httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRhXKTAG0kc

If you feel the awareness building fever catching in your organization or team, have no fear. Review these questions to get back on the right track. The TurningPoint Collaborative also has the following resources (for free!) available:

• The Basics of Social Marketing
• The Manager’s Guide to Social Marketing
• Social Marketing and Public Health:  Lessons from the Field
• Social Marketing Resources Guide

Last but not least, you can always ask questions here at SocialButterfly. Take a step today towards effectiveness–know that the social marketing approach works. Why else would it now be an official part of how our nation plans on improving our country’s health (see objective 13)?

On Monday, the BBC published an article that highlighted findings from a study, Kicking Bad Habits, conducted by the King’s Fund that calls for new ways of thinking when it comes for public health – specifically, more social marketing. In short, the King’s Fund study enforced what many of us in both the U.K and increasingly so in the U.S. is that what we have been doing to address health isn’t working, and that more social marketing may be the answer. Quote:

• “Social marketing techniques and data analysis tools like geodemographics should be used to identify, target and communicate messages designed to motivate people to change how they live.”
• “And public health programmes should not rely on just one approach…as the evidence shows the most effective interventions employ a variety of tactics.”
• “The methods used to promote public health need to be more modern, using the most advanced techniques and technologies.”
• “We need social marketing techniques to target messages and understand what will make changes worthwhile for people but also we need to make sure the healthy choices are the easy choices.”

You can download the full results from the study here. This article further re-enforces why the U.K. created the National Social Marketing Centre. Once I got beyond my own excitement that 1) social marketing was being covered by mainstreams media and 2) that the use of the term “social marketing” was applied correctly (i.e. –> NOT confused with social media), I started to analyze what this means.

I wasn’t alone. Social marketing great Alan Andreasen brought the article to the attention of the social marketing list serv. A member of the King’s Fund responded to the article on the list serv backing the application of social marketing. Social marketer Craig Lefebvre blogged his response to the post as well. Hallelujah!

So, SB, what does this mean? It means the time is now. If a similiar study was conducted in the U.S., I agree with Lefebvre that we’d probably find similiar results. What we are doing isn’t working. Taking a serious look at social marketing and fully integrating it into our activities, I think, would bring about much of the ‘change’ that is a-buzz this year.

As I shared on Craig’s blog, I feel social marketing truly can and does provide an umbrella for people with various expertise across a range of fields to approach public health and well-being. Won’t you join us?

To those on board in the U.K, know we are all watching, here to support and hope a similiar initiative develops here in the U.S. Perhaps an international social marketing association would help? (Hey, it’s at least worth another plug right?)

(digg the BBC’s original article here)

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