On this lovely (almost) fall day and my 13th wedding anniversary (hooray!), here are the latest tips from the world of social marketing…

• The internet has become the primary source of health information in online US households, with 78.1% of adult web users finding it online, according to a Burst Media survey of 3,700 internet users. Women go online for health information more than men (83.5% vs. 72.4%) and 90.1% of women age 25-34 search for it online. The internet is the main source of health information for 45.1% of respondents, more so than health professionals (23.0%) or friends and family (12.9%). It’s more important than ever before to make sure your organization’s health information is search engine optimized on your website.

• Last year, my 9-year old son was spending a lot of time waddling around Club Penguin, the preteen virtual world recently acquired by Disney. Slate’s Michael Agger went penguin for a while to report back to the rest of us adults what cool things are going on over at the old iceberg. I’ve been searching for info on any social marketing activities that may be happening there, but all I could find is an internet safety initiative with NetSmartz (a partnership of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and Boys & Girls Clubs of America). Does anyone know of any other health or social issues promoted within Club Penguin (aquatic safety or avian flu prevention, perhaps)?

• You can watch a video of Michael Rothschild of the University of Wisconsin’s School of Business speaking about “An Introduction to Social Marketing: Considering Its Philosophy and Process as Input to Public Health Practice.” He’s one of the field’s big thinkers, so definitely worth watching.

• Former Apple marketing executive Steve Chazin has released a free ebook called Marketing Apple (pdf), which lays out the principles that have made Apple so successful. These include things like “Focus on what people do with your product, not what your product does” and “Do not define a new category: try to occupy shelf space that already exists in your prospect’s mind.” Good advice for social marketers as well.

• I guess someone took my advice about blimp marketing from a previous Tip Jar. On September 10, the American Blimp Corporation donated ad space on its blimp with a floating jumbotron to encourage people across Central Texas to do good deeds for strangers on the anniversary of 9/11 the next day.

• Do traffic rules remove a sense of personal responsibility for our actions on the road? The Dutch town of Makkinga (population 1,000) thinks so. Its traffic planners got rid of road signs, traffic lights, parking meters, stopping restrictions and sidewalks. The idea is to get drivers and pedestrians to interact in a considerate way that doesn’t rely on external rules, but on socially responsible behavior. I don’t think that would work here in Los Angeles, which was just rated the US city with the worst traffic congestion.

• When people are convinced to adopt a behavior that goes against the established social norms, chances are that they will not continue it for long. But as an opposite case study, the Wall Street Journal tells the story of Susan Taylor, a woman living in a subdivision of Bend, Oregon, who decided to make some changes to her lifestyle to combat global warming. Though her subdivision’s covenants prohibited it, she set up clotheslines in her backyard so she could hang her clothes to dry instead of using the electric dryer. She experienced disapproval from her neighbors and sanctions from the homeowner’s association, including threats of legal action. She’s been fighting it and trying to get them to come around, but now has to hang her clothes in the garage. She’s thinking about moving to a less restrictive neighborhood rather than having to compromise what she thinks is important.

• I’ve just come across the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World, which shows that many basic values correlate across countries’ cultures and can be expressed with just two different dimensions of values. On one axis is the range of traditional values versus secular-rational values, and on the other is survival versus self-expression. It’s interesting to see how the countries cluster together on the graph in groups that include Protestant Europe, Catholic Europe, former Communist countries, English-speaking, Confucian, South Asia, Latin America and Africa. And understanding these underlying values is key for social marketers to help determine what will best motivate people in each of these countries to adopt health or social change. For a more humorous representation of the world’s countries, see this map of the world according to Americans.

Photo Credit: terpstra_brett

Technorati Tags: health, internet, club penguin, social marketing, apple, map

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