It’s been a while since I’ve done one of my Tip Jar round-ups of interesting links and pieces of information here on Spare Change. If you follow my Twitter feed (@Nedra) or links I bookmark on Delicious, you may have seen these and many other useful items already; in fact, I see so many great resources every day that it’s hard to pick just a few to share.
Happy Mother’s Day to all of you who are blessed to have the world’s best and hardest job!
- Show your support for the effort spearheaded by Craig Lefebvre to finally get a professional social marketing association off the ground. Join the 100 or so people who have signed it so far by adding your name to the ePetition that lays out the process by which this organization will be formed. I’ve written about the need for a professional association, which has been a long time coming. Kudos to Craig and the others who took the reins to make this happen!
- The CDC’s 3rd annual National Conference on Health Communication, Marketing and Media will be happening in Atlanta, GA, August 11-13. I’m on the planning committee, and am very excited about the quality of the sessions we are going to be offering. Bill Novelli has just been confirmed as a keynote speaker, and we’ll be featuring other high-level speakers yet to be announced. Like last year, I will be offering one of the pre-conference half day workshops, this time on building a social media strategy. CDC eHealth Marketing staff will be conducting an introductory-level social media workshop as well. I hope to see you at the conference!
- Thanks to Andre Blackman of Pulse + Signal, I found the healthGAMERS blog that focuses on games designed to promote health. Some games focus on education, some are geared toward motivating behavior change, and others actually require healthy activities to occur as part of the game. Andre writes about the Stop Swine Flu game that makes it easy for kids to visualize how easily germs spread. If you are interested in learning more about this field, the Games for Health Conference will be happening June 11-12 in Boston.
- Speaking of flu, Advertising Age published an excellent article offering ten things marketers can learn from the CDC’s response to the H1N1 flu outbreak. These lessons include items like: empower those who want to help others, make search simple and accessible, syndicate the message and more. The CDC has done many things right in its communications efforts, and even though the efforts are still evolving, we can learn from and improve upon what we do.
- If you work for a marketing firm, you may be able to relate to the episodes of a new comedy web series called Groupthink. The short videos follow a pair of friends as they start their firm, invent new buzzwords, and conduct focus groups for wacky products.
- I’ve recently found some fun new blogs to follow for quick infographic and design insights:
- Chart Porn
- New Math
- Your Logo Makes Me Barf
- And some older favorites just in case you didn’t already know about these:
- Take a look at the Center of Excellence for Public Sector Marketing’s new Guide to Branding in the Public and Not-For-Profit Sectors. Branding is an often misunderstood concept, but this guide does a good job of explaining what branding is and how to build your program’s brand.
- If you want to use storytelling to get your messages out in an effective way online, A Storied Career blog (another new favorite of mine) posted an excellent round-up of a dozen web-based storytelling tools. I would also add to these a site that my 11-year old son uses regularly called Bitstrips, which makes it incredibly easy to create professional-looking comics.
- Gennefer Snowfield (@gennefer) interviewed me about social marketing on the TriplePundit blog. It’s a general introduction to social marketing and its relationship to cause marketing. Leave a comment and let me know what you think!
Photo Credit: Dain Sandoval
Nedra helps nonprofits and public agencies create positive change on health and social issues through social marketing and transmedia storytelling strategies at Weinreich Communications since founding the company in 1995. She helps organizations make a difference for the populations they serve by strategically designing programs that draw on state-of-the-art behavior change techniques, digital media approaches and the power of stories. 
