Social Marketers Gone Wild


Call it my blogging Spring Break. For my own sanity and to be able to keep up with my analog work and personal obligations, I had to take a hiatus. But I’m ready to get back into the blogging groove.

Social Marketing University, which I led last week in DC, was a great success. The participants were amazing and ended up being a wonderful resource for each other. I was able to meet several people in person whom I only knew via their blogs or through ongoing correspondence, which was a treat. We were lucky to have as guest speakers Ed Maibach, the director of George Washington University’s Public Health Communication and Marketing Program, and Rachel Greenberg, a veteran social marketer who shared a case study from the National Diabetes Education Program. Each time I offer this training, I learn more about how to improve it for the future. This time, the evaluations made it clear that the participants fell into two groups — beginning social marketers who wanted the basics on up, and established marketers who were looking for more advanced training on applying their knowledge to the unique needs of health and social issues. While I thought I had made it clear on the information page that this is a more basic introductory level training (e.g., with quotes from past participants like “This would be a GREAT intro course.” and “I think it is a great training for people who are new to social marketing.”), it’s clear that I will need to make that more explicit and consider offering a more advanced track.

Being in Washington DC last week was wonderful and it was great to be back where I had started my social marketing career. My family was with me because we were also there for a family event the following weekend, and we had a great time in the balmy weather on Tuesday paddleboating in the Tidal Basin. We were there in the pause of the cherry blossom buds just before they exploded a couple of days later (which I sadly only had a chance to see in pictures online). There’s no place like DC — I miss feeling like I’m living in the center of the world. But I do not miss feeling like my toes are so cold that they are going to fall off, so I have to keep reminding myself why I came back to Los Angeles.

Speaking of living in Los Angeles, today I had a film crew at my house shooting a TV show (NOT “Social Marketers Gone Wild!” as Michael Gibbons suggested to me earlier). More about that in the next post.

Photo Credit: •pet

Off to DC for Social Marketing University

I’ve been a bad, bad blogger. This past week has been so busy with getting ready for Social Marketing University and 200 other things that I had to put the blog on hold. Now I’m about to leave for DC to get the event set up. We are completely sold out! I’m looking forward to meeting all of you who will be there. We even have a couple of people coming from Kenya.

It’s unlikely that I will have much time until next week to post again, but I just wanted to let you all know I haven’t dropped of the planet. Have a great week – I know I will!

The Tip Jar – 3/16/07

Boy that week went by fast – it’s already Friday again! Here are this week’s odds and ends:

  • Believe it or not, yet another suicide-themed ad had to be yanked from TV. Washington Mutual’s commercial showed a group of WaMu’s competitors poised atop a building ready to jump because they can’t compete with the free checking. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention has been busy lately. Apparently CareerBuilder has another ad with this theme that finished running for the quarter, but it plans to bring the ad back in September. Perhaps they should think about laying that ad to rest and going in a different direction in the Fall.
  • NBC will be showing a TV reality series version of the old flour baby (or egg or sugar baby) teen pregnancy prevention exercise. Baby Borrowers will follow teen couples as they live together for the first time and have to care for a real infant, then a toddler, a pre-teen, a young teenager and even a senior citizen. Richard McKerrow, the executive producer, said:
    “We really want the young people in the series and indeed everyone who watches to appreciate that parenting is one of the hardest and most important tasks you’ll ever undertake. We also want people to think carefully about when they want to have children and with whom they want to have children.”

    A great idea. Now who’s going to volunteer to let the show borrow their kids?

  • LA’s Homeless Blog is a great example of how an organization can get its issue out there with a blog that ties together news, commentary and calls to action. The blogger,Joel John Roberts, is the CEO of PATH Partners and People Assisting The Homeless.
  • All in all, it’s just another brick in the… toilet? I can get behind this video that features a Pink Floyd remix to promote ways of conserving energy and water. The video does not, however, feature any giant worms, marching hammers or answer the question of why you can’t have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat. (via Believing Impossible Things)
  • Apparently, there’s only so much self-restraint we can expect from a person. Gretchen Rubin of the Happiness Project shared information on a study that showed that when people performed a task requiring self-restraint, they were less likely to practice self-control on the next activity. Does that mean we need to help people prioritize what to exercise self-control over, or that we reduce our expectations for what is realistic in various contexts?
  • Dr. Steve Beller, on his Trusted.MD blog, has been running a series about how people develop their health-related beliefs, from a psychological point of view. The relationship between beliefs, emotions and behaviors is a strong one, and we need to address both beliefs and emotions to be able to bring about changes in behavior. Information is often not enough to motivate someone to change; we have to find the emotional connection that forms the trigger. Education is necessary but not sufficient in this process.
  • Sorry, Twitter users, but I am afraid that this latest fad is just another sign of the decline of our collective attention span. I know a lot of bloggers are going gaga over it, but by constantly updating the answer to the question “What are you doing right now?” I just don’t see how you can actually get anything done, let alone enjoy it. I never even bought a videocamera to record the kids because I believe Heisenberg’s principle applies to life as well as particles; the act of observing something can change its direction. I would rather enjoy the moment than have to worry about documenting it. Maybe I’m just weird.

Speaking of not documenting things in favor of enjoying life, I’m going to have to beg your patience for the next couple of weeks, as my blogging will likely be sparse. My wonderful sister is coming to visit from Israel and then I will be in DC for Social Marketing University. Though the way time flies lately, my absence will be over in a flash.

Photo Credit: cackhanded

The Meaning of Definitions

Richard Kearns, the poet-activist at aids-write.org, writes about two issues that at first seem entirely unrelated: the CDC’s description of AIDS, and the designation of Daylight Saving Time. After his requisite lovely poem, he writes:

seventeen years ago i belonged to a la-based gay men’s HIV-positive ASYMPTOMATIC support group. ASYMPTOMATIC was the functional word: it distanced us as far as we could get from AIDS. it was having it without having it. fear and shame and stigma captured in a moment of language.

had a love there whom i’ll call jerry, a blonde, blue-eyed hunk with fifty-two t-cells and a kiss that kept me alive. fifty-two t-cells made him happy. fifty was the cutoff. he didn’t have AIDS. he was ASYMPTOMATIC. he felt fine. he felt more than fine. i must agree he felt more than fine.

then came the day.

in an effort to make federal funding available to the shockingly growing national population of HIV-infected individuals, the us center for disease control (cdc) revised its AIDS “portrait” to include — among other things — persons with fewer than 200 t-4-cells. the cdc made this announcement on a monday. our support group met on tuesdays.

jerry came to the meeting in tears.

last week, he’d been free as a bee can fly, an HIV-positive ASYMPTOMATIC person. this week, he had AIDS. nothing else had changed. and everything.

that was the day jerry began to die. i will simplify the rest of his story and tell you he lasted about another year.

Later, Richard talks about the concept and history of Daylight Saving Time:

the us law by which we turn our clock forward in the spring and back in the fall is known as the uniform time act of 1966. the law does not require that anyone observe daylight saving time; all the law says is that if we are going to observe dst, it must be done uniformly.

while it’s not new to our lifetimes, the notion of dst has been around for most of this century and earlier. in the tradition of divinely-appointed kings who could not halt the tides by their bidding, it is an idea new with democracy, itself an exercise in social justice: an informed constituency can command the sun’s passage…

a democracy can command the time, it can alter the fall of daylight.

The implicit point that Richard makes with this juxtaposition of concepts is that definitions are powerful. The words we use to describe something can mean the difference between health and disease, between light and darkness. Jerry’s health status was exactly the same before and after the CDC’s pronouncement, but the new definition of a healthy t-cell count was essentially a death sentence. The sun is still in the same position in the sky as it would have been, whether we call it 6:00 or 7:00, but we can delay nighttime simply by changing the declared time.

Giving a name to something can also change its essence and give us power over it. People who were once thought to be getting senile as part of normal aging are now known to have Alzheimer’s Disease. Someone who hears nonexistent voices is not crazy but suffering from schizophrenia. Kids who once might just have been considered eccentric may now be diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome.

Beyond identifying and naming real patterns of phenomena, we can also use changes in definitions to reposition something that might be considered negative into a positive. I remember a handout I received once from a parenting workshop that showed how we could reframe what might be perceived as a negative trait in our children as a positive: so kids went from being “stubborn” to being “persistent,” “anxious” to “cautious,” “aggressive” to “assertive,” the quiet child is “thoughtful” and the chatterbox is “highly verbal.” All these characteristics that might drive parents crazy when the children are young could lead to future success as an adult if directed appropriately. Therapists often use this technique of relabeling negative characteristics to reflect an underlying strength and building on that in a positive way.

Conversely, smoking went from something that was a symbol of coolness to being a proxy for the tobacco industry’s desire to enslave teens in a lifelong addiction. Bronzed skin went from being a “healthy tan” to “sun damage.” The current battle over the definition of marriage is another example of the power of semantics to affect people’s everyday lives.

Words and their socially agreed-upon definitions often have implications beyond the dictionary. We can try to change those meanings through social marketing and harness the power of words to bring about positive health or social change.

Photo Credit: wiccked

The Tip Jar – 3/9/07

Let’s see what we find in the Tip Jar this week, shall we?

  • Suzanne Hawkes gives a great overview of the different types of approaches that can be used to bring about social change. She divides it out into direct service, social marketing/education, business/consumerism, policy advocacy (i.e., government and corporate), and politics (i.e., via elections). While I generally think about it in terms of education vs. persuasion vs. coercion, Suzanne’s more detailed breakdown would be useful in thinking about how to use each approach within a particular campaign.
  • When your audience has a low literacy level, the use of pictures becomes critical in your print communications. The National Institute for Literacy brought in guest speakers Len and Ceci Doak and Dr. Peter Houts to lead a e-mail-based discussion on Using Pictures in Health Education on its Health and Literacy Discussion List. The discussion is rich with information on everything from where to find free health-related clip art to why to draw stick figures with thicker lines in Africa (very thin people are thought to have AIDS) and how to do your own photo shoots. (via Medical Writing Blog)
  • Yet another ad has been pulled in response to criticism from advocacy groups. Dolce & Gabbana’s ad showing a bare-chested man pinning a woman down by her wrists while other men look on elicited condemnation from Amnesty International, the National Organization for Women and others for its implied depiction of violence. High fashion advertisers have already gone so far in pushing the lines of acceptability, they now seem to feel they have to cross the line to stay cutting-edge.
  • Will a machine be able to do a better job at predicting intentions to perform a behavior than we’ve been able to glean from self-reported data?
  • Those who disparage Second Life users as pasty chair jockeys in their first life may be surprised to find out about Moriash Moreau‘s contraption that lets him physically walk around the virtual world on his actual feet:
    Moreau took a second-hand treadmill (surplus from a fitness no-longer-enthusiast), a second hand USB keypad, and assorted wiring and contact switches, and wired up an input device where he could make his avatar walk by, well actually walking, using some press buttons to steer (his blog contains all the construction details.) Moreau performs regular walks around Second Life, exploring on foot, but it doesn’t stop just there.

    Moreau has found a way to contribute to others. Moreau is going to walk in the Second Life Relay for Life this year. His avatar is going to walk the course, and Moreau will be doing all the leg-work. Literally.

    It certainly helps to be a technogeek when you have an idea like this and can just take out the old tools and cobble it together. I can see something like this taking off as SL becomes voice enabled, when someone in Los Angeles can exercise alongside a friend in London and carry on a chat while doing so.

  • Don’t worry about finding the influential people when trying to bring about social change, but rather look for the easily influenced people, says Duncan Watts about the commonly accepted model of influencers outlined by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point.
  • Hospitals are producing professional-looking TV health news segments that are being used as-is by local news programs without any disclosure of the source of the material. This is not a new development in the field of PR, but it seems to be more common now among hospitals.
    It’s the product of a marriage of the hospitals’ desperate need to compete for lucrative lines of business in our current health system and of TV’s hunger for cheap and easy stories. In some cases the hospitals pay for airtime, a sponsorship, and in others, they don’t but still provide expertise and story ideas. Either way, the result is that too often the hospitals control the story. Viewers who think they are getting news are really getting a form of advertising. And critical stories—hospital infection rates, for example, or medical mistakes or poor care—tend not to be covered in such a cozy atmosphere. The public, which could use real health reporting these days, gets something far less than quality, arms-length journalism. (via Harvard World Health News)

    This is yet another indictment of the mainstream media’s “journalistic standards.”

  • Just a warning… I received an e-mail today that started:
    Hi,
    I’m Dr Brown Mcknight, born in Tetax,live in England.I love making Friends from all around the world, most especially honest individuals.I work in my organisation as a Youth director and also for the U.N.H.C.R as Staff in the refugee department, and also served the World vision as director to Canada two years ago.. I Would love to meet you in person to know how best we can uplift the plight of children and youths in the less developed countries such as Africa and Asia and see how best we can make the world a better place to live in.

    It is my pleasure to tell you that there is a youth Conference coming up soon both in the United State and Spain respectively. .Theme-“anti-terrorism and child labour”.This conferences are Free, the Sponsors will be responsible for your air ticket, both in the United State and Spain and the Conference committee will also fax a Letter to the America embassy within your country,so do not worry about Visa, This conference is sponsored annually by UNICEF,USAID, WHO,UNESCO, the United Nations Security Council and First Ladies of Presidents of United Nations…

    It sounded somewhat suspicious but also slightly plausible — I often receive strange sounding but legitimate e-mails from people in other countries whose first language is not English (though I have no idea where “Tetax” is). I did a search on the organization, called the “Global Youth Centre,” and found out that this is a scam along the lines of the Nigerian 419 spam. Apparently people who sign up for the nonexistent conference are directed to send money via Western Union for the hotel. Just wanted to make sure you all are aware of this latest spam iteration, which I hadn’t seen before.

Photo Credit: Kaija

The Imaginable Warmness of Being Sacrum

Here’s an excerpt from my post over at the Marketing Profs Daily Fix today:

It can be tough to find a job in the advertising biz. Especially if you’re in Germany and want to work in the “British Empire or Americas.” So what do you do? You might start a blog about your job search and reach out to other bloggers, like Sacrum has done. Who is Sacrum? In his own words:

I am Sacrum. I am European man with skills in advertising. I should be in advertising yes? Yes! But I am not and this is a shame. Shame is worry, shame is darkness. I must have light! So I must get in to funky advertising agency. And this I try. Here my blog. I have my own pencils.

The quest of this advertising Borat (sans the dirty jokes) has all the trappings of a great Hollywood story: An endearing underdog sets out to land a job at a major ad agency against all odds.

For the rest of the story, with an interesting twist, head over to the Marketing Profs Daily Fix blog. I am sending you warmness!

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