A practice that I would love to see more ministry leaders learn is reserving/acquiring digital assets (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook) for themselves and their ministries EVEN IF THEY NEVER USE IT!
About.me is a new web product that still has many undisclosed features/uses, but one of the public features is a personal profile page that points to the other places on the web that you are apart of.
Right now you cannot access the product but YOU CAN RESERVE YOUR USERNAME! Click here to get yours!
If you are one of those people who have a hard to remember Twitter username–like ministry_guy7890033–then this blog post is definitely for you!
Here are the other CRUCIAL usernames you should have for your ministry:
- YouTube Channel–youtube.com/yourministry You will need to get a separate gmail account to get this but with so many people producing and sharing videos on YouTube, you need a centralized place to archive this content.
- Facebook Page–facebook.com/yourministry Once you create a page you will need 25 fans to secure a personalized username. Once you do go to facebook.com/username to finish the process.
- Facebook Profile–facebook.com/brian.barela This is available to all facebook users. Go to facebook.com/username to get yours
- Twitter: Use the gmail account you just created for your ministry and grab a twitter username for your ministry.
Let me know if you grab it!
I would like to start off by saying that I went out and grabbed http://about.me/danielcberman. I am left with misgivings though. I realize its wise to grab new service usernames before they get used by someone, especially on the off chance that the service becomes popular.
At the same time doesn’t the larger situation of web services strike of a virtual economy where everyone is creating printing “money/usernames”? We see this also with the plethora of social networks starting up as well. Mediums of exchange and representation only work with a shortage or rarity. The only shortage has become the human attention span. How long will the game continue?
Or are we destined to attempt to hold on to every single possible use of our name and point it back to our central core website? That may not be so bad, its a lot of work with I suspect diminishing returns.
good thoughts daniel. i can see what you are saying, and tire myself of maintaining all the various outposts in addition to my own site.
i’ve been able to connect w many ministry leaders in ccc on this front and i’ll tell you the percentage of people who understand this concept is under 20%.
i would never consult someone to go out and grab as many usernames as possible–but i would love it if many ministry leaders got in the habit of taking 2-5 minutes grabbing a username when they discover/hear about something new.
the discipline i believe works backwards and forwards–when grabbing something new it often reminds someone about something old that they have yet to grab, and might give them the momentum to finish that up–like w facebook or youtube.
linkedin at least for me works this way–i rarely go there on my own initiative, but always do some extra work when i accept an invitation from someone else.
thanks for the comment!
Great post. Thanks for the heads up on About.me.
I would add getting a GMail account. It seems to be the gold-standard email. Both for personal and ministry use. It’s free and useful for all-things-Google; like seting up Google Docs and Google Voice (we have a ministry phone number even though we don’t have an office or phone – we mostly use it for texting purposes).
yes. great thought on the ministry phone number!
we just added a google voice number with an ohio area code–since we do a lot of support raising there. it’s been great to leave a local number with people when we are calling–builds trust and removes some friction in the contact process.
Thanks for one more greet post. Keep up the good work.