..but that’s ok!) If you’re not on Facebook, I’d love to help get you started with this series of posts to guide you through it.
First, let’s be friends…Simply go to Facebook.com and sign up. Once you have confirmed your registration and filled out your profile information, type in my name, “Bobby Gruenewald”, in the search field on the left hand side of the screen. You’ll see a page come up listing people with names that are similar to mine, click on the “Add to Friends” option next to my name and photo. Once I’ve confirmed the relationship, you’ll be able to browse through my friends, join groups, and see what I’ve been up to.
For those of you that want a quick summary before signing-up…Facebook is a web platform that is:
- Highly Social - It’s easy to connect with old friends or acquaintances and make new friends.
- Highly Viral - Almost every part of Facebook is easy to share with your entire network of relationships.
- Highly Extensible - Add applications for movies, music, travel…the list is truly endless because you can build your own.
Now, I look forward to seeing you there!
Visit 
Question: What’s your take on this: A church/ministry wants to incorporate social networking. Should they a) Use something like MyChurch.org that’s specifically designed for churches, b) use Facebook since it has great privacy features, flexibility, design, etc, and c) use Ning since they can build it out however they’d like?
We have a myspace page we just started. Our band leader keeps it up to speed. He copies my blogs over to the blog on myspace. We have only be doing this a week or so, but trying to use ever tool we have to redeem technology. Maybe we should consider a facebook option with the same idea.
Our goal was to get people that werent churched on the site. So for us we would steer clear of the churchy ones. But is who we are.
I love Facebook. I can connect to networks beyond my city and job through the connections of other people. It combines Twitter, Blogging, Site Posting and it allows to keep tabs on your friends without your friends actually having to post anything.
I was on MySpace but I got tired of the spam and the True.com ads. I left MySpace altogether for Facebook and never looked back.
What I would love to see is Networks based on the church you attend (Groups are not powerful/engaging enough). However, the limitation to Facebook is that you will need a corresponding email address in order to join certain networks (other than city based).
Maybe I can consult the powers to be at Facebook to create Networks based on church, etc.
http://www.facebook.com/help.php?tab=suggest
I suggested that Facebook would add another category based on places of worship.
BTW, if you want, add me as a friend. I am the only Joe Louthan in Facebook.
Bobby,
Is this your shameless plug to get more friend adds on Facebook so you can beat us college kids?
Jeff,
Bobby is VERY competitive. I don’t have proof of your accusation, but I’m guessing you could be right!
I see two major benefits that a ministry can have by having a social networking presense. Helping people within the ministry to connect to each other and to help reach the unchurched. Although Facebook may not have a church network option, they have all sorts of different groups. You can easily establish a group on Facebook for your church, people can join it and the socializing will just run loose.
I’m more excited about how much the unchurched can learn about your ministry through Facebook. Friends are constantly looking at each other’s profiles and, in some cases, random strangers will visit your profile (pending your privacy options). As somebody learns more about you they can potentially learn more about your ministry. Posting videos, blogs, calendar events, pictures, etc. are things that can give insight on what your ministry is about and may even interest people enough to learn more about your ministry.
By the way, the same ideas can work with MySpace but Facebook is so much more effective in its social networking features.
Jay,
Great question. They are all tools to me…it just depends on what you are trying to build. We mainly use the tools to reach people who do not know Christ by engaging them and developing relationships with them where they are…i.e. facebook. In other cases…it may make sense to build something different than what is out there. I’m usually (personally) not a big fan of building something that is the same, just “a Christian version” since it seems a bit contrary to what Jesus did.
Jeff,
There will be much more to come!
I would call this the beginning
If any of the rest of you would like to see me “beat” Jeff…just be my friend and encourage all of your friends to do the same.
Seriously…I look forward to connecting and learning with everyone.
Facebook is one of the biggest tools I use with my student ministry. I can send a quick note to a student, I can invite students to an event or just spy on all the teenage activity around our community. As a youth pastor, sometimes it’s tough to keep connected with hundreds of kids, but I’ve found that so many students spend so much time online in this underground world that it is a shame that more youth leaders are not on this site!
You can also use facebook to tell your world of friends exactly what you’re doing / thinking at any given moment. “Status updates” can be a great way to make people think by letting them know what you’re thinking or doing.
For example, you can let the whole world know that you’re headed to bed, and then you can update your status again once you get there to let everyone know you’re sleeping.
Facebook has been going crazy within the last year.. , Just last week it had its first acquisition Parakey. Which is a ‘web OS’. Where you will have something similar to a virtual desktop. Where you can store and work with photos/music/contacts from any computer. It will be really interesting to see what they do with it.
Bobby Grunewald said: “I’m usually (personally) not a big fan of building something that is the same, just “a Christian versionâ€? since it seems a bit contrary to what Jesus did.”
I’m sorry Bobby, but I just can’t resist. So, what’s the non-christian version of a church? (grin)
I’m so glad to hear your willing to guide us through it. I’ve been signed up for about 2 months and haven’t done a thing because I find it to technical to navigate, okay - I just don’t know what I’m doing. Lot’s of people at Lifecentre are registered. I’m hoping to get people from my company connected (to Facebook and Lifecentre).
Adrian,
Unless I am using groups wrong, I tend to think that groups are not powerful enough. If something happens in the group (discussions, wall posted, etc.), I don’t get informed on it.
But for right now, groups is as good as we are going to get.
Joe,
I’m with you all the way. Groups are very limited but, as you said, it’s as good as we are going to get for now.
Facebook is the ddddddddevil.
Great post, Bobby.
Jimmy,
Funny.
If you put quotes around non-”Christian” similar to how I intended it in my statement…I’d hope the answer is LifeChurch.tv
Bobby,
It’s a good answer with or without the quote marks. I’ve found Lifechurch.tv to be extremely different, fascinating, frustrating, challenging, anything but just another “Christian versionâ€? of a church. OK. I’ve gotten a little bored with the lack of meaningful interaction on both Myspace and SecondLife lately. I’ll check out Facebook. I saw an interesting story on NBC Nightly News tonight. It said that only 35% of men in the U.S. say they attend weekly religious services .Traditionally, the Internet was the domain of mostly men. I doubt that’s true now, but I wonder how the stats hold up in the Christian interactions in online communities.
Man, it’s cool to see all the ideas of how Facebook can be used in day-to-day ministry. I personally started using MySpace a couple of years ago as a way to communicate with our youth and also to “spy” on them as Amy mentioned. It really is a great way to keep up with what’s going on with them since they’re so plugged in.
I guess I should add you all as friends, huh?
This blog is certainly lacking estrogen. There has to be some women lurking…show thyself!
I know there are a lot of “mom blogs” and stuff like book clubs which are predominately female, and there are some women in ministry blogging, but as far as church leaders go…lotsa guys.
[...] I’m glad many of you joined Facebook yesterday (and thanks to those that added me as your friend). Hopefully you’ll learn a lot and develop some new relationships. If you have not joined, you can read about how in my first post of this series. [...]
Bobby,
I am the founder of MyChurch.org. And I love Facebook.
I was on a panel recently about the Facebook platform (http://communitynext.com/schedule/) and folks in Silicon Valley are very excited about this. It is truly a social OS, and applications built on top of the Facebook social graph have so much potential to be feature-rich and deeply integrated into Facebook.
We (MyChurch.org) actually built 6 applications on top of F8 already. The one I’m most excited about is in beta right now - its a church app that lets members of a church build their own church page WITHIN Facebook.
The purpose of this app will be (as you said) “engaging them and developing relationships with them where they are”
Facebook users will have a badge on their profile showing which church they belong to. And they’ll be able to share content from their church’s Facebook page with their Facebook friends - regardless of whether they’re a part of your Facebook church. It will be much more powerful that the Facebook Groups functionality - both as a communication tool and as an outreach tool.
Shoot me a mail if you’re interested in hearing more. I’ve got a few churches lined up as beta testers but we’d love to have more feedback. We expect to officially launch this app in late August…
joe
[...] Thanks to all of you who have connected with me on Facebook. It’s been great getting to meet so many of you from all over the world. [...]
[...] It already is the business card of the college people, its nice to see everyone else getting on the bandwagon. Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
[...] You can tell from my 1, 2, 3 posts about Facebook last week that I see great potential in it as a platform to connect with people. At a minimum it is an important phenomenon that you should at least experience to understand. [...]
[...] I’ve wanted to blog about Facebook for quite some time, but now it seems there is no need. LifeChurch.tv’s Bobby Gruenewald beat me to it, and he did a great job at that. First, Bobby did a series titled “What’s All This Hype About Facebook” (part 1, part 2, and part 3). Then, Bobby shared a little bit about the potential he sees for Facebook as a platform in a post titled “Facebook Church.” [...]
[...] You can read more about the motivation and rationale of the Facebook church in the three-part series (part 1, part 2, and part 3) by Gruenewald. [...]
[...] I really love what Seth says about social networks which is funny because after reading some posts on LifeChurch.tv I bit the bullet and created a facebook account. Even after the posts I fought it but when they started a facebook church I was so curious about the platform I signed up. [...]
[...] Several of our team will be there too. The rest of our directional leadership team (Kevin, Sam, Jerry) will be arriving on Thursday along with some of our leaders. Terry Storch will also be there late tonight preparing for some things at Catalyst related to YouVersion. I’ve had several of you email or message me on Facebook to ask about connecting while we are at Catalyst. We’d love to connect and are planning on putting together an informal “meet up” while we are there (likely Wednesday night because of our schedule). I’ll send out specifics via email to those of you that are going to be there and are interested. If you are, just reply to this post and/or email us at swerve@lifechurch.tv. See you there. For those of you that won’t be there…we’ll keep you updated here on swerve. [...]
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