Blog, For God’s Sake

Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on January 25th, 2010

According to a recent post on MSNBC, the Pope is encouraging priests to blog. This shows how “mainstream” social media has become. In my opinion, the Catholic Church has always been very aggressive in its marketing efforts. They have realized that people are online and that if you want to reach your stakeholders, you need to go where they are congregating (pardon the pun).

The Vatican has had a YouTube channel for a while and now, the Vatican is officially encouraging Priests to blog.

The Vatican has its own challenges in dealing with negative publicity, privacy and a…

Social Media, For God’s Sake!

Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on May 20th, 2009

It seems the head of communications for the Vatican has embraced social media. In a news release issued yesterday by the Catholics Communications Network, Fr Federico Lombardi SJ, Director of the Holy See’s press office, encouraged communicators to meet the challenge of using the Internet to engage positively to further the Gospel message of the Church.

This followed Pope Benedict XVI’s call for the Church to speak to “the digital generation” – and from what we can tell, pretty much the only way to do that is through technology. Now, full disclosure – I am not Catholic and…