by Nedra Weinreich | Jun 5, 2007 | Blog, Resources
Here are this week’s odds and ends:
- When CBS’s New York office was bombarded with tens of thousands of pounds of nuts sent to them by fans upset about its cancellation of the TV series Jericho a couple of weeks ago, the network redeemed itself by donating the peanuts to City Harvest, a hunger relief program and State Island Project Homefront, an organization that sends care packages to U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. But there are still 6,388 pounds of nuts sent to the LA office that are unaccounted for. Guess the staff there is nuts for nuts. Kudos also to NutsOnline, the company that is coordinating the nutty assault, for collecting donations and giving a percentage of the nut orders of over $13,500 so far for the Greensburg, Kansas Rebuilding Fund. Jericho is set in Kansas, and during the same week the season finale aired, a tornado hit Greensburg and destroyed 95% of the town. Lots of good is coming out of the series cancellation; hopefully the show’s fans will end up having a reason to be happy as well.
- Dutch smokers who are thinking about quitting can send an approximation of their smoker’s cough to their friends via email with a note announcing their intention to quit (and nonsmokers can send a hint-hint note to their friends who smoke). A clever way to use social pressure to get it to stick in this promotion for Pfizer’s smoking cessation medicine Champix. The site is in Dutch, but the language is similar enough to English that I was able to figure out what the words meant (een paffer = a smoker (puffer), and among the cough qualities you could choose from were “droog” (dry) or “slijmerig” (slimy?)).
- Staying in the same part of the world, Danish PhD student Malene Charlotte Larsen lists 25 different perspectives that people take on online social networking, such as the consumer perspective, the youth perspective, the friendship perspective, the identity perspective, the body and sex perspective and more. It’s a very interesting way to look at the how people could see the same tool from different angles. (via Alison Byrne Fields)
- Ad Age is looking at who is blogging and has a great graphic summary of blogosphere demographics (pdf). Some interesting stats include that 19% of kids age 12-17 have created blogs and 38% read them; 54% of bloggers are younger than 30; and 59% of blog readers floss their teeth daily (a social marketing opportunity to reach the other 41%!). Bloggers are also more racially diverse that the general online population, where 60% of bloggers are white (vs. 74% of all internet users).
- Roger von Oech shares what designers can do when they put their talent toward solving life and death problems rather than luxury cars, soda cans and cell phones. An exhibit called Design for the Other 90% at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum displays inventions like a circular jerry can that holds 20 gallons of water and rolls so easily that a child can pull it behind her, and the Lifestraw, which contains a drinking filter that kills bacteria as water is sucked through it. Think of what amazing strides we could make if the world’s best designers gave some thought to addressing the needs of the poorest instead of the richest.
- Supply and no demand… Algeria has 10 million condoms to give away to its citizens, but nobody wants them. The government is working with imams to preach about the HIV virus and the risks of unprotected sex, but a combination of misconceptions and negative attitudes is keeping people from choosing to use condoms. Any Algerian social marketers out there?
- According to MarketingVox, a new “exergaming” gym will offer over 20 videogames and other equipment to get kids moving while having fun. If I were looking for a franchise to open, this would be it — what a great concept.
- Speaking of exercise, I was flabbergasted when I figured out that this product was for real. Are people really paying $60 for a “ropeless jump rope” (two handles with little attached balls that twirl around when you swing them)? Apparently people who have problems jumping over a real rope have not figured out that you can swing your arms around and jump up and down for free (Look! I can even do it backwards and on one foot!). Do they really need to hold something that makes a fake swishing sound to keep their rhythm? Am I missing something here?
- And finally, in how many ways is the situation shown in this video just wrong? It’s the Lindsay Lohanization process. No need to wonder why some young women have body image problems and look for the meaning of life in shopping, partying and drugs. The news bulletin that goes across the screen toward the end of the clip is priceless.
Photo Credit: beatnikside
Technorati Tags: american cancer society, second life, jericho, pfizer, social networking, blogging, graphics, design, condoms, hiv, gaming, lindsay lohan, marketing
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 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 13, 2007 | Blog, Resources
Welcome to the Mother’s Day edition of the Tip Jar. I was awoken at 6:20 this morning by my sweet and well-meaning son bringing me a bowl of Fiber One cereal and milk balanced on a paper plate for breakfast in bed. I swallowed down as much of the cardboard-flavored cereal as I could and went back to sleep. The day only got better from there. I hope the rest of you mothers had as wonderful a Mothers Day as I did.
I missed a week or so of blogging while my sister and her family visited from Israel (they were supposed to come in April, but the baby got chicken pox just before the flight). They stayed in my office, so I didn’t have as much access to my computer, but I did get more sleep than usual. Funny how that worked out.
Here are some of the things I am catching up on blogging about:
- The Wall Street Journal wrote about how the town of Somerville, Massachusetts has attacked child obesity with a community-wide transformation (see text of article here under 5/10/07 entry). Researchers at Tufts focused on changing the environment in which children make their eating and physical activity choices. They repainted crosswalks and deployed school crossing guards along a designated route, which resulted in a 5% increase in the number of children who walk to school. The schools changed the freshness and fiber content of the foods they offered. Teachers taught a nutrition and exercise curriculum designed by Tufts that included things like taste tests and healthy recipe contests. Beyond the schools, restaurants offered low-fat substitutes and smaller portions, the City sponsored health fairs, a pedometer giveaway and a community fun run, and other activities. After eight months of the program, the average Somerville second grader gained about one less pound than a similar child at schools in the control communities. It’s a modest start, but over time could add up to a big difference.
- Also in the WSJ is an article about how organizations can now offer their own branded cellphone service. For example, the National Wildlife Federation mobile service includes nature sound ringtones, updates on environmental news, and eventually will connect users with their political representatives with the touch of a button. Nearly 900 organizations have signed up with Sonopia to create their own service with customized features for their constituents. This could also be used, for example, to provide people with diabetes a comprehensive service to track their blood sugar, receive testing and medication reminders, communicate with diabetes specialists and even get ringtones like “Sugar, Sugar” or “Hit Me with your Best Shot” (groan).
- A couple of interesting things from Anastasia at Ypulse: The Rescue Social Change Group takes a influencer-based angle on promoting substance-free parties by identifying the cool kids who are the biggest partiers and getting them to host huge, hip alcohol- and smoke-free parties sponsored by the campaign. She also reports that teen virtual world Habbo Hotel is teaming up with Sexwise, a free confidential hotline for UK teens, on the RU Thinking campaign. Trained advisors will be offering group and one-on-one relationship advice sessions within the Habbo world over the next three months.
- Heather at Aspiration provides an overview of GIS mapping software for nonprofits, with an excellent guide to resources for mapping data at the local level to assist with planning interventions.
- There’s another new social issue social networking community out there called Spangy. Their twist is that the site breaks its communities into five age groups, with customized information geared towards the key interests of each age (e.g., the section for ages 30-44 focuses more on issues like child and family health and ages 60-74 focuses on leaving a legacy through areas like microfinance and building community infrastructure). Beyond that customization, I’m not sure how much it differs from something like Change.org or Zaadz.
- The MPAA has decided to include smoking among the criteria it uses to determine a movie’s rating. Though many anti-tobacco groups had been lobbying for an automatic R rating (which prevents children under age 17 from being admitted to a movie without a parent) whenever any smoking is depicted, the MPAA will take context into consideration in the rating. They will ask three questions to determine whether smoking is an issue: (1) Is the smoking pervasive? (2) Does the film glamorize smoking? and (3) Is there an historic or other mitigating context? To me, question number 2 is the crux of whether the depiction of smoking is harmful, and I think this policy makes sense.
- Philanthropy Journal held a bumper sticker contest for nonprofits. Take a look at the winners and entrants to get a sense of what is most effective (and what absolutely does not work) in this format. Short, simple and easy to read are all key criteria. Avoid packing in lots of text and graphics, and avoid the temptation to use acronyms that make your message cryptic to all but those who are already familiar with your organization.
- Fard Johnmar is going to be offering a series of virtual workshops for healthcare professionals on using social media, based on his excellent e-book From Command & Control to Engage & Encourage. Each workshop is an opportunity to engage with Fard in an intimate setting, with no more than 10 participants. If you’ve been wanting to figure out how to put social media principles into practice in your healthcare organization, Fard’s your man.
- I’m a little late on reporting this, but Nancy Schwartz has released the results of her survey of nearly 350 nonprofit communicators. The results were pretty dismal in terms of how respondents are using marketing in any kind of strategic way. Only 37% do any type of tracking of the impact of their marketing efforts, though 95% reported at least one significant marketing success (but how did they know it was successful if they weren’t tracking it?). It sounds like many organizations are groping in the dark, trying to get the word out about themselves without much of a strategic plan for how to do so.
- Names are destiny, as well as a form of branding. For future mothers- (and fathers)-to-be, keep in mind that the name you give your baby will affect how he or she and others perceive him or herself. A recent study shows that girls who are given very feminine names are less likely to study math or physics after age 16 than those with more gender-neutral names. Also, certain types of names are perceived as “lower-status,” such as those spelled in an unusual way or including punctuation, resulting in lowered expectations by teachers. More traditional names also tend to evoke images of success, popularity or kindness over alternative names that are not as common. Of course, a child is not a product, but be kind and think through all the emotional and professional implications of the names that will be attached to your children throughout their lives (says the girl whose name is only pronounced correctly 40% of the time).
- And on a final Mother’s Day note, Salary.com calculated that the work that a typical stay-at-home mom does is worth $138,095 a year, and a full-time working mom would earn an additional $85,939 for the work she does at home. That’s for our roles as housekeeper, cook, day care center teacher, laundry machine operator, van driver, facilities manager, janitor, computer operator, CEO and psychologist. You can calculate exactly how much your work would be compensated with this online tool. But as any mom will tell you, the love we get back is worth way more than any dollar amount.
Here’s to all the moms reading this – remember that the hard work is worth it!
Photo Credit: sealine76
by Nedra Weinreich | Apr 29, 2007 | Blog, Resources
This week’s edition of the Tip Jar comes to you live from the Las Vegas Strip, where I am participating in the Healthcare Blogging Summit. I haven’t been to Las Vegas in about 15 or 20 years, and it sure has changed. What hasn’t changed is the choking clouds of smoke on the casino floors, which is definitely not endearing this city to me. I do, however, love love love the Bellagio fountains.
- When we are thinking about how to segment our target audience, we often break them out by demographics and psychographics (how people think about things related to our issue). Forrester adds another dimension to consider — technographics, or how a population interacts with technology. Charlene Li writes about the social technographics ladder, which divides the population into a number of groups: Creators (13%), Critics (19%), Collectors (15%), Joiners (19%), Spectators (33%) and Inactives (52%). Understanding how most of your audience uses technology will help you determine how to best engage them.
- It’s not a very sexy issue, and not many celebrities have been speaking out about it, but as Tony Blair recently announced, traffic injuries are the second leading cause of death for young men, after AIDS. Blair is calling for a global conference on the issue of road crashes, which cause 1.2 million deaths each year. Sometimes we need to be reminded that we should not ignore the mundane, readily preventable causes of death and injury. We have a long way to go in addressing the behavioral and environmental factors that increase the risk of being hurt or killed in a car.
- Sometimes it is the most obvious things that are overlooked in trying to come up with solutions to problems. In Stockholm, schools that banned sugary foods and drinks reduced the numbers of overweight children by six percentage points in four years — from 22% to 16% — while the control group actually rose. It should not take a nutritionist to figure out that reducing access to high-calorie foods will result in reduced weight gain. Schools do not have an obligation to provide their students with junk food — in fact, it is the opposite. I hope more schools will take this report to heart.
- Guy Kawasaki shares an interview he did with Dr. Philip Zimbardo, the researcher who conducted the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. For those of you who never took an introductory psych class, this was a study which randomly assigned students participating in the research to the roles of either prisoner or prison guard. While it was supposed to run a two-week course, it was terminated after only six days because of the cruel and inhumane way the guards were treating the prisoners. In the interview, they explore how situational factors can influence people’s behaviors without them being aware that they are devolving. It’s very interesting both as a cautionary moral tale and for its implications for social marketing.
- Phalligator explores some of the ways we could use a new tool called Wiffiti for health communications. It is essentially a dynamic billboard that people can send text messages to for viewing by anyone. It could be embedded in a website or enlarged as a public billboard, used at events or in educational settings.
- Via Trent Stamp, I discovered the Gender Genie — a computer algorithm that guesses whether you are male or female based on the way you write. Though it was accurate for Trent, for four out of five of the blog posts I submitted, it said I write like a man. Oh well, at least I throw like a girl.
- Finally, Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen blog is always a source of inspiration and insightful tips on how to improve my presentation skills. This week he went old school with a post on using flip charts to get your point across. We don’t always have to be high tech to be effective in our communication. Make sure you watch comedian Demetri Martin’s presentation of his “findings” to prepare for the next time you have to report on some data.
That’s it from here. More on the Healthcare Blogging Summit to come later…
Photo Credit: Sneaky G
by Nedra Weinreich | Apr 22, 2007 | Blog, Resources
Spare change from around the world of social marketing:
- This week’s edition of The Drum Beat from the Communication Initiative (a rich source of information and commentary on communication for development) focuses on social marketing resources. It includes books, tools, case studies and websites from a mix of US and other countries, and I was honored that they also included a reference to my book and this blog.
- In the US our taxes were due last Tuesday. I was one of the people who waited until that evening to file my tax return electronically using Turbotax, which I’ve used for many years with no problem. I know, I should not have waited until the last minute to send it in but I was out of town and assumed I would just put the finishing touches on and zap it over before midnight. Turns out Turbotax’s servers had a meltdown and many people who tried to file that day got a message to try again later. As the clock approached midnight across the various time zones, with people unable to get their returns into the system on time, panic erupted on the Turbotax message boards. With no helpful information from the company, many people ended up driving to the open post office across town before midnight or staying up all night trying to get it to go through. I was lucky and had my return accepted around 10:30 pm.
While the next day, the company said that the IRS had agreed to accept late Turbotax returns and that they would refund the filing fees of those affected, this is a perfect example of a product failing at the make-or-break time that people need it to work the most. There’s no reason that they should not be able to anticipate the level of demand and have failsafe systems built in, and there were not even updates on the company’s homepage with information for their irate customers. In this era of instant communications, you cannot keep your customers in the dark about something as important as this. On a related note, take a look at this graphic that visually illustrates how our taxes are used in the 2008 US budget.
- Researchers have found that adding alcohol to fruit increases its antioxidant capacity. Way back when, I considered extending my graduate program to stay on for a doctorate; the topic I planned to investigate was how to balance messages about the research emerging at the time about health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption with the negative potential effects of increasing alcohol use. The real world ended up winning out over academia, but this study would have fit right into my topic. Strawberry daiquiri, anyone?
- If you are interested in using social marketing in a university setting, Jim Grizzell at Cal Poly Pomona has started the Social Marketing in Higher Education Listserv. Its purpose is “to allow engagement and participation in discussion of the application of evidence- and practice-based social marketing to bring about positive health and social change and enhanced learning on campuses.”
- AP has a story on how the CDC is working with Hollywood writers on shows like 24 to ensure that health issues are portrayed accurately. Many other organizations serve as this type of resource for the entertainment industry as well. Stan Glantz of UCSF is critical of this approach in the article, saying that they would be more effective in pushing for policy changes by the industry such as an R rating for smoking, rather than working within the system. I disagree, and think that the confrontational approach would backfire and cut off access to writers and producers, who have no imperative to work with these organizations beyond their own desire to do good. Wagging our fingers in their faces only closes doors — not beneficial for us or them.
- Does anyone else find it ironic that anarchists in Quebec are organizing themselves around an anti-get-out-the-vote marketing campaign?
- Via OPC Today, Hindu priests are now blessing children with drops of polio vaccine instead of the traditional holy water usually offered in Hindu temples. The local health agency has trained hundreds of priests to administer the vaccine.”I was very surprised when the priest put polio drops into the mouths of several children, including my son, as god’s blessings,” said Sunita Devi of Bihar. “But we trust the priest as he can do us no harm.” What a clever partnership.
- Next Monday, April 30, I will be moderating a panel at the Healthcare Blogging Summit in Las Vegas. The session is on using new media to market or motivate behavior change, and the three panelists will have a lot to say, judging from our conference call this week. They are Fabio Gratton of Ignite Health, Debbie Donovan of Conceptus and Adam Pellegrini, Strategic Director Online of the American Cancer Society. I’m looking forward to this panel and the rest of the sessions at the Summit, and hope you will be able to join us there.
- My blog has been nominated for the Blogger’s Choice Awards, though I’m not sure whether this is a similar honor to being in Who’s Who or being a semifinalist in one of those national poetry contests. Every marketing blog in the universe seems to be nominated, and for some reason mine was also included in the best blog design and best blog host categories, so I’m a little suspicious. But if you feel like voting for Spare Change, it will make me feel validated as a sentient being. 🙂
Photo Credit: o2ma
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. 
