On Social Marketing and Social Change

New Books on Social Marketing

“This is it -- the comprehensive, brainy road map for tackling wicked social problems. It’s all right here: how to create and innovate, build and implement, manage and measure, scale up and sustain programs that go well beyond influencing individual behaviors, all the way to broad social change in a world that needs the help.” - Bill Novelli, Professor, McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University, former CEO, AARP and founder, Porter Novelli and Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids

“I’m unaware of a more substantive treatise on social marketing and social change. Theoretically based; pedagogically focused; transdisciplinary; innovative; and action oriented: this book is right for our time, our purpose, and our future thinking and action.”- Robert Gold, MS, PhD, Professor of Public Health and Former Dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Maryland, College Park

"This collection is a superb reference source for anyone involved in promoting better health, education, environments, and communities to start their search for great ideas and guidance." - Philip Kotler, PhD, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

"I'm pleased to see this very useful collection assembled and especially pleased that two volumes of it are devoted exclusively to social marketing in developing countries. Family planning social marketing is especially important in developing areas and this collection will help spread the word about that important development." - Phil Harvey, DKT International  

[click on image for more information about each one]

Social Marketing: A Six Volume Series

I have been working with SAGE to prepare a set of volumes that contain original articles and chapters to document the past, current and possible future directions of social marketing across the world. This work is expected to be released in February 2013. Pre-publication discounts are now available at their website.

I had several guiding principles for the selection of work to be included in this series. First, all papers have appeared in English language, peer-reviewed journals across the globe. A few book chapters are also included to develop a more complete picture of the published literature. Most of this work does not appear in introductory textbooks, and are often behind pay walls that prevent their broad awareness and use among academics and practitioners. Second, I have gathered examples from many parts of the world and on many different topics. I do not claim to be exhaustive in this curating, but have tried to be illustrative of many different points of view and experiences. Third, the papers in each volume form both a narrative of the development of the field of social marketing and to document many of the important milestones that have contributed to its growth and vitality. As you will discover for yourself, there is much we know about applying social marketing to specific health and social issues, but even more areas that remain unexplored. I hope that this series provides inspiration for the searchers for solutions to these and many other puzzles.

This series is especially intended for people and organizations that desire a comprehensive set of papers in social marketing. Be forewarned, the intended purchasers of this series are primarily libraries and organizations, not individuals (though you will make a great friend if you decide to gift it to them for the holidays!). Pass this post, flyer and/or website along to the people who make these kinds of purchases for your company, foundation, NGO, university, donor or government agency.

In the end, our intention is to provide a collection of papers that any student of social marketing, or any seeker of knowledge, can find insight and inspiration for how to address any of the wicked problems they confront in their communities or countries.

I want to extend a special thanks to several colleagues who responded to my request for help and for their suggestions of papers to include in this series: Alan Andreasen, Kelli Brown, Steven Chapman, Nancy Lee, Aarti Sewak and Alan Tapp.

Volume One: Social marketing: Conceptual frameworks and common ground

Volume Two: Social marketing in the developed world

Volume Three: Social marketing in developing countries - Part One

Volume Four: Social marketing in developing countries - Part Two

Volume Five: Applications of social marketing for sustainable behavior and environmental protection

Volume Six: Social marketing: Deepening and expanding the impact

 

"This collection is a superb reference source for anyone involved in promoting better health, education, environments, and communities to start their search for great ideas and guidance." Philip Kotler, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

"I'm pleased to see this very useful collection assembled and especially pleased that two volumes of it are devoted exclusively to social marketing in developing countries. Family planning social marketing is especially important in developing areas and this collection will help spread the word about that important development." Phil Harvey, DKT International

Sample articles that are included in the volumes:

The Pioneers - Philip Harvey

Social Marketing - Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman

Problems and Challenges in Social Marketing - Paul Bloom and William Novelli

Cultural and Structural Impediments to Social Marketing - Richard Manoff

Social Propaganda and Social Marketing: A Critical Difference? Nicholas O'Shaughnessy

A Method for Selecting Target Audiences for Public Health Interventions: Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Population Health Social Marketing Campaigns in Australia - Andrew Milat, Tom Carroll and Jennifer Taylor             

An In-Depth Interview Study of Health-Care Policy Professionals and Their Research Needs - Sharyn Sutton and Elizabeth Thompson

The Influence of the National Truth Campaign on Smoking Initiation - Matthew Farrelly et al

The Shoreline Project for Street Drinkers: Designing and Running a Supported Housing Project for the 'Unhouseable' - Steve James and Heather Skinner

A Social Marketing Model for Disseminating Research-Based Treatments to Addictions Treatment Providers - Garth Martin et al         

Community-Based Distribution: The Distributive Potential and Economics of a Social Marketing Approach to Family Planning - T.R.L. Black

The Importance of Socioeconomic Context for Social Marketing Models for Improving Reproductive Health: Evidence from 55 Years of Program Experience - Dominique Meekers and Stephen Rahaim                                                 

Social Marketing of Oral Rehydration Therapy and Contraceptives in Egypt - Karen Fox

Social Marketing Improved the Consumption of Iron-Fortified Soy Sauce among Women in China - Xinying Sun et al

Reduction of Childhood Malaria by Social Marketing of Insecticide-Treated Nets: A Case-Control Study of Effectiveness in Malawi - Don Mathanga et al

The Impact of a Hybrid Social Marketing Intervention on Inequities in Access, Ownership and Use of Insecticide-Treated Nets - Sohail Agha et al

Community Involvement in Social Marketing: Guineaworm Control - W.R. Brieger, J. Ramakrishna and J.D. Adeniyi

Behavioral Indicators of Household Decision-Making and Demand for Sanitation and Potential Gains from Social Marketing in Ghana - Marion Jenkins and Beth Scott

Promotion of Physical Activity in a Developing Country: The Agita São Paulo Experience - Victor Matsudo et al

Social Franchising of T.B. Care through Private G.P.s in Myanmar: An Assessment of Treatment Results, Access, Equity and Financial Protection - Knut Lönnroth et al

Implementing a Community-Based Social Marketing Program to Increase Recycling - Tracey Haldeman and Jeanine Warisse Turner

Integrating Social Marketing into Sustainable Resource Management at Padre Island National Seashore - Po-Hsin Lai et al

An Application of the Social Marketing Perspective to Environmental Policy Development: Information, Incentives and Pro-Environmental Consumer Behaviors - Paul Stern

Ready to Fly Solo? Reducing Social Marketing's Dependence on Commercial Marketing Theory - Sue Peattie and Ken Peattie

Extending the Vision of Social Marketing through Social Capital Theory: Marketing in the Context of Intricate Exchange and Market Failure - Alicia Glenane-Antoniads et al

Behavioral Economics and Marketing in Aid of Decision-Making among the Poor - Marianne Bertrand, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir

New Ways to Make People Save - Annamaria Lusardi, Punam Anand Keller and Adam Keller

Condom Social Marketing in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Total Market Approach - Steven Chapman et al

From Family Planning to HIV/AIDS Prevention to Poverty Alleviation: A Conversation with Mechai Viravaidya - Glenn Melnick

For more information about the series and price, and to see the complete list of articles that are included in the series.

Or download the flyer.

Read the Book: On Social Marketing and Social Change

Five years of the most popular posts on social marketing and social change are now available for personal and classroom use in the easy to use print version. I realize everyone is not reading the blog, and that another format for some users and contexts is way overdue. So here it is -- an excerpt from the Introduction:

" "My exploration of blogging has taken me deeply into the social marketing space, but more importantly, it opened up unforeseen opportunities to become involved in social and mobile media. This book is another format to introduce and reacquaint some of you with this journey. I have not tried to do this in chronological order as the journey has been anything but linear. And given the inability of print to embed the numerous links that demonstrate the interconnectedness of many of the posts, I have put them together into thematic categories like you would find them on the site. What I have done in putting this book together is to refer to my web analytics and selected from the most popular pages for many of these posts. And yes, there are a few that I believe you should read even if they didn’t win the popularity contest.

Section 1, On Social Marketing contains posts that are an orientation to my concept of what social marketing is and what it could be. To this latter point, I selected ‘The Social Marketing Manifesto” to kick things off, even though it appeared later than some of the others. Without listing them all, beginning with “Making Change Happen” comes a collection of ideas about social marketing. Later I cover some ideas from outside the field that are important for us to incorporate into our thinking about social change including the Total Market Approach, the Base of the Pyramid idea, and Creative Capitalism. And ‘No!’ these approaches are not just for people practicing in the ‘developing world’ – all nations are developing.

People Formerly Known as the Audience introduces the soul of social marketing: people. If there is a theme to this collection, it is that social marketers need to stop thinking about passive audiences, or persons they invite to focus groups, and seek to understand them and know them as people first who have as much to contribute to what we do as the so-called experts.

A battle cry of mine for over a dozen years has been on the tyranny of focus groups and the irrational belief that these contrived and sterile environments are somehow giving us wisdom about people we serve. Into the Jungle is a series of posts about attitude as much as it is about methods, and explores some of the characteristics of people we use to call ‘audiences.’ Some of the groups that come into focus include people with low literacy skills, the people who make policy, the people who heal and care for sick children and their families and those who have adopted the new media.

In The Marketing Blender are a number of riffs I have done on the 4Ps of product, price, place and promotion. An intention of many of these articles, beginning with ‘Health communication; The 5% solution,’ is to challenge readers to examine their default behavior of using communication to solve the problems they are presented. Ideas about demarketing, price, and place-based interventions are covered as options, particularly in the context of obesity prevention.

Bring on Social Media is a section that many regular readers of the blog would have been surprised to not see here, though there are some social marketers who will wonder what all of it has to do with social marketing (‘aren’t those the people trying to steal our words?!’ ). In a few words here’s my point-of-view (POV): when the research informs us that interpersonal communication is the most powerful behavior change modality, we have a responsibility to harness that for social good and to scale up interventions. Social media and mobile technologies, I believe, are the most effective ways we yet have to move the personal-to-one to the personal-with-many. Think about it…

One person you will see missing in virtually every text on social marketing is the manager. Many of us get caught up in teaching the doing, but having been a manager of many simpler but usually quite complex social marketing programs, I realize that managing the doing is, in the longer term, the more sustainable model for social marketing practice. So managers, and aspiring ones, the section A Manager’s POV is for you. In it I spend as much time looking at marketing management practice in the private sector and try to make it relevant to the public and nonprofit (NGO) sectors as well (see ‘McDonald’s Secrets of Success’ and ‘Learn from P&G’ in particular). I also hope that some of you will find the discussions of coalitions and partnerships, as well as fear, world-changing.

Over the past two years, I have been getting more involved in the area of design thinking, and sometimes those experiences have seeped into the blog (not as much as it should, but stay tuned on the blog). Design thinking starts where social marketing does, or should – with people. The collection of posts in Design Thinking are the beginning of the explorations of overlap and cross-fertilization across these two areas.

The final section, The Change We Need includes the advocacy pieces for how social marketing should be participating in the social change space, another arena where we have been underrepresented and risk becoming inconsequential. I was delighted that one of them, ‘The Change We Need: New Ways of Thinking About Social Issues,” was reproduced in Social Marketing Quarterly. Perhaps, these posts will inspire you to lift the conversation about social marketing from 4Ps and formative research to change. As several of my blogging friends have commented in the past: when will you guys stop talking about it and start doing it? When indeed."

You can purchase the book for $19.95 at the CreateSpace eBook store and also at Amazon. Bulk purchases for classroom and libraries are available through their customary purchasing sources as well. And yes, for those of you who would rather not pay for Shipping and Handling, the eBook will be available in the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned!

 

 

 

 

Unwinding Social Media Marketing

If your organization aspires to learn to listen to online conversations, use what you learn there to develop segmentation strategies, put these insights to work by building communities around shared enthusiasm and conversations, allow members to become evangelists for your brand or cause, and - as an added benefit - transform the culture of your own organization... then read on. Paul Gillin's Secrets of Social Media Marketing is the book for social marketers, public relations and public affairs staff, public information officers and especially senior managers who are teetering on the edge of chaos - whether to jump into this new world of blogs, podcasts, social networks and virtual worlds and embrace it. Or - wait for the frenzy to pass and things return to the old normal. As I have been writing about here for several years, and Paul goes to great lengths to also address, the sins of the new media are now clear: fear and inaction. Paul's book is the best example and guidebook I have seen for how to learn to thrive on the chaos. After reading it, the principles underlying much of what is happening in the social media space and how to begin navigating in it will be much clearer to you.

Paul's intent with this book is to provide a guide for the new business function in the public, private and nonprofit sectors - the Chief Conversation Officer. In the first chapters he takes on the common obstacles to adoption of social media marketing (for example, People will go negative, The ROI is unclear, and It is just a fad) and gives us good advice and stories to tell to rebut them all. A major point he makes, and that I agree with wholeheartedly, is that your focus needs to be on aligning social media marketing with business objectives and not become simply tactic-driven (e.g., Shouldn't we put this up on YouTube or something?).

I have been involved in social media for a few years now, and the information in this book, especially the first 3 or 4 chapters is comprehensive, dense and maybe a bit overwhelming for first time users. Take your time here because the rest of the book continues expanding on how to tap in and effectively utilize blogs, podcasts, social network sites, social bookmarking sites, virtual worlds, mobile blogging and recommendation sites through both his personal experiences and stories of successful corporate work. One noticeable oversight to me was that almost no space was given to discussing sites aimed at youth and teen audiences other than MySpace (see my Whyville flu vaccine post and today's post at 360blog on age distinctions in social media where this chart appeared). Another oversight from my POV is that there were no examples of social media marketing from either public or nonprofit agencies. However, his brief explanation of search engine optimization strategies, while admittedly elementary, I am sure will be an eye-opener for many. 

He spends a lot of time with blogs and podcasts for the reasons that these offer organizations the most control over message and conversation. They make a good entry point for the fearful inactives. His sections on contacting, engaging and working with online influentials and online communities offer a lot of practical wisdom and insights, and he identifies both 'how to' methods and vendor services to accomplish the same ends. I found myself keeping a pad and pen nearby as new sites and stories got my creative neurons firing. The marvel to me in all this was that for a world that changes incessantly, Paul's references and examples were as recent as a few months ago. It is a book that if you buy it now (and read it now) will get you pretty close to NOW. Which is saying something in itself.

He faithfully attends to metrics for success, such as they currently exist. The point he makes about what qualifies as success is that we need to frame that discussion appropriately: Were we able to learn something about our customers we have not known before? Did we gain useful experience with a new form of two-way communication with priority audiences? Do we learn something from our users that we did not know before? These may be as important, or even more so, than the usual analytics that tell us how many hits or downloads we had, what was our reach, what is our search engine rank, how many return visitors did we have and how long did they stay on the site?

Paul closes with the observation: Online communities will fundamentally change the way in which organizations interact with their constituents. That may be old news for regular readers of this blog, but if you need an 'old normal' media channel to unwind what social media marketing is, and the essence of that truth, for yourself, co-workers or senior managers, then this should be your next stop.

[Ed Note: This review is based on a prepublication copy of the book.]

Sticking With Your Audience

I was on a lunch date at a local diner when the conversation turned to music and whether I played any instruments. As I told my story about having been a drummer in a high school garage band, she asked: Can you play something that I would recognize? After thinking about it for a few moments, I began drumming on the table with both hands…

I recently received a copy of Made to Stick, courtesy of the publishers. It’s another of those ‘searching for the holy grail of effective communications’ books, this time by way of the stickiness frame developed by Malcolm Gladwell in explaining tipping points. The ideas for making sticky or memorable communications are pretty basic (at least to people who study communications). The stories they tell, lots of stories, make this a book to recommend to people who need to learn the lessons again. If it becomes the breakthrough business book of the year, we are in more trouble than I thought (see below).

As I read through their formula, some quotable quotes emerged from the story-telling that you may find useful in designing your social marketing programs. [Note: consider these the takeaways.]

• Simple – A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
• Unexpected – Curiosity happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge.
• Concrete – We [program planners and developers] might find our own decisions easier to make if they are grounded by the needs of specific people: our readers, our students, our customers.
• Credible – If we’re trying to persuade a skeptical audience to believe a new message, the reality is that we’re fighting an uphill battle against a lifetime of personal learning and social relationships.
• Emotional – Mother Teresa once said, ‘If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.’
• Stories – With a story you engage the audience – you are motivating people with the idea, asking them to participate with you.

The formula for stickiness: Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Stories (SUCCES).

The authors also sketch out four villains to creating sticky communications. The first three are:

1. Getting lost in the information or data and losing sight of the core idea – or burying the lead.
2. Focusing on the presentation rather than on the message – style over substance.
3. Feeling trapped by too many choices or ambiguous situations – decision paralysis.

The fourth one, the Curse of Knowledge, is illustrated by this story they tell.

In an experiment people were assigned to either the role of ‘tapper’ or ‘listener.’ Tappers had a list of 25 well-known songs (in the US, such as ‘Happy Birthday to You’ and ‘The Star Spangled Banner’) and were asked to pick one and tap out the rhythm on a table. The listener’s job was to guess what song was being tapped out.

Before they started, the ‘tappers’ were asked to predict the odds that the listener would correctly guess the song. They predicted the odds at 50 percent. Over 120 songs were eventually tapped out in the experiment, and the actual number of correct guesses was 3, or 2.5%. The tappers were astounded at how difficult the listeners found this task to be. After all, it’s an EASY, WELL-KNOWN song. The problem is that it is only easy and well-known when you know the title of the song and are humming the tune in your head as you tap it out. Tappers had no idea of what’s it’s like to just be sitting there listening to them tap (The Curse of Knowledge - we forget what other people don’t know or what frame of mind they are in).

How often are we tapping to our audiences because we know too much about what we are trying to communicate and assume that the audience knows it as well?

Anyway, back to my story. After about 5 seconds of my drumming, a guy in the next booth jumps up, turns around to us and yells “Wipe Out!”

If you didn’t see that coming…I suggest you go read the book.

Photo by TravOC 

Summer Reading Tips from NYT

Planning for the Summer for me means finding a couple of books, preferably fiction, to rest, imagine and recharge with. The New York Times has a list of the best American fiction books of the last 25 years as nominated by a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages. Cormac McCarthy, whose latest book was on my 'reads' list for quite a while, makes the list with two others. I'm leaning towards The Border Trilogy.

Technorati Tags: Cormac McCarthy, Summer Reading

Laws of Lifetime Growth

Johnmoore at Brand Autopsy has a nice review of the book Laws of Lifetime Growth that includes a brief excerpt from each of the 10 Laws. [Note to self: print and post by hallway mirror.]

NYT 100 Notable Books of the Year

This time of year leads many people to consider buying books for themselves and others for the holiday season - and those New Year's resolutions.  Here is a link to the New York Times' choices of the top 100 books of the year in the Fiction & Poetry and Nonfiction categories.  Note that each selection has a link to its review as oroginally published in the NYT. 100 Notable Books of the Year - New York Times.