Blogging, Email Newsletters and Facebook Questions
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Hi there,
We currently have a blog using Concrete's default Composer on our Concrete website. We also have a Facebook account that we have not linked up with anything. In addition to these, we send out a quarterly email newsletter, that we then manually copy into a blog post on the website at the same time as sending it out via manual emails with BCC (we have about 1200 customers signed up for our newsletter). We also manually "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" customers with an excel sheet list.
I'd like to integrate all this somehow. I've been playing with Mailchimp - trying to use the RSS Feed Campaign tool, but I've only been able to get it to pull the title and date of the posts, not the content. I've also been looking at the RSS Feed Creator Add-on (not sure how much better this is than the default page list block RSS feed), Pro Blog Add-on and Wordpress Add-on.
Here's what I would like to accomplish:
+One easy place to create a blog post on our website with pictures, video and/or slideshows.
+Blog post is automatically sent to a Facebook post on our page and sent in an email to our newsletter subscribers.
+Customers can subscribe or unsubscribe automatically on their own.
Bonus would be: +Letting customers decide what content to receive in their email (ie: all blog posts, quarterly newsletter only, software updates, sales, etc)
Any help or direction is appreciated. I'm very new to RSS - I'm not quite sure still how it works.
Thanks!
Amanda
We currently have a blog using Concrete's default Composer on our Concrete website. We also have a Facebook account that we have not linked up with anything. In addition to these, we send out a quarterly email newsletter, that we then manually copy into a blog post on the website at the same time as sending it out via manual emails with BCC (we have about 1200 customers signed up for our newsletter). We also manually "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" customers with an excel sheet list.
I'd like to integrate all this somehow. I've been playing with Mailchimp - trying to use the RSS Feed Campaign tool, but I've only been able to get it to pull the title and date of the posts, not the content. I've also been looking at the RSS Feed Creator Add-on (not sure how much better this is than the default page list block RSS feed), Pro Blog Add-on and Wordpress Add-on.
Here's what I would like to accomplish:
+One easy place to create a blog post on our website with pictures, video and/or slideshows.
+Blog post is automatically sent to a Facebook post on our page and sent in an email to our newsletter subscribers.
+Customers can subscribe or unsubscribe automatically on their own.
Bonus would be: +Letting customers decide what content to receive in their email (ie: all blog posts, quarterly newsletter only, software updates, sales, etc)
Any help or direction is appreciated. I'm very new to RSS - I'm not quite sure still how it works.
Thanks!
Amanda
Ah, ok... Yeah, Facebook's an odd one (lol at Zucker-butt). My boss created an account back when it was becoming a hot item. The problem was our current market is much older and most of them don't use Facebook, so we pretty much dropped the ball on keeping it updated. We now have a new product geared toward the younger crowd, but I think you're right about FB going downhill. Anyway - FB is not a big concern - I kind of threw that in there because it seemed like an easy one.
So about ProBlog - I really like the idea of having drafts that are not public until you release them! A lot of the other features for the product though I'm not sure how they work or if we'd even be able to utilize them.
Would you happen to have any ideas as to why I can't get content to show in the MailChimp RSS campaign? This is where I'm not sure how it works - does an RSS feed creator produce some kind of identifiable tag? If I'm using a Content block in Concrete - maybe it doesn't have the right tag for content?
The merge tag I'm using in Mailchimp is supposed to pull the full everything, so...
Do you think ProBlog would be able to fix this? Maybe ProBlog in combination with RSS Feed Creator?
Thanks for your reply - I appreciate it!
So about ProBlog - I really like the idea of having drafts that are not public until you release them! A lot of the other features for the product though I'm not sure how they work or if we'd even be able to utilize them.
Would you happen to have any ideas as to why I can't get content to show in the MailChimp RSS campaign? This is where I'm not sure how it works - does an RSS feed creator produce some kind of identifiable tag? If I'm using a Content block in Concrete - maybe it doesn't have the right tag for content?
The merge tag I'm using in Mailchimp is supposed to pull the full everything, so...
Do you think ProBlog would be able to fix this? Maybe ProBlog in combination with RSS Feed Creator?
Thanks for your reply - I appreciate it!
I certainly can't answer all your questions but I've had good luck feeding an RSS feed from a page tohttp://www.twitterfeed.com and they post to Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin.
I share Chad's concerns over Facebook privacy. I have several youth sports sites where I'm trying to get the kids and the parents to stop using Facebook for 100% of their communication. Coaches and Executives often ask the kids for their personal information for registration purposes and the kids freely post that information to their public Facebook group. I finally got their attention by showing them some Google searches that contained this personal information. Posting to Facebook has become so ingrained in their habits that they can't stop. The kids never check their email anymore and so any communication system based on email is useless. I'm working on a texting application but lots of the younger kids don't have cellphones (yet). There seems to be only one sure fire way to communicate and that's through Facebook. Ugh!
I share Chad's concerns over Facebook privacy. I have several youth sports sites where I'm trying to get the kids and the parents to stop using Facebook for 100% of their communication. Coaches and Executives often ask the kids for their personal information for registration purposes and the kids freely post that information to their public Facebook group. I finally got their attention by showing them some Google searches that contained this personal information. Posting to Facebook has become so ingrained in their habits that they can't stop. The kids never check their email anymore and so any communication system based on email is useless. I'm working on a texting application but lots of the younger kids don't have cellphones (yet). There seems to be only one sure fire way to communicate and that's through Facebook. Ugh!
Ok, well it looks like I could easily pull links for twitter or facebook. I'll look at that later - Thanks guys. :)
Does anyone have experience with Mailchimp? An automatic email newsletter with the blog content is the most important feature I'm looking for. I don't see any add-ons in Concrete to do this... Mailchimp seems to be the best platform I've found to do this.
http://blog.mailchimp.com/rss-to-email-tutorial/...
I can only get it to pull the title and date. I can't even get it to pull author (just says anonymous) or any content whatsoever. I'm using the merge tag that's supposed to pull every possible item... I've also tried pulling individual items with different merge tags... I think there's something about Concrete's Blocks that don't get registered as items in the RSS feed. Like they're not formatted correctly, or they can't be read...
Does anyone have experience with Mailchimp? An automatic email newsletter with the blog content is the most important feature I'm looking for. I don't see any add-ons in Concrete to do this... Mailchimp seems to be the best platform I've found to do this.
http://blog.mailchimp.com/rss-to-email-tutorial/...
I can only get it to pull the title and date. I can't even get it to pull author (just says anonymous) or any content whatsoever. I'm using the merge tag that's supposed to pull every possible item... I've also tried pulling individual items with different merge tags... I think there's something about Concrete's Blocks that don't get registered as items in the RSS feed. Like they're not formatted correctly, or they can't be read...
We have not implemented Facebook for a few reasons though:
1) Zucker-butt can't make his mind up as to how advertising is working, and we honestly don't support facebook for privacy reasons. Many many people we know are feeling the same way. Facebook is going downhill fast.
2) twitter has a facebook app. So, in theory, posting to twitter from ProBlog should also link/post to facebook in said case.
3) we have not been able to ascertain what the greatest need/want is regarding facebook: timeline? note? post to page? all of the above? I still can not get anyone to give me good feedback on that.
We'd be happy to look at customizing ProBlog for you. Some of what you want may necessitate custom development work though.
You can place an RFQ here:http://goradiantweb.com/contact/free-quote/...
Having said that, I really think you can do what you want with just MailChimp RSS and ProBLog/Twitter/Facebook
ChadStrat