A heads-up for congregational marketing

Cory Doctorow lays down an obvious marketing rule for 2024:

“If there was ever a moment when the obvious, catastrophic, imminent risk of trusting Big Tech intermediaries to sit between you and your customers or audience, it was now. This is not the moment to be ‘social first.’ This is the moment for POSSE (Post Own Site, Share Everywhere), a strategy that sees social media as a strategy for bringing readers to channels that you control….” (Here’s Cory’s blog post — just be aware the title of the post is Not Safe For Work.)

This applies to congregations, too. If you’re relying on Facebook as your central marketing strategy, that’s probably not a wise thing to do. Sure, it’s fine to use a Facebook account for marketing, but Cory’s point is that you really want to use that Facebook account to drive people to your own website. Which you control. So it cannot be censored, or walled off, or otherwise controlled by Big Tech.