by Nedra Weinreich | May 28, 2007 | Blog, Resources
For this Memorial Day edition of the Tip Jar, let’s pause for a moment to remember the soldiers who have given their lives so that we may be free.
Now let’s think about how we can use that freedom to make the world a better place. On to this week’s tips and thoughts…
- While I’m here just thinking about making the world a better place, my stepbrother Matthew is actually doing something about it. He’s about to fly off to Chad with Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) to set up a mental health program at one of the refugee camps full of people coming over the border from Darfur. We’re very proud of him, and if you’re as impressed as I am, please consider making a donation to MSF to support him and the work the organization does (when all the other aid organizations pull out of a location for safety reasons, they are often the ones who continue to stay). You can give via the charity badge on the right side of this blog, or if you are reading this via RSS or email, you can link to it here.
- Ed Maibach, Lorien Abroms and Mark Marosits have published their “people and places” framework for understanding how marketing and communications fit into an ecological view of public health. The framework identifies the attributes of people (as individuals, as social networks, and as communities or populations) and places that influence health behaviors and health. You can download it free from BioMed Central.
- If you have $500,000 or so, perhaps you should consider blimp marketing. MarketingSherpa gives the how-tos for using blimps in your marketing campaign (free access to the article ends soon). Imagine the possibilities for obesity prevention campaigns (“don’t be a blimp!”), drug prevention (“there are other ways to get high”) and animal protection (“save the whales!”).
- Did anyone catch the irony in John Edwards charging the taxpayer-funded University of California at Davis $55,000 for a speech about poverty last year? (Somehow Stanford got away with paying only $40,000.) Contrast this with the four members of Congress who decided to try to live on the $21 a week that food stamp recipients receive per person. Congressman Tim Ryan kept a blog during the week, and aside from having his PB&J confiscated by airport security and subsequently succumbing to the temptation of a pork chop and airplane peanuts, succeeded in experiencing at least partial poverty first-hand. Katya calls it “feeling the pain as a form of advocacy.”
- Nancy Schwartz points out New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine’s powerful new PSA for wearing seatbelts. In it he talks about how he lost half his blood, broke 15 bones and nearly died because he was not wearing his seatbelt in his recent crash. It’s a great example of using an effective and credible spokesman. I would love to know whether people who do not always wear their seatbelts find this spot as persuasive as I do.
- In Cocoa Beach, Florida today, lifeguards closed one of the beaches after having to perform 200 rescues in three hours due to strong rip currents. Wouldn’t you think that after about the tenth (50th? 100th?) rescue they would get the idea? This is a metaphor for so many health and social problems, I don’t even know where to start.
- How not to spend your marketing budget: I recently received a bunch of cookies as part of a pitch for PR software. They were lovely cookies, but because they were not kosher I couldn’t eat them (but my cleaning lady’s family sure enjoyed them). That wasn’t the egregious part though. Most of what I do is not public relations, and so PR software is not going to help me much. If they had done a little bit of research on my company, it would have been clear that I was not a good prospect for them. I hate to think of how many boxes of cookies they sent out to completely inappropriate companies. Makes me wonder about the quality of research that went into their PR database.
- Happy birthday to my blog friend Richard Kearns, who just turned 56. He celebrated in his own unique style, riding around town on the Poetry Bus and making stops to read his poems and advocate on behalf of people with AIDS. May you have many many more happy birthdays, Richard!
- And finally, a study that confirms what many of us who do research already suspected.
Photo Credit: seamusdidit
Technorati Tags: marketing, social marketing, doctors without borders, poverty, PR
by Nedra Weinreich | May 25, 2007 | Blog, Social Media
We’ve all had the flu. It hits us, knocks us out for a few days, maybe even a week. Then it goes away and we get on with our lives. But what if it weren’t so simple? What if many of the people we knew got sick, and some of them, especially our children and our older parents, actually died from it? People would have to stay home to take care of themselves and their loved ones or to try to avoid getting sick. Hospitals would be overloaded, and many of the health care workers would be out sick themselves. Food and other supplies wouldn’t get to the stores, businesses would have to shut down, schools would be closed. How would we get by when the institutions we rely on are inoperable and we can’t venture out of the house?
For those of us who were not around in 1918, or did not have relatives who died in that flu epidemic, this scenario is hard to imagine in this day and age. But the so-called bird flu (the H5N1 virus) has just been called the “greatest global health threat of the 21st century” by the Director-General of the World Health Organization. The likelihood of a global flu pandemic looks now to be a matter of when, rather than if.
The Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Michael Leavitt, is convening a leadership forum on pandemic preparedness on June 13, including leaders from every sector to discuss how to help Americans become more prepared for a possible flu pandemic. As part of this forum, the Department is also hosting a blog summit to extend the conversation before and after the forum in DC.
I’ve been invited to be one of the bloggers on the Pandemic Flu Leadership Blog, which will be active from May 22 to June 27, with a different question for discussion each week. I’m honored to be among contributors like Georges Benjamin, the Executive Director of the American Public Health Association; Pierre Omidyar, the Founder and Chairman of eBay and the Omidyar Network; Irwin Redlener, the Director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness; Greg Dworkin of the Flu Wiki; and many other distinguished professionals. Thank you to Beth Kanter for recommending me to be part of this effort.
My first post is now up on preparing for persuasion, where I talk about how we can use social marketing to encourage people to take action to prepare for a possible flu pandemic. Each of the previous posts before mine have garnered a slew of comments (38, 54 and 91 each so far!), and I expect the conversation to continue to gain steam as we move forward. I hope you’ll come by to read our posts and contribute your thoughts. This is a critical issue for us as marketers and communicators to be prepared for so that we can make sure that the rest of the country is prepared as well. Hopefully, like insurance, we’ll never need to take advantage of our readiness. But even if there is not a flu pandemic any time soon, there will, sadly, always be other disasters that those preparations can help mitigate.
Kudos to the Department of Health and Human Services for recognizing the value a blog can bring in terms of involving constituents, getting feedback and extending the conversation beyond the participants of the one-day forum. For more information on pandemic flu and how to protect your family and community, check out PandemicFlu.gov or the Flu Wiki.
Technorati Tags: pandemic flu, public health, hhs, blog
by Nedra Weinreich | May 21, 2007 | Blog, Social Marketing
More examples of unintended consequences from good intentions…
Forbes editor Rich Karlgaard writes about the ripple effect caused by Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, which launched the modern environmental movement and led to a ban on the pesticide DDT. DDT was accused of making eagles’ eggshells so fragile that they broke prematurely. But the termination of the use of DDT to control mosquito populations also led to a substantial increase in human deaths from malaria, which had mostly been kept under control to that point. According to the CDC, malaria now kills more than 800,000 children under age five every year (at least one million deaths total each year). Many of these deaths could have been prevented through widespread spraying of DDT. Clearly those who banned the substance were concerned with health and safety, but the effects ended up being disastrous for Subsaharan Africa.
On a smaller scale, but with a similar outcome of working against the very issue they are trying to solve, are Al Gore’s series of Live Earth concerts around the world in July. They are intended to raise awareness about global warming, but as far as I can tell, the only thing that will come out of them is a whole lotta greenhouse gases (though whether that’s a catastrophic problem is a separate issue). Yes, the event has a “green policy” for how they will try to minimize the environmental impact. But when you’re talking about nine concerts with 150 acts performing to at least half a million concert-goers and another couple of billion in the audience via various broadcast media, that’s a lot of trains, planes and automobiles, not to mention the electricity being used. I’m sure the concerts will be fantastic, and people will feel good about themselves that they are “doing something,” but I’m skeptical about sustained behavior change coming from people who are finally made aware of global warming because they went to the concert. If they are going to have any impact, the messages coming from the concert need to avoid screaming about how we’re all going to die and focus on just a few easy, concrete actions people can take. But perhaps having people stay home and make their own acoustic music would go further toward actually reducing carbon levels (though I don’t think anyone around here wants to hear me belting out “Roxanne”).
Technorati Tags: ddt, rachel carson, silent spring, forbes, live earth, al gore, global warming
by Nedra Weinreich | May 18, 2007 | Blog, Resources
- Everyone wants their cause marketing campaign to go viral. You put all the pieces into place — a compelling cause, easy call to action with a worthwhile payoff, a “tell-your-friends” feature — but for some reason it just doesn’t take off. That’s what happened to OurChurch.com, which created an AIDS Clickathon where sponsors donate 25 cents to help African children orphaned by AIDS, for each person who click a link. WebProNews did a case study to try to figure out why they only collected $1500 after five weeks. Sometimes even when you seemingly do everything right, a viral marketing campaign can fall flat. Read the viral marketing community’s analysis of what went wrong in the forum (and find out why viral marketing is like a fat midget with a wig on a unicycle).
- MarketingSherpa has a great article on how to execute a mobile marketing campaign (open access until 5/22 so go read it right now). It includes tips like taking into account your audience when determining which mobile approach to use — mobile text, mobile web or mobile video; taking advantage of the peer-to-peer messaging aspect; and integrating mobile with your online and offline marketing.
- Global Kids, a nonprofit that worked virtually with a group of youth in Teen Second Life last summer on their chosen issue of child sex trafficking, shares its best practices for nonprofits who want to work in Second Life. These include general tips (e.g., document your virtual work through photos/video to show other programs and funders who may not be in SL), tips for bringing a youth development model into Teen SL (e.g., create as many opportunities as possible for teens to express themselves through building things and designing avatars), and tips for workshop design and facilitation in SL (e.g., use real world content when addressing real world issues).
- Does the fact that HIV-positive former basketball star Magic Johnson looks so healthy make him a more or less effective spokesperson for HIV prevention? Eric at Classical Values talks about the “Magic Paradox” — that some people may adopt the misperception that AIDS is not so bad, or is even curable, given how good Magic looks after 15 years of living with HIV. On the other hand, he is a walking endorsement of the effectiveness of the multidrug cocktail he takes every day, and thus the importance of testing and subsequent treatment for those who may not know they are HIV positive. Depends how you spin it, I guess.
- The New York Times ran an article this week about the new acceptance of people with disabilities on television, with someone who has cerebral palsy winning NBC’s “Last Comic Standing,” people with one leg competing in “The Amazing Race” and “Dancing with the Stars,” and disabled actors on series playing just another character, rather than the tragic or heroic stereotype. In fact, Special Olympics International sent an open letter to Simon Cowell of “American Idol” thanking him for teasing an auditioner with a mental disability about his weight and not treating him differently as someone to be pitied. Both Fox and NBC are at work on pilots for comedies starring disabled actors. The more exposure people have to images of people with disabilities as “regular people,” the more acceptance and reduced stigma will follow.
- Advertising Age blows apart the stereotypes of online gamers with profiles of the varied types of people and the games they play. It’s not just for teens anymore.
- NetSquared’s conference is coming up in San Jose on May 29-30, and they’re looking for tech savvy, nonprofit savvy, and financially savvy people who will help them pick the three best projects of the 21 nonprofit finalists who are using “the social web for social good.” You will need to apply to participate in the conference this year.
Photo Credit: terpstra_brett
by Nedra Weinreich | May 17, 2007 | Blog, Technology
When countries engage in cyberwarfare, as Russia is accused of doing against Estonia, and terrorists are on trial for using the internet to incite holy wars, can we afford to have judges who are not technoliterate?
From yesterday’s story:
A judge admitted on Wednesday he was struggling to cope with basic terms like “Web site” in the trial of three men accused of inciting terrorism via the Internet.
Judge Peter Openshaw broke into the questioning of a witness about a Web forum used by alleged Islamist radicals.
“The trouble is I don’t understand the language. I don’t really understand what a Web site is,” he told a London court during the trial of three men charged under anti-terrorism laws.
Prosecutor Mark Ellison briefly set aside his questioning to explain the terms “Web site” and “forum”. An exchange followed in which the 59-year-old judge acknowledged: “I haven’t quite grasped the concepts.”
It’s not rocket science, people. Do we need a technoliteracy campaign to educate government officials who don’t even know that the internet is a series of tubes?
Photo uploaded by Lady, That’s My Skull
by Nedra Weinreich | May 16, 2007 | Blog, Communication
Have you ever seen a picture that gives you the chills? Makes you feel like someone kicked you in the stomach? Have you ever had to avert your eyes from a photo because it felt like you were seeing too deeply into another person’s soul?
While searching Flickr for a picture to illustrate an upcoming blog post, I stumbled upon a series of photos by a photographer named Tom Stone, who goes by the username stoneth. His black and white portraits of poor and homeless people riveted my attention. In some cases he shares the person’s story, in others the photo speaks for itself. Never discount the power of a picture to provide an emotional charge to an issue.
(homeless native american man, san francisco, 5/6/07)
father’s service
(homeless self described minister, sf, 12/13/06)
(homeless woman in tenderloin who’s suffered two nervous breakdowns, sf, 6/20/06)
(young person panhandling beside teddy bear, sf, 2/19/07)
Technorati Tags: photos, poverty, homeless, stoneth, tom stone
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. 
