Southern Social Media

This article will teach you an important principle for how you publish content on your blog. You will here me discuss content design a lot, because its very important. Headlines, sub-headlines, bullet points, bolded text and italics are VERY IMPORTANT.

Aaron Marshall
President, International Scanner Awareness Association

Nov 4

Expert Twitter Managment: Bigger Impact, Less Time and Smarter Features

This is a tool I highly recommend - HootSuite. It is a Twitter management tool that will help seminary leaders to have a bigger impact, enhance awareness and save time.

Schedule tweets to go out at a later date and time.

Manage multiple twitter accounts

Setup your blog to automatically update when there is a new blog post.

Track trends and discussions around specific topics

Aaron Marshall
Twit Kwan Do Instructor

Tip for Posting Effective Links -Use “http://” NOT “www.”

This is a quick tip to make sure your links are working BEST when you post them to twitter, facebook or any place that you can share a link.

Good Example http://albertmohler.com

Bad Example www.albertmohler.com

When you use “http://” before a link rather than “www.” the link will work better in more places.

Aaron Marshall
Nitpicker

Fighting Twitter Spam

Dealing with Twitter spam can be dangerous and frustrating. The worst kind of twitter spam and probably the most common is pornography. We need to be actively seeking ways to fight twitter spam.

Here are a few ideas:

#1 DON’T DO IT ALONE

The following solutions may still expose you to negative images. If you have a hard time with images, do it with someones help or simply have someone else do it for you.

#2 TwitBlock

This seems to be the most efficient way for keeping Southern accounts clean. Unfortunately though, when it does the scan it still loads the inappropriate profile pictures. Discernment on who is assigned this task is needed.

#3 Block from Email

You will need to turn on email notifications in your twitter settings to make this work.

Unfortunately this doesnt solve the problem completely, because innapropriate images still may appear. We are investigating a solution to this. Feel free to contact me if you need more instruction or have any questions.

Aaron Marshall
Tweet Spam Eliminator

Oct 30

The Proper Method For Choosing A Username

When signing up for various social networks and services that require that you choose a username. Use your full name.

For Example…

If your name is Dan Dewitt than your username should be DanDewitt. Not something like puffydano, or dmuffin.***

Infact it is important that our leaders know this so that they can snatch up their names early on some of the more popular social networks like Twitter.

***Not depictive of a known occurence.

Aaron Marshall
adawgy47

Oct 15

Social Media Basics (Watch All Videos)

There is a mountain of great tools and technologies that can be found online today, the key is to learn what I call the “Social Media Staples”.

Oct 8

Yammer is Twitter for Business

The Solution to Email Overload

We now have our own private communication network on Yammer that will be a huge step in how we collaborate and communicate.

Go here and sign-up now or Watch this Tour

This could be a beneficial tool to the entire staff at the seminary. We need to flesh it out in communications. There are powerful applications to this tool that will make pesky email wince in pain.

Aaron Marshall
Yammering

7 Ingredients Of Good Corporate Design

Oct 6

From “In the Know” to “Let Us Show”

There are countless great stories, just waiting to be told, all around us here at Southern Seminary. Conversing frequently with those in places of strategic relevance is a must.

This means keeping one’s ear low to the ground.

Is there someone living in Manly who knows everyone in his dorm? Ask him about the men with whom he is interacting, and any specific stories or activities about which you should be aware—say, a student’s evangelism and prayer ministry at the local abortion mill.

Is there someone working in the Billy Graham School who has daily contact with professors and students? Check in with him about things he has been hearing recently—for example, the fact that several professors will be taking mission trips in this year of “Living Dangerously”: who, where, when, and why.

Do you know at least one person who is a member of each of the major Southern Baptist churches in the Louisville area? Ask them what their church is doing in terms of ministry to the lost—an art show and concert at Sojourn, perhaps.

Cultivate relationships with those men and women who are “in the know” about the things going on at the seminary. You never know how one seemingly off-the-cuff comment about some artwork at Java can turn into the highlighting of a student’s ministry to those who are seeking to adopt orphans from nations around the world.

Of course, this takes a good amount of curiosity and intuition, but less so than one might think. At many (most?) institutions, one has to create the stories; here at Southern, we just have to find the ones that are already there.

—Robbie Sagers

Lockstep Can Be a Creative Lockbox

From cultural commentator Andrew Keen, who—though referring to bloggers—provides a good reminder about the dangers of reading and referring only to those with whom we are in lockstep agreement:

“What (Arthur) Miller would see today in the Web 2.0 world is a nation so digitally fragmented that it’s no longer capable of informed debate. Instead, we use the Web to confirm our own partisan views and link to others with the same ideologies. Bloggers today are forming aggregated communities of like-minded amateur journalists—at Web sites like Townhall.com, HotSoup.com, and Pajamasmedia.com—where they congregate in self-congratulatory clusters. They are the digital equivalent of online gated communiteis where all the people have identical views and the whole conversation is mirrored in a way that is reassuringly familiar. It’s a dangerous form of digital narcissism; the only conversations we want to hear are those with ourselves and those like us.”

—Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 54-55.

—Robbie Sagers

Creativity Takes Time

The creatives must create to be great creatives. Always in the office, always cranking out design is the death to being truly creative. Walt Disney call it “imagineering.” I find my most creative times are planned and reflect the following strategy:

Geography—drive far enough away to unplug my mind from a master to do list.
Environment—An environment conducive to thinking—the lobby at the Biltmore in Santa Barbara.
God—filling my mind with the greatness of God prior to engaging the white paper.
Blocking—shutting down communications to the outside world—you can do for a few hours.
The Box—thinking outside the box and push the limits.
Presuppositions—dry up the juices of creativity.
Calender—your calender should weekly reflect creative time away.

What do you say? I say lets get creative!

Dan Dumas

The Cast

Every team member needs the freedom to share openly their ideas. There are no stupid ideas only stupid people who refuse to blurt it out. You never know if some variation spawns a great one.

Dan Dumas

Sep 25

Inspiring an All-Star SBTS Creative Services Team

Assuming that we have hired the most excellent creative team the following principles and actions need to be implemented.

#1 Empower SBTS Creative with full cooperation in the discovery process

#2 Create a High Trust Relationship with SBTS Creative

#3. Push Timeless and be Open to Relevance

If the leadership of the Seminary has to micromanage or direct design then we do not have the right creatives on the bus and we should make adjusments quickly. Though their visionary input is an absolutely necessary, it would be a blunder if Seminary leaders were wasting their time choosing colors, fonts, layouts and imagery. That is the job of SBTS Creative.

SBTS Creative must reflect the excellence of the Seminary.

Aaron Marshall
Inspired