We had a meeting of the Ballou Channing District Board at First Unitarian in New Bedford tonight.<\/p>\n
“Hey,” said Don, one of the board members, “I was looking for directions on how to drive here, and I found your Web site. I like your Web site.”<\/p>\n
“Yeah,” I said, “we’ve been working on the church Web site for some time and….”<\/p>\n
“No, actually I found your<\/em> Web site first,” said Don. “When you type ‘new bedford uu’ into Google, your personal Web site comes up first.”<\/p>\n “Oh,” I said. “My<\/em> Web site comes up before the church<\/em> Web site?”<\/p>\n “Yep,” said Don. “Oh, and I liked your church’s Web site, too.”<\/p>\n Hmm… my<\/em> Web site isn’t supposed to come up before the church’s<\/em> Web site. Unless maybe I’m thinking about this the wrong way. Yesterday’s New York Times Magazine<\/em> has an article about how today’s pop musicians and singer-songwriters are building audiences with blogs and Web sites: “…this is a trend that is catalyzing the B-list, the new, under-the-radar acts that have always built their successes fan by fan.” Am I supposed to be marketing myself (and the church) the way the singer-songwriters are marketing themselves?<\/p>\n On the one hand, there is no doubt that Unitarian Universalism is a B-list religion and that Unitarian Universalist congregations don’t have the resources to mount massive media campaigns. On the other hand, I don’t think we can use the same online marketing techniques as the B-list singer-songwriters — creating a MySpace site, writing blogs, answering email, and then finding out which cities have enough fans to warrant staging a concert there. And I have to say I am a little surprised and uneasy that my personal Web site sometimes comes up on search engines before our church Web site — this blog is supposed to be a hobby for me, and I’m not sure I want it to become part of my job. I’m not quite sure what I think about all this. What do you<\/em> think?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We had a meeting of the Ballou Channing District Board at First Unitarian in New Bedford tonight. “Hey,” said Don, one of the board members, “I was looking for directions on how to drive here, and I found your Web site. I like your Web site.” “Yeah,” I said, “we’ve been working on the church […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marketing-church"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=884"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}