Failure Happens

Mar 10th, 2010 by Sarah Ragsdale

They say “failing to plan is planning to fail.” But what happens when you plan well failureand your intervention still fails?

The textbook Marketing Public Health discusses four types of common failures of communications interventions.

  1. Strategy failures occur when external barriers exist in the community that cannot be overcome by communication messages. For example, a condom usage campaign may be very effective in raising awareness, but if condoms are not available in the community, the campaign is moot.
  2. Execution failures are the result of poorly constructed messaging or targeting the wrong audience. We must always remember to do our homework and study our audiences.
  3. Measurement failures happen when we planned the communication strategy appropriately and delivered it well, but we had a poor evaluation strategy. Check out our post on evaluating social media.
  4. Expectation failure results from overestimating the campaign’s impact in the community. Change occurred but not to the level stakeholder’s expected.

We must remember that people and environments are complex. We can’t just wave our magic marketing wands and change human behavior without some careful consideration of human circumstances. Marketing and communications professionals must work together to avoid committing any of these fatal errors. Have you ever experienced one of these failures? If so, how did you overcome it?

Editor’s Note

See additional content on Living the Path focusing on recognizing, learning from and preventing failure:

The ROI of Failure

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Posted in Health Communications, Marketing Strategy, Public Health | 2 Comments »

Grandma’s a Teenager: The Importance of Digital Age

Mar 3rd, 2010 by Jane Sarasohn-Kahn

She’s 72, texting her girlfriend in Florida, and dissing her Medicare Part D supplemental health plan on Facebook.Senior Couple and Cell Phone

No, it’s not a scene from Freaky Friday – you might remember, the Disney movie (whether Old School with Jodie Foster or updated with Lindsay Lohan).

It’s digital age coming to communications. While we assume that younger people are “digital adults,” it could be tempting to label older consumers as “digital teens” – that is, naïve to the digital world, technologies and applications. That would be a mistake. Here’s a place where older people can be “digital adults,” too, when it comes to communication.

Wells Fargo, the second-largest bank in the U.S., conducted a study into digital age earlier this year. You can gauge your own digital age here on Wells’ Website. The bank is, of course, looking to serve its growing customer base 24×7, on-the-move.

Wells is among the most market-savvy companies, attesting to its place as one of the largest financial services companies in the world. They get market segmentation.

Digital age requires you as a marketer to stop stereotyping your audience. It requires a fine eye for market segmentation. And it’s a very important phenomenon for health and healthcare.

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Posted in Health 2.0, Mobile, Technology | 5 Comments »

Causal Conversation Webinar – How NORD and Siren Interactive Raised Awareness & Sparked Action for 2010 U.S. Rare Disease Day

Mar 2nd, 2010 by Fard Johnmar

As many of you are aware, we had to cancel last week’s highly anticipated Webinar focusing on the #SXSH conference due to an unprecedented snow emergency in New York state.  While we couldn’t focus on the conference beforehand, we plan to devote a future Casual Conversation Webinar to SXSH and what Shwen Gwee and his colleagues are attempting to workshopcoversmachieve.  Please stay tuned for future announcements about our plans. (In the meantime, you can register for the event here.)

Today, I am excited to announce our next Casual Conversation Webinar, which will focus on how the National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD) and its interactive partner Siren Interactive worked to raise awareness and spark action around U.S. Rare Disease Day, which took place last week.  Rare diseases impact nearly 30 million people in the U.S. and many others around the world. In anticipation of this event, NORD used a variety of social media tools, including Facebook and Twitter to encourage people to:

  • Better understand the impact of rare diseases on caregivers and patients
  • Help support organizations dedicated to accelerating research and increasing understanding of rare diseases in the U.S.
  • Take action by encouraging governors to issue Rare Disease Day proclamations,  participate in Lundbeck Inc’s Raise Your Hand initiative, which asked people to help raise $10,000 for NORD’s general research fund, and engage in other activities

Those participating in this Webinar will learn from NORD’s successes (and challenges) at increasing public engagement and awareness of issues impacting people with rare diseases.  This session will take place on Friday, March 12, 2010 at 12:30 p.m. (Eastern). To register for this Webinar, please use the widget below.

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Posted in Case Studies, Casual Conversation Webinars, Community Building | 19 Comments »

Webinar Canceled

Feb 26th, 2010 by Sarah Ragsdale

Today’s Webinar is Canceled due to NYC weather.

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Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Community and Conversation via Social Media in Europe: A Dialogue with #hcsmeu’s Founders (Part I)

Feb 23rd, 2010 by Fard Johnmar

Last year, Silja Chouquet of WhyDotPharma and Andrew Spong of STweM launched a unique pan-European initiative designed to “explore and highlight how social media could hcsmeurevolutionize healthcare by increasing patient focus, improving access to services and gathering high quality patient outcome data.” They launched a twitter conversation community, #hcsmeu, that currently boasts an active global membership and conducts weekly lively conversations on a range of topics focusing on social technologies in the European Union and beyond.

Now, Chouquet and Spong are taking their community building and collaborative efforts offline.  On March 31, 2010, #hcsmeu will hold its first event in Berlin, the HCSMEU unConference.  Choquet and Spong were kind enough to conduct an extensive conversation with me (via e-mail) focusing on the evolution of #hcsmeu and how social technologies are impacting Europe. This is the first part of our conversation.   Part II will be posted next week.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments »

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