As you all may know, Facebook has been constantly improving its features and applications to better satisfy its users. One big adjustment that happened over the summer was Facebook’s introduction of the vanity url.

For those of you who may be a little clueless to the term, here’s a little homework…

“A vanity URL is a domain name, created to point to something to which it it related and indicated in the name of the URL. A vanity URL is used to link to something that would be easier to remember than a random link or a link with a lot of numbers and letters.”

After being laid off from his third job working at an agency in Boston called Arnold, Erik Proulx – a 37 year old copywriter – decided that he had had enough. Putting his creative skills together, he began documenting stories of other laid-off execs. As more stories began to surface of people’s experiences of losing their jobs and having to find their own lemonade stand outside of corporate America, the concept for a movie called “Lemonade” was created.

I found this video on a blog, and I found it quite interesting. It makes you think about how weird and ineffective the Church can be in engaging the culture.

I think this video is a great conversation-starter.

Check out the video below…

Here’s what I know: Everybody – to some degree – is a marketer. Don’t believe me? Think about this… Whether it is through spreading the word about a product, a service or an event, or just sharing an opinion, everybody at some point has “promoted” something. Everybody has played the role of the marketer whether it was intentional or not. What I also know is that most of us are clueless of the power and influence we could have if we used marketing correctly.

However, it is common to see marketing executed incorrectly. One specific example of marketing-gone-wrong can be seen within the institution of the Church. For decades, the church has used marketing intentionally to promote ideas and events, as well as to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Everything from billboards, freestanding signs, brochures, websites, television commercials, radio ads, word of mouth, etc. have all been used to some degree by most churches in America.