March 30, 2012
The End of March! Cool things still to come...
By
Katherine Dodds
MARCH MADNESS ENDS! 65_REDROSES HEATS UP AND HCW WORKSHOP ON SOCIAL MARKETING FOR RED ROAD HIV/AIDS NETWORK!
Things have been mighty busy around Hello Cool World headquarters lately, with most of our major clients having deadlines to match the end of the fiscal year (AKA today!). We last calculated that we send over 30 separate projects to print, and that's not all... Here's our ad in the Georgia Straight for the special screening of 65_RedRoses tomorrow at UBC's Norm Theatre.
This marks the launch of our 'alternative' theatrical release of the new cut of the film, and is especially poignant because it happens to be Eva's birthday.
65_RedRoses fits our multiple mandates of promoting films for social causes and health marketing. We're developing the #4Eva free moblie app to encourage everyone to become an organ donor, and to share the campaign on their social networks. It will launch by the time the film premieres in the US on OWN on May 3.
Still, yesterday we found time to do a social marketing workshop for The Red Road HIV/AIDS Network, which was surprisingly energizing considering what a week/month it's been. The room contained more than a few familiar faces, as we have just locked an HIV testing video we made for the BCCDC street nurse team (The team behind Bevel up). But conversations around social change theories are among my favorite activities, and it was a lively group.
The video we just wrapped (with the help of our cohorts Devon and Andrej at Storybubble) is called "Being There". It's meant for internal use to train nurses in the context and conversations around HIV testing. The client-centred focus of all the modules in the video, and the topic of our workshop for Red Road - social marketing - are deeply entwined philosophically.
"Listen first" is the guiding principle in both. As Charlotte says in the video when asked what her advice to nurses who have to give an HIV positive diagnosis: "Walk with this person from day one of their HIV, you really gotta walk with them. You don’t know what they’ve been through, just help them. They’re going to be your best teacher. Let them be your teacher."
The workshop was an adaption of one I gave two years ago, but in the spirit of 'listen first' I asked the room a bit about where they were coming from and what they were expecting from the workshop. I quickly found out that they thought it was about social networking. So I made it about both!
This confusion of the terms has been an ongoing discussion in social marketing circles, at least for those who invest in identifying with the term as professionals or academics in the field. So - to be clear - social marketing is a set of theories adressing the how-tos of behavior or policy change that borrows from product marketing in terms of tactics. Social marketing best practices say that you should start with the attitude and values of the person you wish to reach or influence, and include them in your message creation. It's also commonly understood that if this behavior change is meant to be sustained over time, the project needs to last long enough to evaluate it's impact over time.
So... social networking can of course, be an integral element in a social marketing effort. These days, it almost has to be. But it's important to notice how it affects time-based strategies and impacts evaluation. I could go on and on about this, but I've boiled it down to this:
Have a clear understanding of what success looks like for your community. Don't measure by mass-appeal alone, but by the depth and quality of interaction that is meaningful within this community. Are the people affected by the health issue you are interested in engaging with the messaging? Do they own it?
Take time to talk. Don't just push out messages, allocate time to have conversations, offline and online. Realize, like street-nurse Sarah said in "Being There", that these relationships are a core goal of outreach nursing practice.
As a term, "Social" is the source of the confusion between 'marketing' and 'networking' and frankly, social is what matters. Anyone over 35 involved in community organizing and grassroots activism knows that social networking was going on long before the internet. :-)
And this is where social marketing theory matters - it encourages folks with a public health agenda to think first about messaging, and listening to their audiences, while understanding that their success indicators in this realm can't be reduced to page visits (or pie-charts and statistics) alone. However, it's easy to have conversations via social networks and get participatory campaigns going, if you are willing and have the mandate to take the time.
Because to sustain a message in the fast-paced environment of social media means to stay engaged. A slow exponential growth of a message across specific networks is more indicative of sustainable outreach than a quick viral phenomenon.
Like good food, good work takes time.
Tag(s):
65_RedRoses,
First Nations,
Health/Health Advocacy,
health promotion,
Harm Reduction,
HIV AIDS
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