by Nedra Weinreich | Jan 29, 2007 | Blog, Professional Development
Looks like I picked the right career after all. I just came across US News & World Report’s guide to the best careers of 2007. The feature includes a list of the most overrated careers, one of which is “advertising executive.” After shooting down the myth that the ad biz is glamorous (McMann & Tate and D&D notwithstanding), and revealing the cold hard reality and disillusionment of agency life, US News reveals their recommendation for an alternative career: social marketing.
Too bad for all you nonprofit managers. US News thinks your job is overrated and suggests you find a career in the private sector that will enable you to donate time or money to your favorite nonprofit. Same difference, right?
Photo from imdb
Technorati Tags: career, nonprofit, marketing, advertising, US News
by Nedra Weinreich | Jan 28, 2007 | Blog, Communication
Last night’s Saturday Night Live was its usual not that funny self. It was a rerun from November, but I hadn’t seen it the first time. Especially unfunny was a sketch that was supposed to be an infomercial for Dr. Archibald Bitchslap’s marriage counseling method (video). I’ll bet you can guess from the name what the method entails. Here’s how the show’s website describes the sketch:
Our host Samantha Hawkins discusses an exciting new “interactive” way to solve relationship problems. She’s joined by couples Pete and Donna Longhorn, and Debra and Jody Preston.
The Longhorn’s problems stem from Donna’s spending addiction, and the Preston’s problems grew out of Jody’s incessant lying about “working late nights”.
Samantha introduces the man responsible for the revolutionary new technique that solved the couples’ problems, Dr. Archibald Bitchslap, founder of the Bitchslap Method.
Samantha runs a sample of the method demonstrated on the 10-DVD set: a montage of images of Samantha and Dr. Archibald Bitchslap employing the Bitchslap Method forcibly and verbally on a series of compliant mannequins. Dr. Bitchslap mentions that along with the 10-DVD set, you also receive a companion booklet: Bitchslap Your Way to a Successful Marriage.
I’m sure they didn’t mean to make light of domestic violence, but their satire fell flat to the point of being offensive (and I’m not easily offended).
Contrast this with Borat‘s brilliant use of satire to highlight the absurdity of the beliefs of antisemites and misogynists. I know many people were offended by this movie too, but I think it succeeded precisely because Sacha Baron Cohen exaggerated the character and situations to the point of absurdity, which made clear that he was making fun of those beliefs. (The fact that the laughably antisemitic Borat was actually speaking fluent Hebrew instead of Kazakh only added to the satire for me.)
The ultimate example of satire is Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. Many at the time took his essay seriously due to its serious tone, thinking that he was actually proposing that poor Irish families sell their children to be eaten to raise money for the family. By exaggerating this normally ridiculous idea to the point of even suggesting how the children could be prepared (“I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.”), Swift gets in his real digs at landlords and political economists, exposing the state of the poor in Ireland.
So, what did SNL do wrong? Sadly, the Bitchslap method is used way too often in reality, with no humor involved. This sketch just reinforced the idea that this method works, without mocking who use violence against their partners or using absurdity to make an underlying point. It was just too close to reality for comfort.
Technorati Tags: saturday night live, snl, satire, borat
by Nedra Weinreich | Jan 28, 2007 | Blog, Professional Development
Registration for Social Marketing University is in full swing, and so far we have what looks like an amazing group of participants. In case you missed the announcement, it will be in Washington, DC on March 28-30. Just a reminder that the early registration deadline is this Wednesday, January 31st, and you can save $100 off the registration fee by signing up before then.
If you’re a social marketer in the DC area, consider joining us for the Next Generation Social Marketing Seminar on the morning of March 30th. We’ll be talking about how to use some of the newer tools available online to reach your audience.
I would love to see you there!
by Nedra Weinreich | Jan 24, 2007 | Blog, Miscellaneous
It’s time for a party — Spare Change is one year old today!! Boy, how the year flew by, and look how much it’s grown. I just want to pinch its cheeks. Here’s the blog’s vital stats:
241 posts
>50,000 visitors from 176 different countries
~200 feed subscribers
When I started this, I didn’t know whether I would have enough interesting things to say each week or whether people would care what I had to say. But look! You’re here! So, thank you for giving me the honor of your time, comments, and in many cases, friendship. I truly feel that I am part of a community, and even though we may not ever meet in person (though I hope we will!), I’m glad we’re connected through the ether.
I’m going to have fun today and share with you some of my favorite blog posts from the past year that you may not have seen. These are presented in order, according to when they were published. You can also take a look at the list of the most popular posts in the sidebar to make sure you don’t miss the biggies like the CDC’s Second Life, Marketing to Introverts and others. So, without further ado, here is the Spare Change Retrospective:
- On Challenges, Change and Cellos – How I learned humility along with the cello, and the social marketing lesson that some skills do not always come naturally. (Postscript: Finally, after about an additional year of lessons from the time I wrote this post, my playing is starting to sound more like a cello and less like a dying goose.)
- Tune in Tomorrow: Soap Operas for Social Marketing – I’m fascinated by the possibilities in both broadcast and new media for providing education and role modeling for health and social issues.
- Why Can’t Social Marketers Sustain a Professional Association? – I’m still wondering about the answer to this question. I think we have a critical mass of people who would be interested, and the technology exists to connect ourselves fairly cheaply. The profession already has a listserv, conferences, and an academic journal – it should just be a matter of formalizing alliances and putting a membership infrastructure in place. We need a unified voice to speak out about issues like…
- Dueling Social Marketing Definitions – Jupiter Research’s misuse of the term “social marketing” is just the tip of the iceberg, with more and more people using the term to refer to social media marketing or social network marketing. Just since this post was written, I find myself having to clarify more often which type of social marketing I work in (whereas people used to have no clue what the term meant, now they think they know what it means but are incorrect). Also see the handy chart I made to help you tell them apart.
- Marketing to Terrorists – The day after the State of the Union address, this continues to be relevant. An apparently well-meaning funder created a PSA designed to appeal to the humanity of potential suicide bombers and thereby dissuade them from their mission, but ended up reinforcing just how effective bombs are in destroying a street full of infidels. Nice thought, wrong strategy.
- Branding for Social Marketers, Part 1 and Part 2 – A series on what branding is and how it is used in social marketing.
- Dove Soothes Our Fragile Egos – Unless We Are in China – A look at the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty in the US and in China, with an interesting cultural twist.
- Friendly Fire: Stigma & Social Marketing Redux – Recent social marketing campaigns addressing HIV/AIDS have generated a backlash among the target audience. How could this be avoided?
- Search Engine Marketing Fun – I cracked myself up while looking at the search engine phrases that people used to find my blog. Hopefully you are as amused as I was.
- Metamorphosis – Unless you are brand new to my blog, you probably saw this post from around New Years. But I wanted to give you an update on the butterflies. A couple of weeks ago, on a very windy but warm day, we let all the butterflies go that were able to fly away. Two were left, one of which had one good wing and one shriveled one, and the other that had two defective wings. We became the butterfly nursing home, feeding them sugar water and orange slices, and sadly, the one with only one bad wing died. My 6 year old daughter buried it in the dirt outside and when asked if she had any words she’d like to share, said with a pout, “I wish it didn’t die.” The other butterfly, whom we dubbed “Crumplewings,” has been going strong and is still alive, despite the fact that pieces of its wings keep falling off and it now has about one-third of one wing and half of the other. I’m thinking of changing its name to Tenacious B. This is one persistent butterfly – we could all learn a lesson from it about not giving up.
Are there any posts I didn’t mention that you particularly like? Let me know in the comments.
Here’s to the coming year. I hope you’ll watch with me as we see together what 2007 brings.
Photo Credit: plus with hat uploaded by FunnymanSE30 – it’s awfully appropriate that this picture is of a Mac Plus – the first computer I ever owned (not counting the Commodore 64 my parents bought us). I’m still a Mac girl, by the way.
Technorati Tags: blogiversary, spare change, blogging
by Nedra Weinreich | Jan 23, 2007 | Blog, Communication, Research, Social Marketing
I may lose some friends out there, but I have to speak up about a phenomenon I’ve noticed over the past few years. It came to the fore for me with the recent story about the battle between the TV meteorologists over stripping the American Meteorological Society certification from any weatherman who expresses skepticism about the degree to which global warming can be blamed on human activity.
My intention here is not to do battle over the facts of global warming, so please don’t leave me comments listing all the reasons why it is or is not an environmental catastrophe. I am less a global warming skeptic than a global warming agnostic — I am not convinced yet either way, but I’m open to the data.
My concern is that global warming has become on par with religious dogma. When anyone, including legitimate scientists, dares to present contradictory data or a different interpretation of current data, they are attacked and harassed. It is assumed that they have evil intentions or are shills for the oil industry. Anyone who does not toe the global warming party line is considered akin to Holocaust deniers. Any data that deviates from the established doctrine is dismissed as biased or not worth looking at.
This is a problem. Science should not be politicized. A particular interpretation of the data should not be taken as the gospel from on high. Our knowledge of science evolves over time. Just a few decades ago, scientists were concerned about the catastrophic effects of global cooling and the coming Ice Age. Going even further back, to the 1630s, Galileo was convicted of heresy by the Church for supporting the radical Copernican theory that the Earth revolves around the sun, rather than the other way around. We should not be subjecting scientists to another Inquisition because they do not agree with commonly accepted ideas. Science does not advance without people who are willing to challenge the dominant paradigm.
While there is some consensus among scientists, there is a huge degree of uncertainty in the models that are being used to predict the future. Meteorologists can’t even predict the weather for next week accurately. To speak of global warming as something that is definitely happening is going way beyond the limits of the data. When everything that happens with the weather is attributed to man-made global warming, the credibility of the claims start coming into doubt. But “maybes” don’t make good news stories.
I have no doubt that most people who are concerned about global warming are well-meaning individuals who want to do the right thing for the planet. I don’t intend this as an attack on those who believe that global warming is a problem we need to address, but rather those who “believe in” global warming as if it were a religious doctrine that cannot be challenged.
I see a parallel with the dogma around evolution — on both sides. Some fundamentalists who reject the scientific version of how life evolved accept as creed that the Earth is about 6000 years old and that dinosaurs lived at the same time as humans before the great flood. I’ll give them a pass on being dogmatic, though — this is their religion, after all. But many evolutionists cling just as tightly to Darwinism, despite the fact that there are holes in the fossil record and big gaps in our knowledge about exactly how life evolves. Until we understand better how evolution works and how to answer some of the remaining questions, we should not assume that Darwin is necessarily the final word on how life came to exist, though it might be the best model we have right now. And why can’t the Bible and science co-exist? MIT-trained nuclear physicist Gerald Schroeder has written some amazing books that use quantum physics and the theory of relativity to reconcile the two precisely.
Similarly, there are things people on both sides of the global warming debate should be able to agree on, even if they do so for different reasons. Changing our energy consumption habits and taking care of the environment are goals that most people can get behind. In any case, I don’t think that the specter of global warming is immediate or concrete enough to get most people to take action to prevent something that may or may not happen in a hundred years or more. It’s just too big of a problem for an individual to feel that they can make an impact. But show people how they can save money by conserving energy, reduce their dependence on foreign oil by driving a hybrid, keep humans and wildlife healthy by reducing pollutants… this could get people motivated to act.
Scaring the public and silencing dissenters is not the way to bring about effective change. If only our leaders could put the same energy into solving the problems people face right here and now in terms of disease, poverty, and violence, we would all be better off in the future whether or not the climate eventually changes for the worse.
One thing is certain: what we know about the science of climate can and will change over time. The most shortsighted thing would be to close our minds to evidence that might bring us closer to the objective truth, whatever it happens to be.
Technorati Tags: global warming, science, meteorology, religion, evolution, environment, research
by Nedra Weinreich | Jan 19, 2007 | Blog, Research, Technology
Downtown Los Angeles has the largest homeless population in the US. But until recently, the data on the problem has been spotty. Starting in November 2006, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has been surveying the streets of Downtown every two weeks to count the number of homeless people, their exact locations and some basic demographics. All this data ends up on an Excel spreadsheet. But what could they do with this raw data? Just looking at the numbers is almost meaningless, since there are so many data points to compare.
Enter Cartifact, a custom mapping firm based in Downtown LA. They offered to work with the LAPD to help them visualize the information in a meaningful way and to see changes over time. Together the LAPD and Cartifact have created the Downtown Los Angeles Homeless Map, which takes the information from the biweekly Excel spreadsheet and converts it into a GIS-based heatmap superimposed on a street map of Downtown that shows the density and location of homeless people on each day of data collection. The individual maps are animated together to show the changes between each two-week period.
Eric Richardson, who writes blogdowntown, is also the lead developer for Cartifact. He notes on his blog how the most recent data provided some immediate insights into what is happening with the homeless population:
Interesting to note, though, is the way in which temperature affects the number of people on the street. It’s cold outside, and has been for several days now. The count for January 15th (Monday) was down 271 people from January 2nd. It got cold and the people who could find somewhere to go did so.
And in the comments he explains why these maps are helpful:
But also this sort of visualization is vital because it tells us what trends are occurring over time. Since enforcement of Safer Cities began there has been a definite spread of homeless to areas outside of Skid Row, particularly into the Toy District, the Fashion District and into South Park. Anecdotally we see this every day, but visualizing hard data allows us to say it for certain. That sort of knowledge is important for planning strategy.
This type of mapping could be used very effectively as a basis for understanding many health and social problems in a particular geographic area. Imagine using this to map the spread of an infectious epidemic – you could easily see what direction it was moving in, what types of neighborhoods it hit the hardest, what the boundaries of a quarantine area might need to be. You could look at areas with high exercise density (where people running or walking for exercise tend to be found) and make sure there are sidewalks and crosswalks on those streets. Map out gang-related incidents to see where to concentrate your violence prevention billboards or locate your program’s youth drop-in center.
I’m sure some form of mapping is occurring in many programs. The advantage of this model is that the heatmap format conveys a lot of information in a quick glance, and that it is easy to visualize changes over time. As Jerry Maguire might have said, had he been a social marketer rather than a sports agent, “Show me the data!”
(via LAObserved)
Technorati Tags: maps, homeless, public health, Los Angeles, LAPD
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. 
