I Got to Meet my Blogging Idol.

My idol in the blogging world is Lisa Hendey. I absolutely love her CatholicMom.com blog and I listen to hear often on the Faith and Family Podcast. When I saw she was having a workshop at the Los Angeles Religious Education Conference, I jumped at the chance to be able to attend.
I will admit I was a bit giddy when I arrived at the workshop. My pastor was attending with me and I think he thought I was on something.
Her workshop was on Social Media Strategies for Today's Church, this was perfect because I seem to have taken on the role of Social Media Go To at my parish and within the ministry.
Lisa began her workshop with a Social Media Geek Smack down. Which I won and I received a CatholicMom.com tote bag and a Pope John Paul II prayer card. I was so excited, again Father thought I was weird.
I walked away with so many ideas that I will be able to incorporate in both my personal blog and also the blog I monitor for our ministry and I'm sure Father has a few projects he want me to take on for the parish.
The idea of creating a QR code to add to the church bulletin was brilliant. I'm planning to have one that links to our Youth and Young Adult Ministry website and I will post it in our bulletin and on posters I will put on the bulletin boards around campus.
She also talked about Twitter chats, which I hadn't done before and using hash tags in your tweets to create trends. I'm a little nervous to try those out but I'll get to that soon. She also shared how the new Google+ has a wonderful hangout feature which can be used for small faith sharing groups, bible study's etc.
One exciting idea I walked away with was having our parishioners check in on Facebook before mass starts, so this Sunday during hospitality I had everyone pull out their smart phones and asked them to check in at mass. Those who hadn't already turned off their phones joined right in. I let everyone know that we will be doing this each week and maybe I'll have them check in with fun status's like. "Attending the best mass ever at .......".
Lisa was very gracious and spoke with me at the end of the workshop. I gave her my business card that also had my blog address on the back and she posed for a picture. Later she asked me to be friends on Facebook.

While at the congress I also purchased two of her books A Book of Saint's for Catholic Moms and The Handbook for Catholic Moms.  I excited to get started reading them. They are at the top of my reading piles.

My next Congress post will be about the awesome talk I heard from Matthew Kelly. 

Until next time,

Karri