Communication in ministry is vitally important because it really sets the stage for how people will perceive the ministry. Solid communication gives the impression that the ministry’s leadership is trustworthy, capable, and competent, whereas weak communication, even if the actual ministry is solid, leaves people feeling that the leadership is lacking direction and credibility. Probably about 80% of my office time each week is spent communicating our ministry with others, not just calendar events and news items, but the vision of who we are that drives what we do. (UPDATE: I usually do the communication stuff in the office, lesson prep and planning at home, and of course all the relationship stuff outside in other places. So, it’s not 80% of my total working hours, just my office hours.)

On a very practical level, here are the avenues my ministry uses to communicate with teens and parents throughout the week. In fact, we even have a handout that sits at our youth kiosk at church that lists these for newcomers.

Youth Group website

www.AlexandriaYouth.com
This is our main hub of communication because it’s a neutral place that almost everyone can access. On the front page site visitors will find the most current information, where and when to be places and who to get a hold of for each thing. There are also pictures and videos of past events, and lots more!. Here’s more information about how I made our website and the thought process behind it.

E-mail list

Whenever news is posted to our website, that info is automatically emailed to our mailing list. We use Feedblitz.com to automatically distribute the emails and manage the subscription list.

Text messaging

Text messaging is a great way to get last minute updates, reminders, and cancellations, but we use it for a lot more than that. There’s a lot of mass text messaging services out there, but I highly recommend TXTSignal.com.

A note about Tatango.com
I know a lot of youth ministries are using Tatango.com, but, although their service may be okay, I can personally vouch that their marketing ethics are highly questionable. Their VP marketing guy emailed me two weeks ago and, after some exchanges, started calling TXTSignal’s service illegal (citing a list of “best practices” as evidence, all of which TXTSignal meets and exceeds) and pointing me to a misleading blog post on their site about the SMS technology. Kinda ticked me off because people who aren’t familiar with the technology could easily get sucked in, like they were trying to do with me. I’ll never use them.

Facebook Page

www.Facebook.com/AlexandriaYouth
Many of our youth group kids are on Facebook. We use it to keep in touch, posting not only youth group pictures, videos and status updates, but video clips and pictures of high school sports games and performances. When kids start commenting on the media, it highlights the videos and pictures for most of their friends. Some of them check out the rest of our page and even become fans. More about using a Facebook page for youth ministry here (although, it’s slightly outdated already).

Bulletin inserts

Every Sunday we basically copy and paste what was posted on our website and distributed via email to a bulletin insert. This is mostly for first-time visitors and those who don’t use email or the web too much at home.

Youth kiosk table at church

We have a youth kiosk table at church right outside the main entrance to our worship center (sanctuary). The lights and motion on the TV and digital picture frames catch people’s eye as they walk by. We have a lot of general information sitting out, as well as sign-ups, pictures, promo flyers, and our weekly news video on a loop. Hanging around it on Sundays is a great way to meet new visitors with teens. See a picture of it here.

Twitter

twitter.com/AlexandriaYouth
Although only a couple of our teens use Twitter, the real reason I use it is to easily easily post short little updates to the front page of our youth group website. (Parents love it when I post updates while we’re away on trips!)

iTunes News Videos

http://www.alexandriayouth.com/itunes
Most weeks we publish a fun video that gives and overview of announcements, highlights of past events, previews of what’s coming up, contests, giveaways, and funny clips from YouTube. I found that if I stand in front of the youth group and make announcements, no one listens, but if I say the exact same thing on a screen, everyone is glued to it.

We post these videos on our website, our Facebook page, and show them at our weekly large-group jr. high and sr. high meetings. Publishing the videos in iTunes allows teens to automatically sync them to their iPods to watch on the bus, in the gym, and share with friends.

Personal contact

And, of course, I make my personal contact information readily available.

A video of my seminar on youth ministry communication

Last year at the Simply Youth Ministry Conference I taught a seminar on, “Communicating with teens and parents throughout the week,” which went into some of these areas in more detail. You can watch the video of the seminar here. Although some of it needs to be updated now (especially the Facebook part), it’s still generally true.

Since I’m in the mood for answering common questions that show up in my Inbox, here’s another one that shows up quite regularly:

Should I create a Facebook group or a Facebook page for my youth group? Which is better?

Short story: absolutely, definitely, positively, without a doubt, create a page, not a group. Problem solved.

Facebook is no longer developing groups. They served their time back in the day, but pages are under heavy development and will continue to receive boosts and enhancements. A Facebook page acts like a “profile” account for your group and has several key features that group’s do not have:

• Post status updates
• The ability to add Facebook applications
• Post pictures and videos from your cell phone (great for parents while you’re away on a trip)
• Some pages integrate with Twitter
• Create a custom URL that easy for people to remember and share (for example, facebook.com/StudentMinistry)
• View analytics of your page’s fans and interaction with the page
• Promote your page by adding a “fan box” to your website
• Import blog posts from an external site as notes
• Organize photos into albums

There are other advantages of using a page over a group, too, but these are the ones that will pertain to the average youth group.

If you don’t have a Facebook Page for your youth group, get started with one here.

And while you’re at it, become a fan of Life In Student Ministry’s Facebook Page.

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The Online Missions Trip went amazingly well last year! Around 3,000 youth leaders and teenagers from every continent except Antarctica intentionally used social media online to share Christ with unsaved friends. Many teenagers trusted in Christ for salvation as a result and many youth group teens were challenged to take God into yet another part of their world: the Internet.

Although this idea started originally for my own youth group out of my discontentment with outreach events, it’s a great experience when we can all connect together online through this “outreach campaign.”

The Internet has never made it so easy to share Christ with those all over the world! Teenagers spend a crazy amount of hours talking with friends on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, World of Warcraft and other such social hangouts online, as youth workers, let’s train them to share their faith and encourage them to do it online. The Online Missions Trip is a 2-week campaign to empower them to use social media to share Christ with their friends who don’t yet know Him.

The structure looks like this:

January 10-30, 2010

Pre-trip training. Use youth group meetings to train kids how to share their faith, think through the Online Missions Trip concept, and start praying for unsaved friends.

January 31 to February 13, 2010

Online Missions Trip! During these two weeks teens and youth leaders are engaging in spiritual conversations with unsaved friends online. They’re uploading videos, photos, posting links, using status updates to share what God’s doing in their lives, writing notes, sending messages, posting on blogs, creating event invites to youth group, and anything else that will bring God up in a conversation that starts online and hopefully spreads to a face-to-face discussion.

February 14, 2010

Outreach event/series and new-believer follow-up starts. Follow-up on this missions trip with a series that helps the new teens in your ministry either investigate Christianity a bit closer or start growing in their new faith. Be sure to follow-up one-on-one with new converts, as well.

To learn more about this trip, visit OnlineMissionsTrip.com. There are many ideas, free resources and tools, a 24/7 Prayer Room that will open in 2010, and more. It also has a video of me explaining the trip in more detail.

Also, you have to see this video about the social media revolution, which underscores why this outreach campaign comes at such a key moment in history.

While you’re there, become a fan of The OnlineMissionsTrip.com Facebook Page and meet some of the other teens and youth leaders who will be attending this missions trip with you next year.

[ Visit OnlineMissionsTrip.com ]

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Only 2 day left to apply for the FREE Youth Ministry Mentorship! Please help support the mentorship, the Online Missions Trip, and MinistryQuestions.com by subscribing to YouthWorker Journal. Get your FREE no-risk trial issue of YouthWorker Journal today, the best in youth ministry resources!

Last week I shared 5 ways how video can enhance your youth ministry, but there’s one very important aspect I left that that warrants it’s own post: using highlight videos to build momentum at youth group.

Highlight videos are essentially a lot of short video clips, typically set to music, that summarize a special youth group trip or event. To see a couple examples, check out some recent videos from my own youth group this summer: jr high retreat, sr. high conference, and Wake ‘n Ski.

Highlight videos have tremendous potential to build momentum for your ministry if you leverage them in a couple key ways.

1. Show highlight videos in church services, online, and at youth group.
When people see the energy, excitement, and value of the youth ministry in a very tangible way on the screen, they tend to become excited and talk about what’s going on in the youth ministry. You’d be amazed how much support you can generate from the church body after showing them a couple highlight videos of your group in action.

2. It serves as a video scrapbook of memories together.
Sometimes I’ll put all the highlight videos from the year together on one DVD and give it away or even sell them to the teens for $5. The students love having the visual reminders of some of their fondest memories with each other, especially years later after they’ve graduated.

3. Upload the videos to Facebook and tag kids.
Perhaps the best way to use highlight videos is to add them to your youth group Facebook page and tag every kid in the video. Not only does this notify each teen that a video of them is online, but it also makes it more likely to be featured on Facebook’s home page news feed when their friends login. They see, “5 of your friends have been tagged in a video by Way Cool Youth Group.” Their friends watch the video and immediately form a positive image of your group. They see the faces, what you do together and think, “Hey, that’s something I’d like to be a part of.”

4. It helps disconnected kid want to connect.
Whether the disconnected kids see it on Facebook, in a church service, on your youth group website, or looping at the youth kiosk at church (as in our case), it somewhat makes them feel that they’re missing out on something great (because they are!). Just this past weekend a girl who is not involved in our group had no motivation to connect with us until she saw our Wake ‘n Ski video from earlier this summer. Now she can’t wait to plug in and attend our last Wake ‘n Ski for the summer this coming Sunday.

5. It’s great accountability to the church.
Especially if donors contributed funds to help make the event possible. They can see exactly how their money worked because, short of witnessing it first-hand, nothing can tell a story as well as a video can. I’ve found that after donors see the video of the trip or event they helped sponsor, they are much more likely to donate again in the future.

6. It reminds kids where they were spiritually.
Sometimes it’s appropriate to sit down with individual teens or even the whole group and record a debriefing time at the end of a missions trip or camp. A couple years later, show them the confessions they made on video and ask them, “Look at where you were in 9th grade. Now you’re a senior. How is your walk with God going since then?”

As my church continues to experience the power of sharing our community’s stories through video, we’re now doing some for our entire church body, as well, like this highlight video of our baptismal service two weeks ago. We showed it during the offering last Sunday as a way to extend the celebration of what God’s doing in the lives of people in our church body.

The following is an article I wrote for one of my denomination’s publications. I have permission to republish it here for you all.

A lot of different social media websites have popped up in the past couple years: YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter, Virb, LinkedIn, MetaCafe, DeviantArt, Friendster, Ping.fm, Orkut, Tumblr, and a whole lot more. As if that wasn’t enough, just as many communication services are being developed online, too, like Google’s soon-to-be-released Voice and Wave services. It’s almost impossible to keep up with it all!

So where can your ministry communicate online without hiring someone full-time to oversee all the possibilities? These communication methods can be highly effective and can greatly enhance your ministry in so many ways, but the options can definitely be a bit overwhelming. Here are some tips that might help you in determining what communication method is best for your church.

1. Determine who your primary audience is for the info you want to communicate.
Different audiences look for information in difference places. For example, people who are new to your neighborhood probably are not going to search Twitter or Facebook for your church’s information. They will typically go to Google and search for your town’s name and “churches,” hoping to find some helpful local church websites. Thus, the information on your church’s website should be geared primarily toward newcomers and first-time visitors, not necessarily to church members.

To communicate with people inside your church, though, it is important to first know how they communicate. Is it by Facebook? Email? Text messaging? Twitter? If you have a lot of church members who are active on Facebook, then creating a Facebook Page (not a Facebook group) may be a great direction for you to go. If only a few members are on Twitter, than do not worry about jumping on board there.

2. If you choose to use social media, put someone in charge of it who knows how to use it.
Whatever social media you use, never put someone in charge of it that’s mostly clueless about how it works. Every network has unwritten etiquette rules that should be followed in order to be respected. Don’t let that scare you from using it, just put someone in charge who is familiar with the territory. Or, enter it yourself as a personal user for a little while before pulling your church into it.

3. Understand that it may be necessary to train the congregation to use your new forms of communication.
If you continue to add new methods of communicating and never eliminate old ones, you’ll eventually become overwhelmed with distributing the same info in too many places. It is more effective to be focused in a few methods rather than spreading yourself out among many methods. That means when communication methods shift, you may have to do a lot of re-training so people know where to look. Even if you start putting church information on your Facebook page and active Facebook users become fans, that does not mean those fans will remember to go to the Page Updates and find information. You may have to train people regardless of how active they are on the social network you church uses.

Also be prepared for the vocal minority to share their opinion about the shifts in how your ministry communicates. There may be those who resist the change and will give many valid reasons why abandoning the older method is a bad idea, so you’ll have to determine ahead of time if the time and energy you put into the old method is worth continuing it for those who use it.

4. Always evaluate what works best.
Just because 100% of your congregation frequently uses email doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best way to communicate with them. All of us often see mass messages and click delete without even opening it. In fact, the mass email service I use for our youth group shows that less than 20% of subscribers open my weekly news emails. That means 80% of the parents and teenagers in our group are not even looking at my messages there even though they all actively use email. The obvious solution is seemingly to send mass Facebook messages instead, but using a tracking link in those messages indicated that only 2% of my youth group kids ever clicked through those messages for information. Again, very poor results. Don’t assume that putting information in the most “obvious” places will always be the best communication method.

For my ministry, the evaluation process revealed that people in my church will not take 2 minutes to read an email or Facebook message, but they’ll take 10 minutes to watch a YouTube video. Similarly, if I stand in front of the youth group and make announcements, no one listens, but if I say the exact same thing on a screen via video, they’re all glued to it! So now I do my weekly communication by recording a video with some added value (giveaways, contests, polls, funny YouTube clips, etc.) and distribute it via email and Facebook. Plus, the videos spread much more viraly to people in our community via Facebook and YouTube than one-on-one emails and private Facebook messages can. Even a random stranger at Wal-Mart recognized my wife by her last name because of the youth group news videos I do on YouTube!

Whatever method you use, just make sure you evaluate it. Not only do communication methods change over time, but so do the ways people use those tools.

A video that goes into more detail
Earlier this year I taught a seminar at the National Youth Ministry Conference on this very issue in much greater detail, giving more insights into communication trends in my ministry, how to evaluate communication effectiveness in your ministry, and ideas for improvement. You can watch the seminar in it’s entirety here.

The following is a written interview I did back in February for someone whose blog has since shut down. This interview was never published, so I got permission to post it here for you guys instead. It feels a bit weird to publish someone else’s interview of me on my own site, but his questions are common ones that I’m frequently asked. Although some of these answers are a bit inaccurate now (for example, a couple people on staff at my church know about my sites now), I figured it might still be helpful for people who are wondering about these questions and would like a “behind the scenes” glimpse of Life In Student Ministry.

1) First of all, tell our readers a little bit about the work you do online (what blogs, websites, social media accounts, youth group sites, etc., do you manage?).

• Life In Student Ministry [Blog. HQ for YM Mentorships, YM training videos, LIVE YM Talk, Freebie Fridays, etc.]
• OnlineMissionsTrip.com [HQ for Online Missions Trip]
• MinistryQuestions.com [Recent project, details below]
• MinistryWebsites.biz [Side business that will hopefully keep future projects free]
• @timschmoyer on Twitter [Twitter]
• Tim Schmoyer on Facebook [Facebook]
• YouTube [YM Training videos, my youth group news, and personal videos]
• AlexandriaYouth.com [My youth group's site that is quickly becoming old-school.]
• …and other sites and ideas I’ve abandoned (like PlugRug.com)

2) Life In Student Ministry runs like a well-oiled machine. Where do you find inspiration for fresh content, and how far in advance do you prepare for each post?

Inspiration comes from almost anywhere: various conversations, my wife, issues in my own youth ministry, other blogs, and totally random thoughts from the Lord.

The preparation for posts really varies. Sometimes I’ll sit down with an idea, crank it out and publish it within a couple minutes. Other times I start with an idea, save it as a draft, and come back to it from time to time as I think about it. Right now I have 40 drafts started for blog post ideas, some of them dating back to 2006. So, there’s definitely not a set process of what I write and when I publish.

3) How much does the Life In Student Ministry community contribute to the content you deliver on the site?

Again, it varies. As previously mentioned, the content at Life In Student Ministry is a combination between a lot of different places. Sometimes the comments spark an issue that needs greater attention, so I’ll blog about that. Other times it’s an email from someone. Posts also are based on an ongoing need or question I see. And still other times it’s something that’s never been addressed before I think needs to be talked about. Other times it’s an old issue that has my own spin on it.

4) A search for “student ministry” on Google brings up Life In Student Ministry as the third result. What effort (if any at all) or marketing do you put into the site to attract new visitors?

A couple years ago I started reading a lot about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) online. Based on some of the advice I read, I made some changes to my site’s structure, which helped, but the ranking mainly comes from three things:

• Consistent new content over time
• Incoming links from other sites
• Blogging about roughly the same topic over and over again

I’ve also found that some of the conventional SEO wisdom out there is totally dead wrong in regards to my site. Not sure why, but some standard SEO practices actually kill my site’s Google traffic for sustained periods of time. That’s why it’s helpful to track site stats and experiment on your own a bit without swallowing whatever the “experts” say.

As far as marketing is concerned, though, I’ve never spent a dime on advertising or anything like that. Not only do I not have the money nor the interest to do that, but social networking is both better and free! I create content primarily for people, not Google. If people like it, they talk about it with others, post links on their own sites, and share it in their own way. Google has ears everywhere and picks up on that.

5) Your most recent project is MinistryQuestions.com. Can you tell us where you got the idea, and what the response has been like?

The idea for MinistryQuestions.com came from two places, actually.

I used to get a fair amount of youth ministry questions showing up in my Inbox. Instead of answering them privately, a long time ago I started a Q&A feature on my blog where I’d publicly answer some of them. However, the questions quickly began to pile up and before long no one was getting the answers they deserved. I also found that most of the time people gave better advice in the comments on my blog than I did in the post, which was great, but it made me start thinking through a better system for answering questions.

Around this same time I started the Youth Ministry Mentorship Program, which was great, but after the first round generated almost 200 applications, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see there was a huge need among youth workers — to be able to ask ministry questions and be mentored one-on-one. Since the mentorship is limited to however many mentors are on the team (currently 16 of us), I wanted to figure out a way to put the mentorship online where an open community of youth workers could encourage, mentor, and support each other.

MinistryQuestions.com is a response to both of those situations. It took months of dreaming, planning, and a huge financial investment to make it happen, but so far the Kingdom impact has been totally worth it. Many people are embracing the site and investing into each other’s ministries, which is awesome to see. I know I’ve been blessed tremendously through the people there! In the first week of its launch, it had over 30,000 hits, which was great!

The future vision for MQ is to have it extend into other areas besides youth ministry. It’s currently populated with youth ministry since that’s my primary audience, but hopefully over time it will grow to encompass worship ministry, children’s ministry, pastoral ministry, and more.

6) How do you balance time with your wife, your students, and investing in other student pastors?

I’m not really sure. Probably because I don’t have any kids of my own yet (first one due this August), but honestly, none of the areas seem to be lacking. I’m very conscious about putting my wife first, my ministry second, and my sites last as a hobby. I don’t really have much interest in watching TV, going out to movies, or other things like that, so the time most people spend on entertainment and such I spend developing content online. It feels so much rewarding than keeping up with TV shows.

It will be interesting to see how this changes in August when my first kid is born. Life In Student Ministry and other projects may slow down. Who knows.

7) On average, how much time do you spend updating, creating, and sharing content on the web each week?

Hmm… Fridays are my day off from the church, so I create most of it then and post it online throughout the rest of the week. My wife is usually at work on Fridays, so it doesn’t detract from our time together. So, maybe 10 hours a week, give or take, of course.

8 ) How supportive is your church of the things you are doing online?

Honestly, I don’t think they even know about most of the things I do online. Some of the staff have seen parts of it, but none of them know about all of it. As I already mentioned, I don’t really promote my content outside of online social networking, so I’ve never brought it up and they’ve never asked. I’d be fine if they knew, but I’ll wait for someone else to bring it up.

9) Lastly, do you have any advice, tips, or recommendations for youth pastors who have a passion for helping each other like you do?

• Just start doing it. Life In Student Ministry started as a personal blog one night in 2005 because I was bored and didn’t feel like playing video games. I threw WordPress on it and started blogging about nonsense with my mom and dad being the only readers. But as I continued to write, I tended to write about what I’m most passionate about: youth ministry. Over time it morphed into what it is today. I certainly didn’t set out to create what it is today. Others started connecting to it slowly and I realized that the Lord was giving me an opportunity to use it to serve Him.
• Do it for the long haul for the right reasons. Too many people have a great vision for something, but stop because they’re not becoming as popular as quickly as they think they should be. Or, they think that because they’re only helping 1 or 2 people that it’s not worth their time. Just like youth group, be a good steward with the 1 or 2 people God has sent your way and you’ll be blessed to serve others later.
• Be different. Seth Godin writes about this a lot and it’s absolutely true: don’t copy ideas someone else is already doing — no one talks about that. Do something unique for the kingdom. Meet a need no one else is meeting. Do something that’s extraordinary, something worth talking about and sharing with others. Build the kingdom in ways no one else is. That’s where the YM mentorship came from, MinistryQuestions.com, YM training videos, Online Missions Trip, etc.
• Start off small and invest as it grows. Don’t discount yourself because you think you need to start your ideas with a lot of big fancy equipment, an amazing website design, or a huge audience. Start simple and build from there if your idea takes off. For example, I started the weekly YM training videos with nothing more than my Macbook’s iSight webcam and iMovie. Now that iTunes downloads and views are over 1,000 per video, I’ve invested in an hi-def video camera and an good mic. Same with the LIVE YM Talks every Friday. I started those with my little gaming headset that sounded awful, but the idea took off, so I invested into a better mic and recording software. Even my website’s design a little over a year ago was hideous, but as traffic grew it was worth investing into something better.
• Have a plan for making money. I know this sounds weird, but new ideas often come with a price tag. Of course you’ll need to start cheap like I just mentioned, but as your idea grows, you’ll need to invest into a better webhost (or increased traffic will knock you offline like it did to me), better equipment, or even have to pay designers and web developers. Adsense supported most of my projects until I decided to provide all the books for the YM mentorship to the mentees for free, and more recently when MinistryQuestions.com required almost $1,000 up-front just to get it started. Since I never want to charge a penny for a single thing I do to serve the Lord online, I need to find other ways to finance ideas. For example, MinistryWebsites.biz is an attempt to generate funds to keep my projects online. Unless you have a lot of extra money lying around somewhere, I advise you also come up with a plan to keep the finances of your ideas out of your personal bank account as much as possible.

I actually drafted this post several months ago, but am finally publishing it now in light of some other blog posts that are coming out. Among others, Anastasia Goodstein writes about Facebook and youth social networking fatigue, Libby Issendorf says that gen Y lost that loving feeling for Facebook, and Adam McLanes writes about how MTV lost their “cool factor” with this generation.

The cycle of youth culture

It’s really not surprising to me that this is happening. It’s the cycle of youth culture. Teens gravitate to something, usually under criticism from adults, until it becomes common and mainstream. As the adults eventually start adopting it themselves, teens gradually move on to something else.

Remember that, in his day, Elvis Presley was greatly criticized for his gyrating hips and the moral values his followers were adopting, but eventually his music became common among adults, parents, and teens alike. So, teens moved on to other flavors of rock and roll. As those flavors became mainstream with adults, teens moved once again to alternative rock. And so on…

Mark Oestreicher, in his book, Youth Ministry 3.0, summarizes it well:

Youth culture has become the dominate culture…. Middle-aged and younger parents listen to the same music their teenagers listen to (or, at least, used to listen to)…. Clothing brands cross age barriers…. Adults are all over Facebook and MySpace. …youth culture cannot stand by while it becomes completely commoditized and commonplace. That rubs against the essential fabric of adolescence…. Teenagers’ constant need to differentiate from the adult world… drives them to new, “other” ways of connecting, coping, and creating. Every time some aspect of youth culture becomes commoditized and mainstream, accepted by adults and culture at large, teenagers tweak it in a new way for themselves or create a whole new category. Case in point: All Web-watchers and adolescent speculators were still convinced that teenagers were going to continue using email and online chat rooms to connect with each other virtually, but teenagers slid out from under that and embraced instant messaging. Then we adults… were shocked… that teens would slide out from under our assumptions about their IM use and move to texting as the most common form of social networking. (Pages 65, 66, 68.)

It’s impossible to predict what teens will move toward next, but I will take the liberty of going on record to say that the general population of teens will move away from Facebook in the next two years.

This is becoming more and more evident as young adults like Julian Smith are annoyed that grandparents are joining Facebook. In his popular video, 25 Things I Hate About Facebook, Julian says there should be an age limit to Facebook (1:14 in the video).

Some teens I know still love Facebook and use it daily, but not everyone. Actually, what prompted me to write this blog post a couple months ago was a conversation I had with a teen who said he closed his Facebook account because there’s too many adults there and it’s too bloated with random features he doesn’t care about.

So what’s next?

I have no idea what they’ll gravitate toward as teens stop checking Facebook multiple times a day and start checking it only once a day, eventually checking it a couple times a week and then only once in a while, but I think it will have a couple elements:

1. It will not be tethered to a computer. Although Facebook has a mobile version and features, it’s still largely bound to a computer. As teens become more and more mobile and as smart phone data plans become more common, their networking will move to a mobile device that connects to a computer rather than the other way around.

2. It will still enhance and lead to face-to-face socializing. When the telephone was gaining traction, the criticism was that people would no longer meet face-to-face to talk and the dangers of miscommunication from not seeing body language would create a lot of problems. Today we all know people still continue to meet face-to-face anyway. The telephone just extended our communication. Oddly enough, however, that’s the same argument that was made when I was younger and email and IM was gaining traction, except that those communication methods didn’t even have talking involved! But yet, here we are today still meeting in person, despite all the text messaging and social networking sites. Remember, God has created mankind with an innate need for relationships, primarily with Himself, but also with each other. That face-to-face component will never go away, just the expressions of it change as technology and youth culture continues to develop.

One possibility of something teens might gravitate toward is something like Loopt, a social service that utilizes the GPS capabilities of newer phones to show you where your friends are in proximity to you, what they’re doing, and quickly contact them so you can meet together face-to-face. (This Apple commercial explains it a bit more.) Whether or not it will reach the widespread acceptance like Facebook is yet to be seen (I kinda think it won’t).

Whatever teens move toward, though, it will initially come under criticism from adults just like MySpace and Facebook did. Soon enough adults will accept it and cause the teens to once again move elsewhere, but thus is the cycle of youth culture and all the subsequent challenges of youth ministry.

What do you think?

Do you think it will take teens longer than two years to move to something else? Shorter? Will Facebook be able to keep up with the morphing trends in culture and adolescence? Have an idea of what they’ll move toward after Facebook? Would love to hear from you in the comments below.

Yesterday in our LIVE Youth Ministry Conversation Alejandro Reyes of ChurchWired.com lead us in a discussion about using social media to connect with teenagers. We talked about how to use Facebook to stay involved in our kids’ lives, how to use it to find out what issues they’re going through, how it should impact our teaching, if Facebook is true community or not, and many other things.

Alejandro Reyes is an online marketing consultant and speaker who specializes in teaching organizations how to use social media to better connect with their audiences. ChurchWired.com is his new project to extend this expertise to churches and ministries to learn how to further spread the message of Christ online. Check him out on Twitter, also.

You can listen to the whole conversation below or grab it in iTunes.

Download this episode

Subscribe to LIVE YM Conversations in iTunes

Next week’s discussion

January 23rd: Next week Jason Lamb, the Deep & Wide Ministry staff member at Dare 2 Share Ministries, will talk with us about Deep & Wide Ministry — how to take our teenagers deep in to God’s Word and wide with His message.

Join our next LIVE Youth Ministry Conversation!

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Been in youth ministry for 2 years or fewer? Apply for a FREE 10 week one-on-one Life In Student Ministry Mentorship with one of our 13 youth ministry veterans. Application closes on January 24, 2009. Mentorship is made available for free thanks to Lifeway Students, who are supplying all the resources and materials to each mentee. Thanks, Lifeway Students!

Yesterday I wrote about why I’m abandoning outreach events and gave several reasons why “outreach campaigns” may be a more effective solution.

For several months now I’ve been planning an outreach campaign for my own youth group and am excited to have other youth groups join us! The best part is that it’s completely FREE! We’ll be going all over the world, sharing the gospel with friends both in our local neighborhoods and friends far away. It’s an online missions trip, a “missions trip to Facebook,” if you will.

The Internet has never made it so easy to share Christ with those all over the world! Teenagers spend a crazy amount of hours talking with friends on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, World of Warcraft and other such social hangouts online about things that don’t really matter in light of eternity, let’s train them to share their faith and push them to do it online. The Online Missions Trip is a 2-week campaign to empower them to use social media to share Christ with their friends who don’t yet know Him.

The structure looks like this:

January whatever-31, 2009

Pre-trip training. Use youth group meetings to train kids how to share their faith, think through the Online Missions Trip concept, and start praying for unsaved friends.

February 1-14, 2009

Online Missions Trip! During these two weeks teens and youth leaders are engaging in spiritual conversations with unsaved friends online. They’re uploading videos, photos, posting links, using status updates to share what God’s doing in their lives, writing notes, sending messages, posting on blogs, creating event invites to youth group, and anything else that will bring God up in a conversation that starts online and hopefully spreads to a face-to-face discussion.

February 15-whenever, 2009

Outreach event/series and new-believer follow-up starts. Follow-up on this missions trip with a series that helps the new teens in your ministry either investigate Christianity a bit closer or start growing in their new faith. Be sure to follow-up one-on-one with new converts, as well.

To learn more about this trip, visit OnlineMissionsTrip.com. There are many ideas, free resources and tools, a 24/7 Prayer Room, a Facebook app you can use, and more. It also has a video of me explaining the trip in more detail.

While you’re there, join the OnlineMissionsTrip.com Facebook Group and meet some of the other teens and youth leaders who will be attending this missions trip with you in February.

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Thanks to YouthBytes, Dare 2 Share Ministries, and Xtreme Youth Alliance for their support, promotion, and free resources for the Online Missions Trip! Thank you Brian Ford and Michael Rothermel for all your help in creating content and tools for this missions trip that will bring teenagers to Christ! And thanks Janelle Painter for designing the Online Mission Trip logo!

Over the past two weeks, I posted a couple articles about using video to communicate with youth group kids. The first one talked about why online video can be such an effective communication tool for youth groups, and the second one gave more of a step-by-step how to make the videos with links to all the resources I use.

The glaring oversight that’s missing in both of those posts is where to put the videos on the web once your content is created. Here are my recommendations, each with pros and cons.

YouTube

YouTube has only two things going for it: it’s extremely popular and it’s social. Other than that, YouTube is honestly a horrible place to host your videos because the video quality is very poor and the only distribution methods are to link to it or embed it in your site. Fortunately, YouTube now has a “watch high quality version” feature linked under some of the videos, but even then the quality is still poor and there’s no way to embed the high quality video in your site or link to it directly.

Use YouTube as an outreach
However, I still recommend that you keep your youth group video episodes shorter than 10 minutes so you can post them on YouTube. Why? Because that’s where kids know to look and search for them. Besides, now that Google owns YouTube, their videos tend to rank fairly well in search engines. Just be sure to tag your YouTube videos with your church name, youth group name, town and state so when random kids in your community search to see, “What’s going on in my town on YouTube?” they find your youth group. It’s an easy way to do outreach! If your youth group has a website, put that URL in the very beginning of your video’s description so viewers to see it right away and visit your site for more info about your ministry.

[ Visit YouTube.com. ]

Vimeo

Vimeo is geared toward professional and amateur film developers and thus has amazing video quality and full support for HD (high definition) content. You can create “channels,” which is basically a brandable page that displays all your latest youth group videos, latest udpates from an RSS feed, custom URL, and more. Plus, Vimeo makes it easy to distribute videos by putting the embed code right in the video itself for people to copy and paste. Although free accounts are limited to 500 MB uploads per week, that should be more than enough for most people’s needs. Other than that, the service is phenomenal. The only reason I don’t use them for my youth group videos and the Life In Student Ministry video posts is because it lacks iTunes compatible RSS feeds, which Blip.tv offers.

[ Visit Vimeo.com ]

Blip.tv

Blip.tv is my choice until Vimeo adds a couple key features that I want. Blip.tv offers pretty much everything you could think of and it does it all for free: amazing video quality, customizable video players for your website, a simple interface, unlimited uploads, and an RSS feed that you can plug into iTunes as a video podcast in less than 60 seconds. The iTunes feature really is the selling point for me over Vimeo right now because if my youth group kids subscribe to the video podcast in iTunes, they can easily sync it with their iPods and watch the episodes on the bus, in the car, on a treadmill at the gym, or wherever else they want.

[ Visit Blip.tv ]

Facebook

Of course, if you have a Facebook group or page for your youth group, remember to upload your video episodes there, too. Just be sure that you don’t have any copyrighted material in it (like a music background from song or something) because Facebook will take it down pretty quickly, at least they did with my old ones before I started using only royalty free content.

[ Visit Facebook.com ]