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Every­where you look online it’s all about big­ger and bet­ter. Face­book apps that help you stand out above all the other Face­book pro­files.  Word­Press plu­g­ins that mar­ket your blog every­where you can’t be at once. It goes on and on…

Even my other “self” will say this to her clients: You can wow the socks off of any­one you want, but if you have noth­ing to say, then it’s all worthless.

What hap­pened to just com­mu­ni­cat­ing your heart…your pas­sion? Let’s bring the hoopla down a bit. Do you remem­ber why you started that blog? Was it really about rub­bing elbows with the right blog­gers? Or was it just to get your thoughts and ideas out of your head on to vir­tual paper?

What about Face­book? If you feel like you have to update your sta­tus morn­ing, noon and night, you’ve prob­a­bly lost sight of your orig­i­nal rea­son for start­ing it in the first place.

Sim­plify
to make less com­pli­cated, clearer, or eas­ier
–dictionary.com

I want to encour­age you to clear up the clut­ter online. Let’s uncom­pli­cate the issue. Write it down. Put it on a Post It note and stick it to your mon­i­tor. Tape it to your vanity…whatever you need to do to get Ms. Human “Drama” Nature out of the picture.

Ok?

K.

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Be sure to check out the other blog­gers of 31 Days of Min­istry Online:

Karin — 31 Days of Inten­tional Par­ent­ing

Image via Wikipedia

In Novem­ber, I spent some time in Cal­i­for­nia. It was mainly for my grandmother’s funeral, but I was blessed to be able to spend time with fam­ily and cre­ate won­der­ful mem­o­ries. My most favorite was spend­ing time with my brother and sister-in-law on the Morro Bay beach tak­ing pic­tures. I was able to cap­ture some amaz­ing scenes: surfers, turf war with birds, shells, etc. With all the beauty sur­round­ing this mid-west girl, what stood out to me the most was when my sister-in-law intro­duced me to sea glass.

It’s my under­stand­ing that there is glass that the ocean waves have rolled over and over on sand and cor­ral until it’s per­fectly smooth. Find­ing round one’s was hard, but when you did find them, they were like flaw­less mar­bles. The rocks rolled between the waves and sand were also per­fectly smooth. It’s an inspir­ing result from fric­tion time and time again.

This got me thinking…

I don’t mind con­fronta­tion but I do not like fric­tion. It’s the con­stant rub­bing the wrong way. We all know peo­ple like that and for some rea­son they like to con­gre­gate online too…HA! But if rea­son­able con­ver­sa­tions and “friendly fire” pro­duce learn­ing results, then maybe we shouldn’t shy away from it all the time.

Now, I’m not talk­ing about the sad saps that only pro­duce neg­a­tive vibes. You know how I feel about them. But if we embrace a lit­tle fric­tion along the way, don’t we just bet­ter our­selves and cre­ate a more smooth, rounded per­son? Maybe the next time a friend gen­tly chal­lenges your motives or your thoughts, you could lis­ten and let the fric­tion buffer out the impu­ri­ties and cre­ate some­thing so much more beautiful.

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Be sure to check out the other blog­gers of 31 Days of Min­istry Online:

Karin — 31 Days of Inten­tional Par­ent­ing

Image via Wikipedia

Whether you are on every social media plat­form out there or barely hang­ing in there with a blog, you want to make it easy for your read­ers to share your fab­u­lous words of wis­dom. The best way of doing that is by adding social book­mark­ing to your posts.  It’s fairly easy. If you use Word­Press, these book­marks are just plugins.

Quick Expla­na­tion: Social book­mark­ing is actu­ally using sites like Deli­cious, Kirtsy, etc to ‘book­mark’ sites/posts that inter­est you. That being said, there are those in the indus­try that use the term book­mark­ing for appli­ca­tion that allow oth­ers to share your blog posts with their followers/friends either through Twit­ter, Face­book, Deli­cious, etc.  That’s why I chose to call it Social Shar­ing so as not to con­fuse the issue any more than it already is!

Social Shar­ing is a great way to gain more read­er­ship and find more peo­ple in your blog­ging tribe . There are many appli­ca­tions that can do this for you…it really depends on what hanks your chain. On this blog I use Tweet­Meme for the Twit­ter retweet but­ton (top, right of every post) and Socia­ble for the bot­tom of each post. You want to be able to give your read­ers the oppor­tu­nity to share to any plat­form that they wish.

A few other pop­u­lar WP social shar­ing plu­g­ins are:

Sexy­Book­mark

Add to Any

AddThis

I know that some blog­gers don’t use these options because it dri­ves them nuts if no one uses them. Remem­ber, the point is to make it as easy as pos­si­ble for read­ers to share your info if they want. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to share a great post, but there wasn’t an easy way of doing that.  Five minute install and you are ser­vic­ing your readers…that’s a great investment!

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Be sure to check out the other blog­gers of 31 Days of Min­istry Online:

Karin — 31 Days of Inten­tional Par­ent­ing

YouTube, like Face­book, is pretty self explana­tory and you want to be care­ful with pri­vacy issues. The dif­fer­ence is that you want to be care­ful what video’s you’re upload­ing because any­one can see it.

Your house with your chil­dren? Yep

Will some­one leave a nasty com­ment? Probably

There are a lot of sad peo­ple out there that want to share that sad­ness. When it comes to any kind of social media plat­form, try hav­ing the hide of a rhino and heart of a dove. What­ever you do, have fun with it! You just never know…maybe your video will be one of 2011’s top viral video:

My fav!

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Be sure to check out the other blog­gers of 31 Days of Min­istry Online:

Karin — 31 Days of Inten­tional Par­ent­ing

It is amaz­ing to me how loyal Face­book users are! There have been pri­vacy issue after issue and yet Face­book con­tin­ues to have record break­ing per­for­mances. Oh, I get it…it sure is nice to be able to go to one place and share pic­tures and expe­ri­ences and know that every­one you love (or might not even know at all) will be updated and be part of your life.

It’s a great con­cept and hello!…can you say addic­tive? Man, before a much needed inter­ven­tion I was plow­ing the hey-hoo out of Farmville!

Hello, my name is Jen and I get up at 2am to har­vest my blue­ber­ries.

“…Hello, Jen…”

Face­book, whether it’s used for com­pany or per­sonal use, needs bound­aries and bal­ance. I have a par­tic­u­lar “friend” on Face­book, who I don’t even know (…and nei­ther do you, so stop try­ing to fig­ure out who it is. ) and just about every hour she updates her sta­tus with a Bible verse and mini-sermonette. I can tell she is a ten­der soul and wants to share her love of Jesus with oth­ers. How­ever, there’s no bal­ance. Scrip­tures can be very uplift­ing, but an overkill of Scrip­ture can get scrolled over. Now, if she shared updates on her life and other pas­sions, those Scrip­tures would mean so much more.

Then there are other friends who need to share their sta­tus updates with their very per­sonal diary. TMI doesn’t even touch it…ACK! Dude…get a room or wake up! Bound­aries are just ways to draw lines in the sand…“do not cross this line”. It’s always a good thing…use them.

With all the changes and frus­tra­tions with Facebook’s pri­vacy set­tings, I encour­age you to check your set­tings and make sure you are only shar­ing what you want with who you want. If you have ques­tions about how to do cer­tain things, check out Mashable’s Face­book Guide.

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Be sure to check out the other blog­gers of 31 Days of Min­istry Online:

Karin — 31 Days of Inten­tional Par­ent­ing

On Sat­ur­day I talked about tools that help man­age your Twit­ter account. Hoot­suite is a very pop­u­lar pro­gram that a lot of peo­ple and busi­nesses use. One rea­son com­pa­nies like to use it is because you can cre­ate sched­uled tweets. This means you can write up a tweet and tell Hoot­suite to send it out on what­ever day you’d like. This is very appeal­ing to that small busi­ness owner who doesn’t have time to “do it all”.  They can sched­ule their tweets for the week and be done. Right?

Wrong!

Remem­ber, Twit­ter was designed to be a suc­cess­ful SOCIAL media tool. This means to use the tool suc­cess­fully you need to be social: engage ‚engage, engage!

Now, that being said, I’m going to endorse sched­uled tweets also. On this site, I use a plu­gin called Twitoaster. This plu­gin will send out an auto­mated tweet every time I pub­lish a post. I’ve even sched­uled tweets through Hoot­suite, myself. They were spread out to make sure I noti­fied my fol­low­ers of some­thing I was work­ing on through­out the day. Not every­one is on Twit­ter morn­ing, noon, and night (…ahem…). So if I want my fol­low­ers to be aware of some­thing impor­tant, I will make sure a tweet is sent out at var­i­ous times.

The key to mak­ing auto­mated tweets suc­cess­ful is to make sure you’re avail­able to fol­low up with any­one that is try­ing to chat with you about your tweets. It’s pretty anti-social to send out a tweet and not be there to answer any ques­tions about this.

So if send­ing out auto­mated tweets will help you stay on top of your social media pres­ence, then by all means do it…but just don’t use Twit­ter as big bill­board in the sky to pro­mote your­self for free. Your social media expe­ri­ence will leave you bang­ing your head against the wall.

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Be sure to check out the other blog­gers of 31 Days of Min­istry Online:

Karin — 31 Days of Inten­tional Par­ent­ing