On Social Marketing and Social Change

The 2012 Social Marketing Conference: Getting Better at Doing Good

A major meeting on "getting better at doing good" will take place in Clearwater Beach, FL 15-16 June 2012. This theme for the 22nd Annual Social Marketing Conference reflects the global reality that government institutions, not-for-profit groups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), universities and colleges and businesses are searching for better ways to improve people's health, the environment, work force development and social welfare. This international gathering will bring together social marketers and social innovators in a forum where we can engage our collective wisdom and talents to explore creative ways to teach and employ marketing to positively change the world.

There is still time to register. If you are interested, or still on the fence, here is the almost final program of major speakers and presentations.

Full Conference Session Presentations and Discussions:

Why Social Marketing is so Important
Ayman El-Mohandes, MBBCh, MD, MPH,
Dean, College of Public Health, University of Nebraska Medical Center

Advancing (Disruptive) Social Innovation in Academic Settings
Erin Krampetz, MA
Co-Founder and Community Director, Ashoka U

Emerging Ideas in Commercial Marketing and Their Relevance for Social Marketing
Phillip Kotler, PhD
S.C. Johnson & Son Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

The Creative Discipline of Social Marketing
Lynda Bardfield
Associate Director, Strategic Behavioral Communication, FHI360

Fostering Sustainable Behaviors: Community-based Social Marketing
Doug McKenzie-Mohr, PhD
McKenzie-Mohr & Associates


Interactive Collaboratories with featured presenters:

Teaching Social Marketing at George Washington University: Answers, Challenges & the Road Ahead Monique Turner, PhD

Teaching Social Marketing at Brighton Business School, Brighton, UK  Matthew Wood, MBA

Marketing Social Marketing as Organizational Behavior Change Mike Newton-Ward, MSW, MPH

Training International Conservation Leaders: Changing Behaviors One Community at a Time Brian Day, MS & Katherine McElhinny, MA, Rare Conservation

Pull Yourself Up by the Bootstraps: Social Marketing and the Oklahoma Ethos Robert John, PhD

The Transformational Potential of Short-Term Social Marketing Training Events Francois Lagarde, MA
 

Concurrent Research Presentations:

Best Bones Forever!: A Case Study in Social Marketing (Elizabeth Osborn, MPH; Darcy Sawatzki, MA; Lynne Donner Lotenberg, MA; Valerie Borden, MPA)

Plate It Up Kentucky Proud: Statewide Social Marketing Campaign to Increase Consumer Purchase and Consumption of Locally Grown Fruits and Vegetables (Laura Stephenson, PhD)

Social Marketing Group Projects: A Strategy for Introducing Students to Social Marketing Concepts (Jane McKay-Nesbitt, PhD)

Practitioners to Professors: Bringing the Real World into the Classroom
(Jennifer Nichols, MPH; Melissa Taylor, MA)

The Role of the Servicescape on Emotional Regulation: An Exploration of Novice Blood Donors (Kay Russell)

Influencing Breastfeeding Behavior: The Use of Technology to Provide a Peer Support Service (Rebekah Russell-Bennett, PhD)

Using Mobile Phones to Track and Influence Multimodal Travel Behavior (Philip Winters, BS)

Personal Health Systems: New Technologies for Improving Personal Health (Andrew Raij, PhD)

And a closing full conference discussion on Integrative Themes and Action led by
Robert Gold, PhD, DrPH, Dean, University of Maryland College Park School of Public Health.


SO here's where to register and get more information. Hope to see you there!

Why Use Marketing in Social Change Programs?

My discussion on social marketing and social change with Don Akchin, a principal of Nonprofit Marketing 360, was published this week on the MKCREATIVE blog (#INTERVIEW: Craig Lefebvre, Designer of Public Health & Social Change Programs, Discusses Social Marketing - you will have to scroll down the page to find it). We cover the history of this blog, why it’s a great time to be a social marketer, the confusion of social marketing with social media marketing, and the next frontiers for social marketing. He ended with this observation.

MKC: You seem to be making a good case for thinking about problems from a marketing perspective, even if you’re not a social marketer.

CRAIG: I think the marketing approach can bring a systematic perspective for thinking about how we start to solve some of these problems that we see set up for ourselves, and can help us work through that process. That’s certainly why many of us got involved in social marketing. I started off wondering how do you reduce heart disease risk factors in an entire community? Not sitting in a patient education clinic! You have to think about changes at scale, and that’s what marketers and marketing as a discipline is really all about. People who are looking to change society or change their corner of their neighborhood can find a lot of inspiration in what marketing has to offer.

If you’re new to the ideas, or want a refresher, try these for starters:

The Change We Need: New Ways of Thinking About Social Issues

Making Change Happen: The Marketing Approach

 

Social Objects: Sharing Devices of Object-Centered Sociality

The most important asset you can have in a social media marketing program is something worth talking about - not a “message” to listen to, read or watch. There are no markets for messages, or to paraphrase the Introduction to the Institute of Medicine (2000, p.5-6) Promoting Health report, people in the health and social change communities have “messages” while the individuals they are targeting in communities have “lives.” Having lives means, among other things, that people are talking to each other as opposed to talking to someone else (that might mean you). Why do they choose to talk to some people and not others? Mainly because they share something in common, whether it is a passion for bowling, their dogs, work, Star Wars movies, a local sports team, being in the church choir, or attending Charity Balls. Jyri Engeström and Hugh MacLeod have advocated for the idea that all social networks consist of people being connected by a shared object – whether it is an intangible idea or a physical thing.

The development of social media parallels this object-centered sociality: we have sharing and SNS designed around pictures, music, videos, jobs, dating, diseases, hobbies, places and especially friends. This feature of social networks is often overlooked by many social media programs that attempt to ‘build communities’ around the producer’s interests (aka messages and brands), not people’s lives. Social networks form around social objects, not the other way around. The value of a social object is that they are transactional – they facilitate exchanges among people who encounter them. People see or hear a social object (like a juicy piece of gossip, a cute animal video) and immediately want to share it with their friends who they believe will also find it interesting, useful or entertaining. But the point of a social object is not simply to have something to share; it becomes the centerpiece of a dialogue between people.

Too frequently social media efforts try and discover something for people to share and wind up creating objects that are viewed and then forgotten in the privacy of their rooms and offices. Creating objects that “creatively communicate messages” is not the social media challenge; creating things that people talk about with each other in ways that relate to your program’s objectives is the key to having a social object. Social objects are personal, active, provocative (or surprising) and trigger natural, enthusiastic sharing.

When you hear about successful social media programs, if you look closely you will find a social object embedded in it. The easiest way to tell is by what the people involved with it are talking about. You have to listen and engage with the conversation around thier social object to get the big results in social media - not try and change it to suit your agenda. Otherwise, your social media program is just another message machine. As J.P Rangaswami put it: "If markets are conversations, then marketing is about the things that conversations are about. Not about placing those things or promoting those things, but about the things themselves.”

 

Reference

Institute of Medicine (2000). Promoting health: Intervention strategies from social and behavioral research. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.