This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

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Kind of afraid to ask but… Do you have a caption for this photo?

Sent from my iPhone

Posted via email from Russell’s Mobile Blog

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In one of the boxes pictured… There is coffee.

Sent from my iPhone

Posted via email from Russell’s Mobile Blog

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“Do you want people to spend time visiting your church website or visiting your church?” This is the question a wise person asked me when I was talking about upgrading our church website. The question caused me to rethink some of the things I was planning for our site. I am not arguing against having a quality website, however I think there are some questions to be asked, and things to seriously be considered when you are starting a website for your church or non profit organization. Here is a list of questions I came up with:

1. What is your goal? You need to decide what your website will provide. Maybe it will have basic information like dates, times and forms. What ever your reason make sure that you are using the appropriate tool, or site, for the job.

2. How much are you going to spend- You can easily spend $2500 or more to have a beautiful website designed for your group or church.  You need to ask yourself whether that money should be spent on your web presence or if it could be put to use in your organization in a better way.

3. What do you need to get your message across? Wait.. first figure out what your message is. Then what do you need to get that message out. Will flash slideshow with pictures be the best format? Would video updates be effective? Do you need to be able to create podcasts?

4. Who is your audience and how do they like to be reached? Don’t just think about who you are communicating with but also consider what ways they communicate. I recently had a member of our church tell me she does not go to our website. When I asked why, she said that she gets our email updates and facebook messages and they all came to her phone. She has no idea what the website looks like, how many hours I spent choosing the right photo or how much money we spent designing it. She gets the information she wants in the best format for her. That’s what’s important.

5. Consider other forms of communication- In this artcile by Fred Zimny he proposes that with services like facebook and twitter, that websites are becoming less important and are being forced to change:

“Over the next few years, we’re going to see official institutional websites become less important. They will cease functioning as the only point of web interaction between businesses and customers and will become merely the official storefront. The main “conversion goal” of these retooled portal sites will be to drive interactions onto the third-party social networking sites.”

It used to be that your goal was to get people to come to your website for interaction with your company. It seems more and more that websites are directing their visitors to their presence on social networking sites like facebook and twitter.  Consider the thought that a website cannot be the only online presence your organization has.

6. Will your web presence be mobile?- Look at the number of iphones, blackberry’s, droids and other smartphones that are out there. More and more we access the web on the go. Are you considering how your site will be accessed by these devices?

What questions do you think should be considered before starting a website for your organization?

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Sent from my iPhone

Posted via email from Russell’s Mobile Blog

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Yesterday I posted something on facebook that at the time was a huge mistake. I didn’t realize it of course, but as the day wore on, and comments started coming in I saw the error of my ways. What was it?

Big news for the Martin household. More details later.

I saw nothing wrong. We had big news happening with us. It made sense to me. What I failed to keep in mind is that out of my facebook friends and followers there are many women who were all of the sudden drawing their own conclusions and speculations as to what our big news was. You can guess what they were thinking. Sorry to disappointed but the letter “B” has nothing to do with this announcement.

The news is that we have found and begun the process to purchase a house. It’s a nice starting home here in Texarkana. I’ll post pictures once everything is final. This is a big step for us and a huge commitment. We would definitely appreciate and covet your prayers as we go forward.

I apologize again for being so open ended and allowing for so much speculation my status update. I will try not to do that again.

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Monday May 26th I will be joining worship leaders Kerri Crocker, Shelly Wilson and David Davis for a free concert after the Annual Conference service. We will be sharing songs from our CDs and some of your worship favorites. Everyone is welcome to attend. Here’s the specifics.
Date: Tuesday May 26
Time:9:00-10:30
Location: The Woodlands UMC in “The Loft”
Cost: None
Facebook Invite

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This morning many of you went to a worship service somewhere. My question is what will be different about you tomorrow because of something you heard, sung, saw, or did in worship?

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When I found this clip about the 4th screen I had just heard about this guest post called “Is Twitter the New Town Square?” written by Gavin Richardson for the blog Life Without Pants. In his post he suggests that social media, like twitter, facebook, blogs etc can be the new town square.

In our world of intense individualism social networking may be a place where we can come together and share stories of faith, testimonies, exchange ideas, find comfort and support from other believers that we may never see or know about without social media.

I think this commercial reflects the same thing except the computer has done the same thing that the printing press did. That as technology has advanced we have in fact become more individualized. We need to find ways that technology can help us be more connected to each other, and engaged in the real world, rather than continuing to allow ourselves to live in increased isolation.

What do you think?

Oh.. for more you can always follow me on twitter @rgmmusic or on facebook

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Tonight I was watching the weather channel and when the asked for feedback they did not give an email address to send a response to or a number to send a text to. Instead they asked viewers to twitter their responses in. So that got me to thinking. Would twitter replace email? What about text messages?

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