The following clip does an especially great job of illustrating a point I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. (Be forewarned there is some naughty language sprinkled here and there.)

Carrie, the show’s witty protagonist, has just been broken up with by a depressingly lovable fellow writer, Berger. But she’s not so much upset about the break-up as she is bewildered at the medium through which the break-up message was conveyed: that most ubiquitous of office supplies, the Post-It. It’s clear to the stylish gaggle of ladies who lunch that the message and it’s delivery do not line up.

In talking to both individuals and groups about social media, many colleagues and I tend to stress that “it’s just a tool.” At the same time, we all know full well that social media is much more than that.

Here’s an analogy; let’s talk about food. Here in the U.S., eating is primarily done with forks and knives. Those are our tools and we don’t think too much about it. But what happens when those tools are traded out for a row of six different forks, or a pair of chopsticks, or a communal piece of flat bread? The cultural implications of the tools with which we eat are suddenly brought to the forefront.

Image credit: Paul Goyette

Change the tool, and (to some extent) you change the culture. Or, similarly, to quote Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message.

To touch briefly back on the aforementioned saga, Carrie later goes on a rant about how a break-up should ideally be handled. She stresses that the message of ending a relationship should be delivered in a way that honors what the two people had together. Essentially, the message and the medium should match.

I’m confident everyone reading this post has had moments like this – moments in which we’ve questioned what is appropriate to share (or find out) via Facebook, or over email, or in a text. The screenshot below illustrates a very mild example.

And it’s not only due to issues of public vs. private in these spaces, but something deeper. There’s something about posting certain messages on Twitter, for instance, that feels like the digital equivalent of breaking up on a Post-It. But these media are all developing so quickly, becoming so deeply ingrained into our lives and even onto our physical selves, that’s it’s often unclear how to draw these boundaries. Or whether it is a fool’s errand to try to do so.*

How can an organization keep up and be successful in this environment? I’ll give you my thoughts on this in a follow-up post. But now, I’d love to hear yours. Have you ever had a Post-It moment? What are your impressions of the relationship between the medium and the message? What are the implications for Jewish organizations in the connected age?

*To further complicate the matter, “social media” is not some monolithic beast. The term refers to a field, a loose configuration of platforms and spaces that allow for certain kinds of interaction. Each space has developed a culture of its own. There are behavioral and conversational norms that are perfectly acceptable in one space that would seem quite odd in another. For instance, sharing pictures of your breakfast has become fairly acceptable on Facebook; doing so in LinkedIn may not go over so well. (But now I’ve gone off about food again…)

Photo Credit: j&tplaman

Social Networking Gardening Tips:

Step 1: Seek out the gardeners. Find out who among the people you work with is blogging, tweeting, active on Facebook or LinkedIn, etc., by doing basic searches in those networks and asking around.  See which friends you have in common – you may be surprised and delighted at the connections you find!

Step 2: Watch their seeds and shoots. Subscribe to posts and friend these folks in whatever way you feel most comfortable (adjust your privacy settings as needed).  Put them in lists you can easily come back to (Twitter/Facebook), subscribe to blog posts via RSS, and bookmark whatever other sites might be relevant.

Step 3: Add sunshine, water, and fertilizer regularly. Schedule a regular time to focus just on networking with these groups.  Try taking ten minutes, two days a week, to go through the friend lists and RSS feeds you created and comment, reply, and retweet.  Share resources you think might add value to that person’s work and suggest people they may gain from being in touch with.  For some cases, it may be best to send a personal email or make a phone call to deepen the connection.

Step 4: Bonus step! Find the other gardens where your gardeners’ seeds have taken root. Uncover the conversations where your colleagues and their work are being talked about that they might not even know of!  Set up a Google Reader or Google Alerts.  Go to Google Blog Search.  Type in the names of the people and/or institutions you work with and see what comes up.  If there are a few meaningful, relevant results in the search, subscribe to that search by scrolling to the bottom of the page and clicking the RSS link.  Check in on that RSS feed every now and again and share with those people the (good) news you found about them.

Some additional tips:

Be sure to subscribe to comment feeds on the blog posts you reply to so you can see where the conversation goes and easily follow up.

Use a consistent username across platforms so that folks will begin to recognize your presence and personality.  This will also make yourself more searchable in the future.

Put a pause between your fingertips and the keyboard – think about your voice, tone, and the value you’re adding to the conversation.  Be consistent.  If your organization has one, make sure to adhere to the guidelines of the social media policy, and develop that document as needed based on your interactions.

Don’t neglect IRL (in real life) and other media. Networks need to flow within and among different platforms to be truly effective.  Mentioning a Facebook post in a phone call, or a blog comment in a coffee date, then tying those conversations back to their original host platform can be a great way to weave people and ideas.

Serendipity happens! Being active in social media means you open up all kinds of potential for new connections – whether you plan on it or not.  Have an open mind and welcome the unexpected!

How have you found and cultivated the fertile areas in your organization?  What resulted from these interactions?

1. Focus –  prior to entering the social media arena, zero in on simple and realistic goals.  As opposed to top down planning, it is vital to build personal relationships, be authentic and listen intently to the communal needs.  At Temple Israel in Memphis, we organized heterogeneous focus groups to hear individual thoughts concerning the temple. Based on their insights, a vision was constructed by lay leaders, stating our congregation’s role to connect Jews more deeply to Torah, spiritual fulfillment, community, and tikkun olam.  Using this as the foundation, our temple’s Facebook page, alongside my Rabbi Adam Facebook and Twitter accounts, ultimately connect to our community more deeply and, subsequently, help to drive our attendance, donations, long-term membership, and new member opportunities. While some might disregard this planning stage, successful social media approaches realize the importance of slowing down before speeding up.

2. Grab Attention – getting noticed by our audience is vital to social media success.  In an online world dominated with choices, we need to move away from the predictability.  Too many organizations explain events or communicate information in the exact same way as was done fifty years before – title the event, share the details, expect a crowd.  In the online world, this is not acceptable. Sparking the curiosity of our constituents must be done through innovative and audience centered videos and pictures that personally connect with and elicit an emotional response from our constituency.  Think of the Maccabeats, Yeshiva University’s all-male a cappella group, whose fun, entertaining and unexpected song “Candlelight” became an instant Youtube sensation and now has almost 6 million views.  While by no means the same number of hits, this video from Temple Israel exceeded expectations, generated excitement, and started many conversations about the event.

3. Engage – emotionally invest the community in the organization. One of the best lines of the book is that “to engage, it’s necessary to view yourself (and your effort) as a brand.” In order to do this, we need to tell our stories, which help to define and to build our constituency’s collective memories thus connecting them more deeply to the mission of and take action for the institution.  Answering questions such as what inspires the community, what makes an institutional experience meaningful, and why Jews would want to connect with us gears the online conversation to the community and makes it personal.  In promoting Temple Israel’s Sukkot and Simchat Torah experiences, we redefined them for the community where music became the center.  We ran a fun promotional spot and an online giveaway for autographed CD’s of the artists via Facebook and Twitter. By rethinking the marketing, we have helped our community become more engaged and excited about the experience and the artists.

4. Take action – get the community to act upon your cause by giving their time, money or both.  The most important take away here is to ask for time before money.  Too many Jewish institutions consistently ask for money via membership, programs, events, dinners, etc. and never truly get people vested in the experience.  In order to reverse this trend, it is imperative to actively seek and encourage volunteer participation.  Even though individuals are involved with so many activities, we have to rethink how we invite people to volunteer. Instead of asking them to join time intensive committees, encourage them to work on smaller and tangible projects that value their individual talents, skills and interests. When a group then becomes invested in the organization, social media then becomes a tool for reaching a greater audience and receiving much needed feedback. As one experiments with social media to motivate the community, make it fun and, as our communications director, Isti Bardos, always states, make sure to respond to every message or post for that personal touch helps the audience feel they are actually having a dialogue rather than a monologue.

The Dragonfly Effect provides the tools to captivate an online audience, and then inspire them to actively participate in social change.  The examples and illustrations can help Jewish institutions more fully realize the potential of social media.  By experimenting, having fun and continuing to evaluate results, these four wings can provide Jewish institutions a way to further engage Jews as our world proceeds to advance technologically.

How are you addressing these four wings, and more importantly, how are you getting them to work in congruence with one another?

Rabbi Adam Grossman is the Associated Rabbi of Temple Israel of Memphis.  Rabbi Grossman earned his Master of Arts in Hebrew Letters from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in 2008,  a Bachelor of Arts in Communications from The Ohio State University and a Master of Education Administration with a Specialization in Jewish Education from Xavier University.  He is an active user of social media, and contributes to Temple Israel’s effective use of online social tools for engagement and building community.  Follow him on Twitter, and find him on Facebook.

As I began to wind down my work week in preparation for Shabbat,  my social media Friday began, a few months back, to take on a different form. I needed a wrap up of the social media week, just as Shabbat is the wrap up of my work week. Inspired by a radio “shock jock” who used to end each morning with a call-in segment called “What have we learned today?”, I decided to try asking this question on my Friday Facebook status. And so, every Friday morning, my status reads “It’s Friday! What have we learned this week?”

Several months in, our (no longer my) What Have We Learned This Week? community is thriving. Each week literally dozens of friends from around the world share their reflections.  The recognition of learning that has taken place ranges from the odd (“I learned about the reproductive system of a hen”) to the seriously reflective (“we can spend time weighing our day, debating its worth, or we can recognize all of the good in our day and count it as worthy!”), to the personal  (“To have a little more faith in myself than I might otherwise deem I deserve.”) to the proudly parental (“That my son is receiving a wonderful public school education from wonderfully committed teachers.”)

Beyond their individual reflections, the participants in this weekly ritual have begun to talk to each other, supporting (or challenging, such as the discussion on the difference between “fact” and “truth”) friends and sometimes strangers as we close our week together.  My Friday Facebook wall has become a safe place for introspection, joking, kvetching, and praying. We judge our own learnings from social media and from the rest of our life and, without judging one another we get the opportunity to learn from each other’s weekly journeys. And in the end, it’s the sharing of one another’s journeys that is what life, as well as social media, is about.

Judaism has a practice in which a person conducts a cheshbon ha-nefesh, a self-audit of one’s soul. Some people engage in this practice daily, others less often. During the Rosh Hashana season, it’s particularly apropos, as we look back on the year past and at the year ahead. We assess ourselves honestly, and we set our course for the future. Why not invite my Facebook friends to share their own cheshbon hanefesh on my Facebook wall?

May we all continue to learn and share, and may be all be blessed wish a shana tova u’metukah, a happy and sweet New Year.

So… What you have you learned this year?  Share your thoughts in the comments.

Arnie Samlan is a rabbi, Jewish educator, consultant, Jewish life coach, and aspiring DJ. Follow him on Twitter (@JewishConnectiv) and his blog (http://thenotoriousrav.blogspot.com Arnie is part of the professional team of the New Center for Collaboration and Leadership of The Jewish Education Project.

One Forty to the rescue!  Laura Fitton (@pistachio) runs this smart “Social Business Software Hub”, which recently blogged 5 Common Twitter Mistakes and How to Fix Them.  It’s worth reading.  I’ll share the fifth one with you here, since it’s a juicy factoid I’m betting many people are curious about:

@ vs. .@ The way that Twitter is constructed, only people that also follow whoever you are @replying can see that @reply. Sometimes, people will start a Tweet with @ when it’s not intended to be an @reply, though. For instance,  ”@CNN’s coverage of the Egyptian riots….” If you Tweeted that, only your followers that follow @CNN will see that Tweet in their timeline.

HOW TO FIX: Want everyone to see those Tweets? Use the .@ trick: stick a period in front of the @ sign and it’ll send the Tweet into the main Twitter stream for all to enjoy.

See? Simple and brilliant explanation.  Now go check out their blog for many more.

.@y’all, see you on Twitter!

The New Year is quickly approaching and with that comes the deluge of new calendars.  Synagogue calendars, school calendars, board meeting schedules, and soccer schedules.  Like me, you are probably used to dedicating an afternoon around this time of year to entering all of these lists of dates into your personal calendar.

Those days are over.

Set up a calendar for your organization in Google, post it to your website or blog, invite your members.  One click and voila, each event on your organization’s calendar is instantly imported into their personal calendar.  The events show up in a new color, so your organization’s events are easily distinguished from other entries on the user’s personal calendar.  And the best part- as you add events to your organization’s calendar, they automatically show up on each individual’s personal Google calendar.  You can even use it to send invitations to your events and collect RSVPs.  It is all both cost free and ad free.  For those that don’t use Google calendar, they can easily view events right on your website or print the calendar in any of three formats:  weekly, monthly, or agenda.

To get started on setting up the calendar for your organization, you’ll need a Google account.  Then go to Google calendar and select “Add” in the “My Calendars” section.  The investment of time is quite minimal.  Spend a few minutes entering the events and then embed the calendar directly to your website.  To try it out from a member prospective,  visit a sample calendar at Kesher Jewish Community After School Program. Then just hit the + at the bottom of the calendar.  (You can easily remove it later.)  Note that for Mac users, Google allows you to add a link to allow them to get the calendar through iCal too.

Ellen Dietrick is the new Director of Early Childhood Education at Temple Beth Shalom in Needham, MA, and is famous for her creative and practical uses of technology at her previous position at Congregation Beth Israel, in Charlottesville, VA, and through the Covenant Fellows program and the Jim Joeseph Foundation Fellowship.

1. How to Convey Our Mission/Religious Message/Personal Relevance Online? Beyond marketing events, providing links and posting photos of a recent gathering, how can faith based organizations use these platforms in serious and effective ways?
2. Convincing Leadership to Take Tech/Social Media Seriously: Oftentimes leadership in faith based organizations are unaware or uncomfortable with the role of technology in running a successful organization.  How can we help increase comfort, get the budgets we need, and build confidence among leadership and colleagues?  What should we be measuring, how to measure and present it?  What are your techniques, key performance indicators, and strategies to educate senior staff?
3. Balancing Shifting Roles – Who Manages the Web Site, Twitter Feed, Facebook Page? Who is the gatekeeper of outgoing messages and your organization, and how is that role changing in a social media age?  How much should program staff be empowered to update statuses or post other content?  Where is the balance, and how to evolve an organization’s culture for success in the immediacy-culture of today?  When and how should clergy be using these tools?  Who assists/supports/teaches clergy how to do it well?
4. Planning for the Future: Often we find ourselves behind the curve and trying to catch up. While we may not need to be on the cutting edge of everything, now is the time to start planning for the future.  Mobile is emerging quickly as a powerful tool – how can faith based orgs effectively make use of this new wave of potential, and what else should we be watching, planning for, innovating with, or inventing?

Share your experience!

Here are a few fun morsels to leaven liven up the holiday!

• Tweet the Exodus – fun, creative, and a cool model for role playing using Twitter, this is a season highlight! Check it out, even if you’ve never tweeted before – just follow along. As they say, “Relive the Exodus from Egypt, one tweet at a time. The story comes to life between March 16-29.” Check out the recent article, “Passover Meets Twitter,” in the Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2010.
  
• Projecting Freedom: Cinematic Projections of the Haggadah – 14 short videos corresponding to the individual steps of the Haggadah, offering visual commentary on the Passover story; a project of the Skirball Center for Adult Jewish Learning and the Covenant Foundation; just launched – look for it!
• Creative Seders – crowd source ideas on a Google doc! Take it out for a spin and add your own!
  
• Legacy Heritage’s Smart Board Jewish Educational Database: Pesach Lessons – teacher submitted, downloadable resources for use with SmartBoards
• Torah Aura’s Passover resources – games, activities, and resources for the holiday
  
• iMah Nishtanah – iPhone/ iPod touch app by Behrman House
• BabagaNewz’s Pesach Central – resources galore for kids, teachers, and parents
• MyJewishLearning: Passover – articles, recipes, seder ideas; don’t miss out on their Best Seder Ever contest – the deadline is March 22, 5pm ET – can’t wait to see the entries!
  
• Jacob Richman’s Hot List of Passover Sites – Jacob’s growing list of holiday resources, including links to games and fun stuff for kids of all ages
• JVibe’s Counting of the (H)Omer Calendar - a staple. a classic. a calendar.
• The Open Source Haggadah Project – create your own customized Haggadah
  
• The Four Questions in Klingon – an oldie but goodie, and yes, continues to prove that there is something for everyone
  

Not to be forgotten, of course, is last season’s fave, Moses is Departing Egypt: A Facebook Haggadah. Alas, the link seems to be itself departed – anyone have a current one?

Any other faves out there? Share yours!

Last week BBYO announced the launch of what I believe is an exciting, inventive tool available to engage teens in a meaningful Shabbat experience: Build a Prayer.  As a free, online tool the site is designed to connect youth with prayer and Shabbat like never before by allowing them to build and customize their own service.

At BBYO, I constantly see teens, advisors and staff members using unique spaces and creativity to offer relevant, powerful Shabbat services, a unique challenge since most teens have only experience services within their synagogue. This challenge is only made more difficult by the fact that most teens aren’t comfortable in a traditional siddur – they don’t know where services start and end, what to include, or what is “safe” to leave out.

To meet that need (and often times to save money), these worship services are typically guided by a teen-designed collection of songs, poetry and prayers that is compiled through an effort of photocopying, cutting and pasting together old song sheets and prayer book passages. As an organization, we saw the need to provide Jewish teens with an accessible place to explore prayer and its meanings – doing it online also happens to save some glue.

What makes this site so exciting is that it brings thousands-of-years-old prayers into a modern day realm that teens relate to. It is streamlined and easy to use. In a few clicks of a button, teens have a complete service in front of them in which they feel some much needed connections. While not every teen feels comfortable finding their way in a traditional siddur, Build a Prayer allows teens to put together a basic Shabbat service in a space they can easily navigate.

The site is designed for teens, educators, camp counselors, youth group advisors, JCC professionals, chavurah leaders – basically, anyone who is interested in putting together a Shabbat service in a formal or informal setting.  The site allows Hebrew, English and/or transliterated text to be compiled with one’s own pictures, prayers or poetry toward the creation of a custom “Prayer Service” which can be printed and used anywhere.

With help from www.myjewishlearning.org and a series of videos, users can learn more about the traditions and tunes behind specific prayers.  Additionally, a content library holds creative elements from individual prayer services as they are created.  Because this is an online resource, people can collaborate on the development of each service and comment on them once they are placed in the Build a Prayer library.

While recent studies show that participation in traditional religious experiences decline during the teen years, the desire to connect spiritually on one’s own terms remains strong.  Build a Prayer is another resource we are offering the Jewish community as a way to better connect with Jewish teens. Organizations looking to reach the teen audience should look at this as a tool to literally bring prayer to life.

Matt Grossman is the Executive Director of BBYO.  He began his career at Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life. Matt is also a member of the Darim Online board of directors.  Matt currently lives in Washington, DC where he works at BBYO’s international headquarters.

It’s the season of inclement weather closings. The time tested ways of notifying families of school closings, announcing it through the radio, tv, and a weather closing phone line, produce mixed results. An issue remained: families had to consider that the school might be closed to think to check in with these information sources. At our school, a sudden unexpected flood meant those with flooding basements thought to check if the school was impacted, but those on higher ground went on with their usual routine, never considering that the school might be closed.

A little voice rang in my head: Go to your audience.

With the traditional systems, families had to come to us.  How could we get the information straight to them? Email notifications helped, but with children to feed and dress, lunches to pack, and that pesky missing shoe to find, so many families keep the computer off during the early morning hours. Email again requires your audience to come to you. I considered a phone alert system, like those used by politicians, but they were expensive, requiring monthly subscriptions. And not everyone appreciates a 6am wake up call.

Text messaging to the rescue! Now parents receive a text message on their cell phones the instant the decision is made. We still maintain the traditional notification systems, but the text alert gets by far the most praise. From the parents’ prospective, it is direct and simple, and comes straight to them.  The information in on hand the moment they wake up.  For many they get the text before they go to bed, and can start planning accordingly for the next day.  From an administrative prospective, it is easy to use, time efficient, and at 2-5 cents per message, depending on the type of message and the plan you choose, quite affordable.

Sample text messages from this unseasonably snowy winter.

So those childhood memories of sitting by the radio, waiting as lists of school closings were announced are no longer. An easier way has finally arrived.
How to get started:

1. There are many text messaging alert options out there. We chose Ez Texting http://www.eztexting.com/
2. Sign up now. Don’t wait until you need to send a message. Advance preparations are critical.
3. Allow families to opt out. Some phone plans charge for text messages, so not everyone will want to be notified this way. We offered the chance to opt out in our weekly school newsletter and out of 130 people, we had 6 choose to opt out.
4. Consider your groups. In our case, there may be times we will want to notify just teachers of an emergency schedule change.
5. Load the cell numbers onto the site, grouping as appropriate.
6. Purchase credits.
7. When you are ready to send a message, simply log in, type your message (the number of characters is limited, so keep it short), and hit send.

And remember to add a cell phone field to every registration form, so you have the information to use.