Why The Pope Is Socially Active Anywhere?
Just when you thought you had enough Facebook Friends, devout followers of the Vatican can soon add the Pope as a friend. And after Oprah and Obama now the Pope is leading marketers the holey path towards digital and social marketing…
You won’t get an email saying Pope Benedict added you as a friend and you can’t “poke” him or write on his wall, but the Vatican is still keen to use the networking site Facebook to woo young people back to church.
A new Vatican website, Pope2you has gone live, offering an application called “The pope meets you on Facebook,” and another allowing the faithful to see the Pope’s speeches and messages on their iPhones or iPods.
The Vatican’s World Communications Day this Sunday is devoted to communicating the gospel with new technologies.
“We recognize that a church that does not communicate ceases to be a church,” said Monsignor Paul Tighe, secretary of the Vatican’s Social Communications department.
“Many young people today are not turning to traditional media like newspapers and magazines any more for information and entertainment.
“They are looking to a different media culture, and this is our effort to ensure that the Church is present in that communications culture.”
Users of the new site can select from more than a dozen “virtual postcards” with pictures of the pope and messages from him on faith, love and life specifically aimed at young people, and send them to other users.
The Catholic Church, which has seen vocations to religious life decline and church attendance fall, has already turned to the Internet.
Last January 2009 the pope became one of the oldest people to have his own YouTube channel.
The pope, known to write most of his speeches by hand, while his aides manage his forays into cyberspace, has even admitted that the Vatican does not use the Internet enough.
The Vatican got egg on its face in January when the pope admitted that, if the Church had surfed the web more, it might have known that a traditionalist bishop whose excommunication was lifted had for years been a Holocaust denier.
The new applications are currently available in Italian, English, Spanish, French and Dutch.
An overview of the Pope’s digital and social marketing milestones:
Watch the Pope on YouTube. Watch the pope on YouTube. Here the pope lets users from across the world get video news about the life of the Church and about Pope Benedict XVI, through the Vatican’s page on YouTube.
The video clips, provided by Vatican Radio and the Vatican Television Center, represent a new, quick open way through which one can educate oneself and get passionate about the happenings of the Church in the world, in a social and planetary perspective.
The WIKICATH. Let’s read the Pope’s Message together. The Pope has written to young people in a special way in his Message for the 43rd World Day of Communication.
The application Wikicath lets us read the message in a new way, interactive and hypertext, through a platform built in the WIKI style.
Wikicath has the commentary to the Pope’s Message and the deeper key concepts contained in Benedict XVI’s text.
Wikicath can be a useful tool for the personal reading of the Message and a supplement for the pastoral care in Christian communities.
Bring the Pope on your iPhone. Pope to you iPhone App. Follow Benedict XVI and the Church in the world through you iPhone and iPod Touch.
The H2Onews application for the iPhone and iPod Touch brings you timely, insightful news about the life of the Church in the world. In collaboration with the Vatican Television Center and Vatican Radio, H2Onews connects you with video and audio news from the Vatican.
Through H2Onews, the first video news application dedicated to the Catholic world, you can follow the travels and speeches of Benedict XVI, as well as key international ecclesiastical events.
The Pope meets you on Facebook. The application Pope2You for Facebook, lets you receive the messages of Pope Benedict XVI through the most important social network of the world.
So you can meet the Pope on Facebook, listen to his words, see his pictures, receive his messages of congratulations through “virtual postcards”.
The postcards can be sent to your “friends” on Facebook and the application can be shared with anyone. So we can create a close sharing network around our Pope.
In January 2009 the Pope warned people against “obsessive” Facebook usage.
Source: Reuters
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Why The Pope Is Socially Active Anywhere? – http://tinyurl.com/qq297z
Why The Pope Is Socially Active Anywhere? -: The Pope uses social marketing smarter than brand marketers. See hi.. http://tinyurl.com/qq297z