Entertainment Education Advocacy Update

by | Oct 18, 2007 | Blog, Entertainment, Policy

Thanks to my well-placed source on the ground in Washington, here is a brief update on the status of the entertainment education funding:

The Senate began consideration of the Labor-HHS bill yesterday and continues today (and possibly tomorrow). Sen. Coburn filed his amendment to eliminate funding for the Entertainment Education program, signaling his intention to offer it at some point during debate on the bill. We do not have a time frame for when Coburn will formally offer the amendment and when the Senate will debate it.

In his column today praising Senator Coburn’s efforts to eliminate pork from the budget (a worthy goal, but misguided in this case), Bob Novak of the Washington Post mentions the “$1.7 million added to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention budget to fund a Hollywood liaison to advise doctor dramas.” This vastly oversimplifies the purpose of the program, and ignores the public health impact that results from collaborating with the entertainment industry to achieve the CDC’s health behavior change goals. If anything, it’s the anti-pork (literally and figuratively).

I just called both my Senators to urge them to oppose Senator Coburn’s pending amendment. If you feel as strongly about defending the value of the entertainment education approach as I do, I hope you will call or email your Senators today as well. I think we especially need people from outside of California to contact your Senators, because most of the efforts so far have been centered in L.A.

To make it even easier for you, here are a couple of sentences you can use as-is or adapt for when you call:

Hi, I’m calling to urge Senator ____ to oppose Senator Coburn’s amendment to the Labor/HHS appropriations bill that would eliminate funding for the CDC’s entertainment education program. This is an effective and cost-efficient public health tool that has been proven to increase health knowledge and healthy behaviors among television viewers. Thank you.

Two minutes per phone call, and we can make this happen. We’ve got the power.

Photo Credit: sazztastical

Save the CDC’s Entertainment Education Funding!

by | Oct 15, 2007 | Blog, Entertainment, Policy

I have been intending to write about this for some time, and with the US Senate about to open up debate on the appropriations bill for the Department of Health and Human Services this week, the time must be now.

Back in July, when the House of Representatives was voting on the HHS Appropriations bill, Congressman Ryan of Wisconsin successfully passed an amendment on a voice vote that took out the line item for the CDC’s entertainment education project (currently housed at USC as Hollywood, Health and Society). This is a well-known, successful program that works with television writers and other entertainment industry professionals to ensure that health issues are depicted accurately and to work towards inclusion of health content into shows to promote healthy behaviors on the part of the audience. I have written about the effectiveness of the entertainment education approach many times before.

Congressman Ryan lumped this program in with other instances of what he considers wasteful spending by the CDC and tarred it with a very broad brush. Here’s an excerpt from the transcript of his remarks:

Mr. Chairman, there is a recent troubling report entitled “CDC Off Center,” which was produced under the direction of Senator Coburn with a report in the Senate Government Affairs Committee. Instead of using its resources to fight life-threatening diseases like HIV/AIDS and cancer, the CDC has instead spent money on needless luxury items and nongovernment functions.

For example, the CDC’s Office of Health and Safety recently provided its employees with a new, extravagant fitness center that includes such items as rotating pastel “mood” lights, zero-gravity chairs, and $30,000 dry-heat saunas. The CDC has also spent over $1.7 million on a “Hollywood liaison” to advise TV shows like “E.R.” and “House” on medical information included in their programming, clearly an expense that should have been covered by the successful for-profit television shows, not by our hard-earned tax dollars. They also further squandered taxpayer dollars in an office intended to help improve employee morale…

In a time when we are facing increasing risk of bioterrorism and disease, these are hardly the best use of taxpayer dollars. My amendment simply would ensure that the CDC would not be able to spend any more Federal funding on these three boondoggles described above. And it is my hope that we can get the CDC focused on doing its job, which is very important and they do a good job on that, and not on these kinds of boondoggles.

With that one sentence about the “Hollywood liaison,” boom, out went that program. I’m not going to comment on the rest of the CDC “boondoggles” because I don’t know enough about them. I do know that entertainment education is not a boondoggle, but a very effective public health activity.

Congressman Ryan’s chief objection seems to be that those rich Hollywood types should pay for their own darn consultants if they want to be medically accurate. The fact is, TV writers and producers are in the business of telling stories and entertaining people. There aren’t many producers out there like Neal Baer who put a premium on incorporating health education while telling a good story. Many need to be convinced, and then handed the information on a silver platter. If programs like Hollywood Health and Society (HHS) and others like it weren’t doing constant outreach to the entertainment industry, much more inaccurate information would be getting out to the public, which might then be erroneously acted upon.

And that doesn’t take into account that this type of outreach is much more cost-effective than producing television ads and purchasing time to run them. Some examples of the cost savings can be found by looking at the shows HHS has consulted on (thank you to my anonymous well-placed contacts who provided me with this information):

  • Show: ER
    Topic: adolescent obesity and related topics
    Length: approx. 7 minutes
    Audience: 24.8 million
    If purchased time using ad rate: $4,818,324
    Evaluation results:
    • Viewers reported more healthy behaviors after seeing the storyline, i.e. exercising and eating healthy (AOR 1.65, p< .01>• Viewers had more knowledge of 5 A Day compared with non-viewers (AOR 1.05, p< .05>• Men had the greatest and most significant gains in knowledge (AOR 1.25, p< .01>
  • Show: 24
    Topic: Bioterrorism/major disease outbreak
    Length: approx. 20 minutes
    Audience: 11.4 million
    Cost if purchased time using ad rate: $12,360,000
    Evaluation results:
    • Viewers who saw one or more of the 5 storyline episodes had increased knowledge about susceptibility to a bioterrorism attack, how infection spreads, public health response, and steps to take in a bioterrorism emergency.
    • Viewers were also significantly influenced in their intention to follow directions from authorities.

Over the past five years, the total time that television shows aired public health information concerning CDC topics was approximately 545 min., reaching 586 million viewers. The total cost if they had purchased ad time on those shows would have been $72,442,644. For the number of people they reached, and the effectiveness of the content, I’d say the program was a bargain at $1.7 million.

If you agree that the CDC should continue to promote public health through the very effective entertainment education approach, please contact your Senators to express your support for retaining this funding. You can find your Senators’ email and fax numbers here. You can adapt this sample letter:

Date

Senator _______
U.S. Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510

Dear Senator _______:

I am writing to share my support for the CDC’s Entertainment Education Program, an important public health tool which utilizes the power of popular mass media to educate Americans about healthy behaviors. I urge you to oppose any attempts to eliminate funding for the program when the Senate considers the Labor-HHS Appropriations bill for fiscal year 2008.

The CDC’s Entertainment Education Program fosters the use of factual health information in television shows and promotes the incorporation of important and timely public health messages into television programming. Funding for this program allows the CDC to reach out to television writers with written materials and experts on a wide range of public health issues, to respond to requests from television writers, producers, and researchers, and to ultimately connect them with experts who can provide factual information. Rather than serving in lieu of paid consultants to the shows, the program ensures accurate depictions of health issues even when no such effort would have been made otherwise on the part of the entertainment professionals.

During House consideration of the Labor-HHS bill, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) successfully offered an amendment to eliminate funding for the program. I urge you to oppose any similar effort in the Senate.

According to the 2005 HealthStyles (Porter Novelli) study, nearly six out of 10 (58%) regular television viewers report learning something about a disease or how to prevent it from a daytime or primetime drama. More importantly, nearly three out of 10 (28%) regular viewers took one or more actions as a result of a television health storyline, such as telling someone about the health topic, calling a hotline or visiting a clinic.

Under the guidance of the CDC’s Entertainment Education Program:
• More than 400 television episodes contained public health information, including more than 82 major storylines
• 11 shows ran some combination of informational PSAs, info spots, and toll free numbers
• 28 storylines were evaluated for effect on viewing audiences
• More than 200 links to public health information were provided to show websites for their viewers

The entertainment education approach works. Up to 20 million viewers may watch a single T.V. show, and they act on the health information they receive. It would be a public health tragedy for this highly successful program to lose its funding.

Sincerely,

Please pass this information along to other entertainment education professionals and social marketers you know so that the entire field is not dismissed offhandedly as a “boondoggle.” The House wasn’t paying attention. Let’s make sure that the Senate is.

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ICANN has Oy-nternet?

by | Oct 11, 2007 | Blog, Technology


I read a story in the paper this morning that gave me a giggle and made me wonder if someone was pulling the reporter’s leg. ICANN, the official internet naming agency, is starting to test using domain names written in languages composed of non-Roman letters. The 11 languages they are testing are Arabic, Persian, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil. Yes, that does say Yiddish. Not Hebrew, the language of scores of the highest of the high-tech internet entrepreneurs, but Yiddish. These languages were chosen “based on the online communities that have expressed the most interest in and need for non-English domains.”

Are there really octogenarians and Chasids clamoring for the ability to surf the web in Yiddish? Are the Judenrein communities of Eastern Europe attempting to preserve the vestiges of Yiddish culture online? Or is it a way to avoid dredging up politicized battles by testing the Hebrew characters in which the language is written while calling it by a more nonthreatening name?

I’m going to go reserve my social-marketing.oy domain name now.

UPDATE (10/15/07): Kieren McCarthy at the ICANN blog responded to my question about why Yiddish was selected. She forwarded what Tina Dam, the manager of that project, told her:

“It was not a case of Yiddish rather than Hebrew. These are two different languages that both utilize the Hebrew script. When we were looking at which language to chose to translate the word test for, and hence develop the IDN TLD, we picked the ones where clear need had been expressed.

“However, the list of the eleven was up for comments and review and we had expected it to be expanded with a few additional languages that communities around the world would like to add. We did not get any such requests and so went ahead with the 11 we have today.

“However, please keep in mind that it is not about testing languages – it is about testing a technology. We do need to test the technology on both right-to-left languages and left-to-right languages – Yiddish, Arabic, Persian being the three of the former…

It still amazes me that there are tech-savvy Yiddish-speaking activists out there demanding equal language access.

Suicide Prevention Advocacy via Facebook

by | Oct 10, 2007 | Blog, Policy, Social Media


I’ve been spending more time on Facebook lately, getting to know how it works so I can use it when I have an appropriate project. The opportunity just presented itself in the form of an advocacy campaign headed up by my blog friend Jeff Harrell. A couple of years ago, Jeff wrote a moving article about a young woman named Suzanne Gonzales.

Suzy was a bright, bubbly young lady with a quirky sense of humor from a small town in California. After she went off to college, she became depressed and turned to the Internet for support in January 2003. Unfortunately, rather than finding people who wanted to help her recover and live a long, healthy life, Suzy posted a note about her suicidal feelings to the Usenet group alt.suicide.holiday. She was met with relentless discouragement against getting help, and over the following months was encouraged by members of the group to go ahead and commit suicide. This included providing specific details on the best method of killing herself and helping her come up with a plan to carry it out. On March 23, 2003, Suzy took her own life, alone in a Florida hotel room. She was one of many such “successes” to come out of that online group.

Yesterday, Jeff announced on his blog that he would be spearheading an advocacy campaign to help pass the bill currently before the House that was inspired by Suzy’s story. H.R. 940, the Suzanne Gonzales Suicide Prevention Act of 2007 (Suzy’s Law), would make it a crime to use the Internet to promote or encourage suicide.

It’s a very narrow and specific law, designed not to abridge freedom of speech or trample on state-specific laws related to suicide. Telling someone how to commit suicide is already against the law in all 50 states, but there is a need for a federal law to take into account the interstate nature of the Internet. A person can only be convicted under this law if they provided information on how to commit suicide to a particular person whom they knew to be contemplating suicide, and when that information was not generally known. The bill is currently in the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security, and requires approximately 50 Congressional co-sponsors to make it to the next step in the process (it currently has 3 co-sponsors).

Jeff has created a striking website to serve as a home base for this advocacy effort (all work on this campaign by Jeff and others is on a volunteer basis). He has made it very easy for people to learn more about the issue, the legislation, and how to help. The main push right now is for people to call to urge their Representative to sign on to H.R. 940 as a co-sponsor of the bill. He provides a zip code look-up to find your Rep’s phone number, along with a two-sentence script that you can use if you’re not sure what to say.

I suggested to Jeff that he use Facebook to get the word out about this campaign quickly and efficiently. It seems like the kind of issue that Internet-savvy, particularly college-age, Facebook users would be interested in supporting and sharing with their friends. When I found out that Jeff was not on Facebook, I decided that this would be a good opportunity for me to set up a Facebook group and learn more about promoting a campaign via a social networking site. The page went live this morning, and includes:

  • an introduction to Suzy’s Law
  • campaign contact information
  • an action request to call Congress
  • a pointer to the National Suicide Prevention Hotline for people who might find the page because they or someone they know is suicidal
  • additional resources about suicide prevention
  • photos of Suzy
  • links to the story Jeff wrote about Suzy and to the website her family created in her memory
  • a discussion board with the starter topic of “Have you ever had a friend who was suicidal? What did you do?”
  • and a post on the Wall about National Depression Screening Day, which is tomorrow, Thursday October 11.

I invited my Facebook friends (almost 50 people) to join, and Jeff posted a link to the group on the campaign blog. I left messages on about 8 or 9 other Facebook groups related to suicide prevention, depression and mental health inviting their members to join our group. By the end of the day, we had 17 members in the group — the majority of whom were not from my own network. It’s not a huge number, admittedly, but I will be watching with interest to see how quickly it increases. I’ve had my jealous eye on the “Support the Monks’ Protest in Burma” group, which currently has a whopping 397,000 members and increases by about 17,000 a day (if that’s how often the “new members” feature is updated). I’m looking to that as an example of how to get a group to spread.

If you are on Facebook, please join our “Support Suzy’s Law for Suicide Prevention” group and invite your own friends to join as well. If you’re not on Facebook, it’s free, quick and easy to become a member, and then you can join the group. You can also add me as a friend (here’s my profile – viewable once you have a Facebook account).

Let’s make sure that other young people like Suzy are not persuaded by sick strangers that suicide is the best answer, and then coached on how to take their own lives. If you live in the U.S., I hope you’ll get involved by making that quick and easy phone call to your Representative. And if you live outside the U.S., you can help us by spreading the word to your American friends. Thanks!

A Social Marketing Book Club!

by | Oct 9, 2007 | Blog, Resources, Social Marketing

Consummate bookworm CK has announced the next round of the Marketing Profs Book Club, and the featured book is one of my favorites for nonprofits who want to do social marketing — Robin Hood Marketing by Katya Andresen.

You might remember that I did a review of the book last year and thought it was a great guide to developing a marketing mindset in your nonprofit communications. For more on the book, read CK’s interview with Katya. I’m looking forward to many stimulating online discussions at the Book Club, which will start November 13. Sign up by October 12 to be part of the Book Club, and you will be entered to win one of 50 free copies of Robin Hood Marketing!

I was honored to be asked by CK to put together a short introduction to social marketing as a bonus to be offered to all Book Club participants. This free eBook, Social Marketing at Your Fingertips: A Quick Guide to Changing the World, is now available for download. It briefly explains what social marketing is and isn’t, outlines the social marketing mix, offers an abridged review of Robin Hood Marketing, and provides a list of resources for more information. I hope you find it helpful!

Social Marketing University Update

by | Oct 8, 2007 | Blog, Professional Development, Social Marketing

I’m excited about the 3rd Social Marketing University training that I’ll be leading next week (October 15-17) here in Los Angeles.

I have a few excellent guest speakers, who I think will add a lot to the program. Dr. Deborah Glik, the director of UCLA’s Health and Media Research Group, will be sharing a case study of a social marketing program she developed. Hendre Coetzee, the CEO of MobileCause, will give an insider’s view on how to use mobile marketing to bring about behavior change. And at the Next Generation Social Marketing seminar, Brian Humphrey of the Los Angeles Fire Department (who I wrote about here) will be sharing how he has used social media to extend the reach of his messages and engage the community in his department’s mission.

We still have some spaces available, so if you would like to join us, please register as soon as possible!

The Tip Jar – 10/1/07

by | Oct 1, 2007 | Blog, Resources

After being out of town, out for various Jewish holidays and trying vainly to catch up with work, here is the next edition of the Tip Jar…

  • My daughter, who’s in first grade, still makes friends by asking other girls, “Do you want to be my friend?” As we grow older, friendship becomes more of a social process that evolves organically and less of an up-front question. That’s changed with social networking sites where we have to expose ourselves to flat-out rejection all over again to build our friend lists. I’m still trying to decide whether Facebook offers enough value to me to keep up with it on a regular basis. I’m finding that the more people I add as friends, the more useful it is, though I have a strange mix of friends, colleagues and family. If you’re on Facebook, do you want to be my friend? Here’s my profile (only accessible once you complete the free registration) [update: link fixed!]. I wish I could take the Facebook class offered at Stanford by BJ Fogg of the Persuasive Technology Lab. They will be exploring how motivation and influence operate on Facebook. There’s still so much to learn.
  • Speaking of social networking, should we be surprised at yet another such site popping up around the issue of social change? The Changents site centers around change agents and those who want to support their efforts.
  • And if you are feeling overloaded by all the social networking sites you are part of, the NOSO Project may be just what you need. According to the website:
    NOSO is a real-world platform for temporary disengagement from social networking environments. The NOSO experience offers a unique opportunity to create NO Connections by scheduling NO Events with other NO Friends.

    These “NO” events, called NOSOs, take place in designated cafes, parks, libraries, bookstores, and other public spaces. Participants — whose identities remain unknown to one another — agree to arrive at an assigned time and remain alone, quiet and un-connected, while at the same time knowing that another “Friend” is present in the space.

    NOSOs are scheduled by users through the NOSO website. They last for a duration of 1 – 30 minutes, after which participants disperse and return to their regular activities.

    Or, you could just grab a cup of coffee by yourself and disengage from the grid for a while. Nah, not ironic enough.

  • Hip-hop music is being used to bring about social change in a region in Kenya, spurred by a musician named Geoffrey Arthur Ogalo (better known to his fans as Tera Mos). He is leading a group of hip-hop artists in Kisumu, who are shying away from using vulgar language, and sings about problems that youth encounter in their daily lives, how to protect the environment, and other issues like poverty and HIV/AIDS. The phrase “Tera Mos” – also the name of his best-known song – means “don’t hurry me up because I need to be sure before I leap” in the Dholuo language.
  • For those who watch the Superbowl just for the commercials, a new website called Firebrand is about to launch. Its “commercials as content” programming includes commercial jockeys (CJs) — along the lines of the VJs back when MTV actually showed music videos — to contextualize the commercials and guide viewers through the spots, contests and promotions. It will be viewable via TV, web and mobile devices. Users will be able to create their own playlists and share their favorite spots. Hopefully they will also include social marketing spots in their content, and this should certainly be added to your TV ad/PSA distribution strategy.
  • A couple of excellent reports have come out on the use of blogs by government agencies. The first is called The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0, and is downloadable from the IBM Center for the Business of Government (thanks to Mike Kujawski for the tip). The second is an article by Maurice Muise of Environment Canada, called “Government Blogs: What They are and Why You Need One (or Two or Three…),” which includes some great examples. This document came via the Social Marketing Listserv, and as far as I could find is not online, so if you’d like to take a look, send me an email and I’ll forward it to you.
  • If you want to reach Generation Y with your story, Sam Davidson at Cool People Care has some tips for how to best get your message out in a way they will listen. He says: get digital, get relevant, get simple, get practical, and get original. Get over to the full post to find out how. And here’s an example of how voter mobilization campaigns are reaching this demographic through text messaging reminders to vote.
  • I’ve written about this before, but here is more confirmation that depictions of healthy behaviors on television influence health behaviors among viewers. According to researchers at USC, those who watched episodes of the show ER that addressed the topics of teen obesity, hypertension and healthy eating were more likely to report a positive change in their related behaviors and increased knowledge about nutrition. Similarly, even in Saudi Arabia, the most popular comedy series Tash Ma Tash, watched by nearly the whole country each night during Ramadan, is working toward social change by addressing topics like women’s rights, corruption and other social problems.
  • Social media has been playing a role in the reporting and response to the gripping protests by the monks in Burma. With over 263,000 members of the Facebook group supporting the monks’ protest, blogs, YouTube videos, cellphone photojournalism, Flickr, Second Life and other tactics, detailed so well by Angelo Fernando and Beth Kanter, the dynamics of real-time protest and reportage have completely changed. Similarly, those supporting the Jena 6 are also using social media to create a student movement around this issue.
  • England’s health secretary, Alan Johnson, is hoping to change the MRSA superbug infection rate in the nation’s hospitals through a simple behavioral and cultural change. NHS doctors will no longer be allowed to wear the long-sleeved white coats that have come over generations to represent authority and tradition, and they must remain bare below the elbow whenever they are in contact with patients. The MRSA superbug may have been spreading from one patient to another on the cuffs of the doctors’ coats, and eliminating the coat will make it easier to wash hands and wrists correctly. Watches, jewelry and ties will also be verboten. It’s a simple change, easily enforced, but could make a big difference in patient survival.

Time is running out to register for Social Marketing University, which will be happening October 15-17 in Los Angeles! There are still spaces left, so come join us for a fun and informative training.

Photo Credit: justbadpot

Passing Off the Costs?

by | Sep 19, 2007 | Blog, Cause Marketing, Technology

Sony, the Ad Council and the National Crime Prevention Council are running a contest to create a television PSA on the awareness and prevention of cyberbullying. The grand prize winners — an individual and a school group — will receive thousands of dollars worth of video production equipment. Consumer-generated marketing — great, right? Yes, until you look at all the requirements and restrictions they put on the entries.

The contest submissions must be broadcast quality — that can cost serious money. They specify tiny details like the required PMS colors and proportions of each organization’s logo. Entrants have to get talent releases from everyone involved and location releases.

And each person involved in the production has to confirm that “neither he/she nor anyone else has engaged or taken part in (or induced or encouraged anyone else to do so) in any activity or conduct that may or is likely to harm or create a risk of harm, physical or mental injury, emotional distress, death, disability, disfigurement, or physical or mental illness to any person, other living thing or any property.” Does this mean that kids who have been involved with cyberbullying (or other types of bullying) in the past cannot be involved in this project as a part of their rehabilitation?

So, essentially, the contest sponsors are asking for someone else to invest the time, money and creative energy in creating a finished spot for them, in exchange for the production equipment they would already need to own in order to create the spot. Perhaps this is the kind of thing a school-based video production class or semi-professional producer could pull off. But it also excludes an awful lot of people who might otherwise want to enter the contest. And those who do enter the contest but don’t win get nothing for their efforts — no opportunity to show off what they created or share it in other venues.

If Sony, the Ad Council and NCPC wanted to get more youth participating and engaging with this issue, why not solicit a broader range of videos with fewer restrictions, select the most creative and persuasive entries, and then cover the production costs to turn those ideas into a professionally created PSA? They could do it on YouTube or MySpace so that everyone can see all the entries and comment on them. This approach would seem a lot fairer to me, and potentially much more effective in ultimately affecting the issue of cyberbullying among youth.

I’m not sure whether this contest was underthought (in terms of the implications of the rules) or overthought (by the lawyers), but I have to hope that it’s not just all about passing off the costs.

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The Tip Jar – 9/18/07

by | Sep 18, 2007 | Blog, Resources

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

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Reaching Bloggers

by | Sep 18, 2007 | Blog, Social Media

Even blogs with a relatively small readership like mine have become the new holy grail of marketers because of the fact that the audience is so targeted to a particular niche. While a mention from an A-list blogger is certainly a coup, sometimes you can be even more effective by getting your message out through smaller blogs that have the very specific audience you want to reach, making up for quantity with quality.

I often get emails from PR firms, publishers, and individuals with something to promote asking me to cover their product/book/website/etc. on my blog. Sometimes I will immediately say yes because it’s clear that the information is of interest to me and/or my readers (and hopefully both).

Other times the pitch is so poorly done that it’s a waste of my time and theirs. It’s clear that they have no clue what I write about even though they say that they love my blog. Or they send me email after email to try to convince me of the merits of their product.

Blogger relations has emerged as a tactic of its own, similar to media relations but not the same. Bloggers generally do not consider themselves journalists, so a somewhat different and more informal set of guidelines apply from standard media outreach practice. But that doesn’t mean that your approach doesn’t matter. In fact, you may need to put more time into cultivating blogger contacts — it’s all about building relationships.

Others have created excellent lists of suggestions for how to pitch bloggers (see Toby, CK and Rohit), as well as examples of what not to do, so I am not going to cobble together my own list here.

The folks over at Ogilvy have recently developed a Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics, and they are asking for feedback to help refine it. Here it is:

  • We reach out to bloggers because we respect your influence and feel that we might have something that is “remarkable” which could be of interest to you and/or your audience.
  • We will only propose blogger outreach as a tactic if it complements our overall strategy. We will not recommend it as a panacea for every social media campaign.
  • We will always be transparent and clearly disclose who we are and who we work for in our outreach email.
  • Before we email you, we will check out your blog’s About, Contact and Advertising page in an effort to see if you have blatantly said you would not like to be contacted by PR/Marketing companies. If so, we’ll leave you alone.
  • If you tell us there is a specific way you want to be reached, we’ll adhere to those guidelines.
  • We won’t pretend to have read your blog if we haven’t.
  • In our email we will convey why we think you, in particular, might be interested in our client’s product, issue, event or message.
  • We won’t leave you hanging. If your contact at Ogilvy PR is going out of town or will be unreachable, we will provide you with an alternate point of contact.
  • We encourage you to disclose our relationship with you to your readers, and will never ask you to do otherwise.
  • You are entitled to blog on information or products we give you in any way you see fit. (Yes, you can even say you hate it.)
  • If you don’t want to hear from us again, we will place you on our Do Not Contact list – which we will share with the rest of the Ogilvy PR agency.
  • If you are initially interested in the campaign, but don’t respond to one of our emails, we will follow up with you no more than once. If you don’t respond to us at all, we’ll leave you alone.
  • Our initial outreach email will always include a link to Ogilvy PR’s Blog Outreach Code of Ethics.

It’s a great start, and I think it shows a great deal of respect for the bloggers they are contacting. I would suggest that they add that they will only contact a blogger after having read enough posts to determine whether their information or product is relevant to the topics that blogger writes about.

If you’re a blogger, or someone who wants to work with bloggers to get your messages out, what do you think of the code of ethics?

Photo Credit: ~Aphrodite

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