marketing

We use and recommend FeedBurner for RSS feed stats, podcasting, and the other helpful services it provides. However, one downside of redirecting your website's users to your FeedBurner feed is the fact that you have no control over FeedBurner's URL for your feed.

Say, for instance, you burned a feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/midwesternmac. If, in a year or two, you need to change the shortcut, or you would like to switch back to your own feed, you can cancel your FeedBurner account, but FeedBurner will only give you 30 days during which they'll redirect their shortcut to your new feed address.

Unfortunately, a lot of people won't switch their feed reader to your new URL, and you'll be stuck with a bunch of subscribers who unwittingly abandoned your RSS feed. Additionally, any feed aggregation services like Catholic News Live won't be getting stories from your site anymore unless they manually update your URL, since there will be no redirect after 30 days.

A few days ago, I noticed the latest Where is Matt? video on YouTube. In these videos, Matt is shown in various locations around the world, dancing in various exotic and urban locations, often with natives.

The videos are extremely simple, don’t require tons of professional equipment, crews, or even much more planning than “where to next?” Matt speaks quite a bit about how he’s made these videos, who’s helped sponsor him, and more on his site and elsewhere (he recently did an AMA (‘I am A’) on Reddit about his videos and life).

All of his videos are full of positive images, positive emotions, and seem to touch just about everybody who watches them.

Many Catholic PR people, journalists, and marketing specialists have told me that it’s hard to get people’s attention with positive news, and I agree with that, to a point.

It's not what you'd think...

CatholicVote.org has started running a new ad campaign on public transport vehicles for this year's Earth Day; so far these ads have been running in Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, and LA. You can help support the campaign by donating to CatholicVote.org.

Here's a video of some reactions filmed on the streets of Chicago:

I follow a lot of Twitter users among my accounts; probably somewhere around 400-500 different twitter-ers. Because of this, I often get some awesome links to tutorials, guides, how-tos, and general information; many links which I would miss otherwise, because they won't show up on reddit, digg, or other social link sites.

When Twitter users give high-quality, low-visibility links, users read their tweets and blogs more often than the users who spam their Twitter streams with tons of links to their own content. In my opinion, very few people can often and consistently write top-notch content on their own blogs. There are exceptions, but most bloggers are not professional writers, and therefore need to focus not solely on their own writings, but on others' as well.