Giving Twitter another try

I joined up on Twitter several months ago and never could figure out what it was good for.  I heard about it on the TWiT podcast and it was being talked up like it was going to change the way people communicated with each other.  If you haven’t heard of Twitter, the easiest way to describe it is as a clearinghouse for text messaging: you send the text message to Twitter and it forwards it on to anyone who has chosen to receive messages from you.  The tools of Twitter are the Twitter web site, your mobile phone, and a plethora of third-party Twitter tools.  Twitter allows you to customize how you send and receive messages to meet your needs – if you would rather not involve your mobile phone, then you can use their web site or other software tool.  The only real restriction is that the messages must fit within the 140-character limit of a text message.

So I signed up last year and began subscribing to messages from a few people, but the novelty wore off quickly and I pretty much disconnected myself.  It seemed that all I got were messages from people telling me that they were having a latte at Starbucks or that they hated the weather or other commentary that was just not interesting to me.  When I spoke at the Internet Ministry Conference last fall, there was unbounded enthusiasm among much of the “ministrati” (that is, the ministry digerati) for using Twitter as a ministry tool (though there was also a minority of Twitter haters as well). I tried to understand their enthusiasm, but I just couldn’t. To me, Twitter was just another honk in the vast sea of Internet noise.

Last week, Cynthia Ware visited my Internet ministry class.  She has been a big fan of Twitter for quite a while and sees its potential for ministry.  Though I don’t (yet) share her views, I think a discussion of Twitter’s capabilities for ministries is important, so I invited her to speak in my class next month on just that topic.  I asked Cynthia if she had a resource that could help me understand some Twitter “best practices”, and she pointed me to a new e-book on Twitter called The Reason Your Church Must Twitter, by Anthony Coppedge.  This book explains what Twitter is and how it can be used in a church setting.  It does a good job of explaining the fundamentals of Twitter as well as giving specific examples of its use.

After reading the book, and further discussion with Cynthia, I am going to withhold judgment on Twitter and re-evaluate it.  In fact, I do have one theory about Twitter that I will put to the test over the coming weeks: Twitter could be the breakthrough tool that will bridge the online/offline gap. Every organization that plans on using the Internet for ministry must deal with how to bring the online and offline worlds together. Twitter, with its ability to integrate with mobile devices and web sites, may be the tool that finally allows us to bring those two worlds together.

So, I am re-starting my use of Twitter and giving it renewed effort. I have updated my Twitter username to “DaveBourgeois”, I have begun “following” several more people, I have installed a Twitter “gadget” on my home page, I use Twitter to update my Facebook status, and I have installed a software tool called twhirl which is supposed to make Twitter easier to use. I have even put a Twitter “widget” on the sidebar of this blog that shows my latest “tweets” and gives you the option to “follow” me.  I will keep you posted on my thoughts as my experiment progresses, both on this blog and on Twitter, of course!

Tags: Anthony Coppedge, Cynthia Ware, twitter, Twitter for Churches