Little did I know that there’s been a kid’s ministry hashtag (#kidmin) in use since February 3rd – and it’s been fairly widely adopted.  So why haven’t us student ministry people been using one?  Well, for one, it might be because of the method that we choose to update from.  With so many people using SMS to update their status these days, it becomes a chore to A) remember to use the hashtag and B) fit it in with the other content of our tweets.  Also, at one point should we use it and and what point should we not?  Just because we in one way or another work in student ministry doesn’t mean that all of our tweets should be labeled that way, does it?  Don’t get me wrong – I think it’d be great to aggregate all student ministry tweets.  The best possible would be just like Zappos does it, having people in student ministry submit their usernames to be included in the stream.  I don’t have the programming skills or time to set something like this up, but it would be great if someone out there did.

Until what I’ve just described happens, Josh, I, and several others have agreed on #StuMin, which keeps in line with #kidmin.  Spread the word in tweets worldwide!  Copy and paste the tweet below!  You’ll be able to track the use of this Twitter hashtag here or here.

RT @StudentMinistry: The people have spoken. Use #StuMin in your tweets about student ministry! Please RT! http://cli.gs/NvZa1P

UPDATE:  You can also use this service from NutshellMail.com, rather than just the Facebook application.

Yesterday Mashable broke news about a new Facebook application that monitors your social networking and email accounts and sends recent activity straight to the email address of your choice.  The application, called NutshellMail, allows you to select at what times and on what days you want to receive email updates.  It only informs you of certain Facebook activity, including new messages, friend requests, group invites, friend invites, and unread pokes.  However, you can also get updates from LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, and any other email address that you dread checking all of the time.  I’m extremely pumped that it doesn’t tell me every time your mom threw up on my super wall or asked me to be an interior decorating pirate.  Whew.

NutshellMail is enormously beneficial for me.  I have two Facebook profiles, manage three Twitter accounts, have two personal email addresses, a work email address, and a profile on all of the sites I listed above.  Rather than logging into all of these every day with the possibility of being distracted from my real work, I can simply read the email from NutshellMail email as I do several others throughout the day to catch up on the latest.

Installing the application is pretty easy – just go to the application page, click “Go to Application”, and follow the instructions.  Don’t forget to check your inbox to verify your email account so you can start receiving updates.

Hope many of you find this free application as beneficial as I do.

Let me introduce you to a nice little application called Twhirl.  This Mac and PC friendly program allows you to create a list of your Twitter accounts and login one-by-one.  Each account is shown in it’s own application window, and gives you the same functionality as the Twitter website, plus more.

Pros

• View direct messages, replies, favorites, and archive of your own tweets
• View friends and followers
• Follow other Twitter users
• Add tweets to favorites
• Use Twitter’s lookup feature (for usernames) as well as Twitter Search (for content in all tweets)
• Tweetscan Search
• Desktop notifications for new tweets
• Upload to TwitPic
• Shorten URLs (using one of  three different short URL providers)

Cons

• Can’t view multiple accounts in one window
• Lack of automatic brand mention tracking

While Twhirl is loaded with features,  I’m hesitant to commit because of the inability to handle multiple accounts from one window.  However, this is likely a great solution for many of you who don’t want to have a browser open at all times to manage your Twitter accounts.

For those of you familiar with Twitter, this will probably be no surprise.  The purpose of short urls is to take a long url (such as http://www.threeparts.com/2008/12/26/friday-video-a-christmas-greeting/) and make it more managable…err…pretty (such as http://bit.ly/17oA0).  Both of these thinks will take you to the same location on the web.  The first one is the original URL, while the second is a shortened version of the first, assigned when I signed up for an account with Bit.ly and created it.

The most common use for short urls is to make long urls more friendly to microblogging services.  Lately, however, I’ve been using these free services to not only shorten urls, but to track the number of times certain links of been clicked - regardless of where I place them.  The click-tracking feature of many short url providers is one that is greatly overlooked.  This information can be extremely valuable for you as a youth worker.  For instance – if you send a link to a medical release form via your youth ministry newsletter which 25 people receive, and the link only gets one click – you should probably head down to the copier before the next pre-trip meeting so you can have some copies available for parents.  Click tracking can also let you know your ‘return on investment’ when providing resources.  If you spend two hours a day scouring the web for things to share with your students and parents, and only a small fraction of the people you are sending the information to click the link, you may need to invest your time doing other things.

While many premium email services already provide click-through information, it’s safe to say most of you are not using those pricey services.  Therefore, I highly recommend using these in emails, on your blog (though a plugin or addon for stats would be better), on Twitter or other microblogging services, and so on.  There is no reason not to track your links, given the process is incredibly simple.

Simply copy a url you would like to share, sign up at one of the sites below, create a short url, and copy and paste the new link where you intended to share the original.  It’s truly that easy.

Be aware, there are some very popular short url providers that do not give you click stats (such as TinyURL), though somehow they continue to be incredibly popular.  I prefer Bit.ly for tracking my links.  Not only does it track the link where I place it, but it tells me where else the link has been placed by other people.  It also lets me know how many people on Twitter are talking about it.  However, there are several providers.  Here are a few:

• Tweetburner
• Snurl
• Tr.im
• Bit.ly
• Twurl
• Is.gd

There are far too many for me to A) have used and B) to cover here. Comments are encouraged and welcome!

Update:  You may also want to read How to Manage Multiple Twitter Accounts On Your Desktop

As someone who manages several Twitter accounts between work and my personal life, I was thrilled to come across Splitweet this week.  Splitweet is a website that allows you to  setup the credentials for each Twitter account you run to pull all of your Twitter feeds on to one page.  The tweets from all of your accounts appear in one stream. While this sounds like it might get confusing, the service assigns each of your accounts a different color.  To the far right of each tweet, there is a small box that is colored to coincide with the account that the tweet is associated with.  It uses the same feature to show you which accounts you sent each tweet from.

Just as if you were logged into Twitter, you can post tweets, send replies, and even direct messages across all of your accounts.

One thing I love about the site is the ‘brand mentions’ area in the sidebar. Rather than having to use TweetScan or visit Twitter Search, Splitweet displays any mention of your brand on the same page that you send and read your tweets from.  It displays your most recent @replies in the sidebar as well.

While I absolutely love how much easier Splitweet has made my life over the past few days, there is one major feature that keeps me going back to the Twitter website from time to time.

The site does not give you the ability to manage your followers.  Yes, there are sites that allow you to do this outside of Twitter – such as MyTweeple.com.  But the goal here is consolidation.  I don’t want to have to visit more than one site to manage my accounts (mainly because I’m lazy).  As a general rule, I try to follow everyone that follows me.  While Splitweet does show you an estimated ‘tweet audience’ when you choose which account to send a tweet to, there is no way to see your newest followers and follow them back.  So for my main LifeWay account, StudentMinistry, which gets a couple of new followers every day – I still have to visit Twitter to manage them.

In addition to Splitweet, this video by CHURSMO shows how you can use Netvibes to display all of your accounts on one page.  However, Splitweet offers more funcationality.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Overall, I give Splitweet 4 out of 5 stars.