“The Health Benefits of Breastfeeding and the Impact of Infant Formula Marketing in Hospitals”
This is a Prezi presentation I made based on the SlideShare in my last post and the infant formula marketing campaign at Public Citizen. Prezi is a great tool for creating visually interesting, interactive, zooming presentations – a huge upgrade from Power Point that can have a much more powerful impact.
This is an interesting Slideshare presentation on the benefits of breastfeeding for babies and mothers. Did you know that breastfeeding is a form of birth control that is 98% effective? Regular breastfeeding prevents a woman’s body from producing a hormone needed for ovulation.
Filed under infant formula marketing, Public Citizen
Michael Brito’s Smart Business, Social Business is a great how-to source for converting a business into an interactive social media environment. He emphasizes that a brand cannot become social without the internal business, itself, first evolving to become social. This involves breaking down barriers between different sectors of the business, which he calls “organizational silos,” and fundamentally changing the culture of the organization.
In brief, this happens through a concentrated effort to implement “organizational models, culture, internal communications, collaboration, governance, training, employee activation, global and technology expansion, team dynamics, and measurement philosophy” that situate social media as a prominent component of marketing strategy. Brito goes into great detail to describe the changes that need to be made in each of these areas.
He also shares a variety of social media tracking and measurement tools so that his advice is truly actionable. Brito emphasizes the need to integrate the best tools for the particular organization, basing this on factors such as the current software systems in use, IT capacity, and the need for company growth, or scalability. A whole chapter of Brito’s book is devoted to different technologies available, from social business collaboration tools such as Jive and Microsoft SharePoint to social listening tools such as Radian6 and Sprinklr.
Technology, however, is just one of the three prongs in social business development. A business also needs to establish a solid governance model so that its employees know to engage transparently, disclose affiliation with the company, engage respectfully, follow the company philosophy, and follow a variety of other guidelines that are laid out clearly for them. The organization also needs to plan how it will provide feedback on social media platforms, measure impact, and develop over time. This is the “process” prong; the third prong is “people.” Becoming a social business requires a shift in the interactions between different parts of the organization – improving communication between different parts and finding management personnel who will champion the shift to social media. The diffusion of innovations model of behavior change tells us that few will be early adopters of social media. But promoting interaction on these various Internet platforms throughout a company, and teaching employees not just what to do but how exactly to engage, can increase the rate of adoption.
Brito points to the importance of measuring influence and ROI, from both a business perspective and one of evolving social media proficiency over time. This can be challenging because there’s no standardized measurement method. Not everything in social media converts into a monetized value, and different organizations tend to use different tools to track influence, including things such as Twitter retweets, RSS subscriptions, the comment-to-post ratio, customer retention, likes, share of voice and conversational sentiment. These are just a small handful of the many ways to measure social media impact, and none are perfect, but they can be used to demonstrate the importance of social media, growth and change over time, which can be especially important for garnering and maintaining the support of management.
The book also describes how there are different types of customers that have to be treated differently. These include venting, passive, used-to-be, and collaborative customers, customer advocates, and future customers. Brito also distinguishes brand advocates from influencers – influencers have a large social media network and their own agendas, and may write about a company (not necessarily positively).
Brand advocates speak out in support of the brand simply because they love the brand and its products. A company might want to offer new products to an influencer for review, but it’s incredibly beneficial to create a system for promoting and rewarding content creation by brand advocates. This could be something such as creating a special community within the company website, or otherwise mobilizing brand advocates.
Most importantly, just as Brian Solis emphasizes in Engage!, messages need to be relevant to the audience, the community, the time of posting, and other contextual factors. Rather than simply pushing marketing messages at customers, companies need to provide helpful information through social media by answering questions, resolving conflict with pertinent information, and being interesting by offering content such as multimedia and contests. This positions the brand as an important provider of information that customers can trust and believe. Determining what is relevant requires personnel and time resources – the company must engage in intensive listening on social media channels.
However, this investment can have immense benefit, increasing reach because customers are more likely to comment, retweet, post, and otherwise engage in response to content they care about. Relevant content also increases organic search results because the selected keywords match what customers are searching for. This content will also increase the amount of inbound links a brand receives from from related and respected sources, which also helps with SEO.
Brito discusses the option of working with a social media agency to monitor online activity, create a social media strategy and implement the program. An organization has to take into consideration the expertise of its own online team as well as research various agencies to select one that matches its particular needs – the type of organization it is, the experience of previous clients, actual social media engagement by the agency, the agency’s social media philosophy, and other characteristics. Whether an organization creates its own social media strategic plan or uses to an agency, Brito provides guidelines on the most important components to include. In ascending order of specificity, these are the mission statement, goals and objectives, strategies, and tactics.
My client, Public Citizen’s infant formula marketing campaign, can benefit from the framework set forth in this book even though it is focused on social businesses rather than advocacy organizations. All organizations should work to change their internal culture before engaging extensively in social media. Creating a strategic plan and engagement manual, implementing social media listening and measurement tools, engaging advocates and amplifying their voice, hosting platforms for idea generation by employees and the general public, and securing a social media budget are just a few of the items in this book that are universally important to modern organizations. Although a nonprofit might not have the same investments of money, manpower and time for social media involvement than a large business, it can work under the general principles set forth in Brito’s book and maximize its capacity to make a real impact through social media.
Video: Hospitals should stop giving out formula samples and coupons.
More information:
Hospitals that distribute formula samples are in violation of a 1981 World Health Organization code that prohibits healthcare facilities from marketing infant formula.
Children that are not breastfed have more medical problems, including severe lower respiratory tract infections, obesity, diabetes, childhood leukemia and more. Women who do not breastfeed have higher rates of diabetes, breast and ovarian cancer, post-partum depression and bladder infections.
Many hospitals across the country have stopped distributing the samples. A 2009 study by the CDC found that 34.2 percent of hospitals nationwide have stopped the practice, and in November 2011, Rhode Island became the first state in which all hospitals with maternity wards stopped distributing formula samples to new mothers. A recent study noted that in states with higher numbers of hospitals eliminating the distribution of formula samples, there are higher rates of breastfeeding.
Filed under infant formula marketing, Public Citizen
Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (2006) examines the new market of products, services and information that the Internet has made widely available. Our culture has increasingly moved online. Businesses that take advantage of digital technologies, which enable the sale of a much wider inventory than physical retail stores do, are doing incredibly well. For example, Amazon and eBay save themselves the distribution costs of physically storing and shipping goods by having the people who sell products through their site do so. Their inventory is dispersed, while information-based goods such as music and movies require no physical storage or shipment at all.
What the virtual storefront allows, Anderson writes, is for us to sell an enormous array of niche products. This was never possible with the limited space in retail stores. We can avoid the bottleneck of selling only what is predicted to be most popular, and just sell everything.
All the stuff that couldn’t have been sold in-store, seen in a movie theater, played on the radio, etc. can now be accessed online. And it can be accessed wherever we are, whether we’re geographically distanced from storefronts or searching for information and goods on the go. This book made me aware that my client should maximize web and mobile distribution of its message to make sure it’s available everywhere.
This accessibility is creating demand – a huge amount of demand. It’s not that one niche product will necessarily have an enormous customer base, but the aggregated bulk of these products adds up to a much greater demand than there is for the most popular “hits” and goods. Sometimes, web user-generated content does go viral, but this often happens through active promotion. Though it’s not about viral Internet phenomena, specifically, Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point is a great resource on the basics of social epidemics.
Consumers are no longer limited to the goods that hit-makers like Hollywood and big music labels push out to them. It’s becoming more and more evident that people have unique tastes, and therefore want unique goods, whether that’s 1970s horror film or musical subgenres like breakbeat hardcore.
Anderson talks about three major forces that have made this possible – the democratization of the tools of production, the democratization of the tools of distribution, and the connection of supply and demand via filters. For example, most of us now have access to the technologies needed to record a song or a short video, and upload it to YouTube. Then, filters such as search engines and recommendations for similar content direct web users to and between our creations.
These filters are necessary because although it’s now more likely that people will find the products or information they want, the long tail also includes a great mass of things they don’t want. Filters allow us to sort through everything so it isn’t overwhelming. They guide us deeper into niche content, to both find what we are looking for and discover new items of interest.
They use actual data from user click paths to measure behavior, where traditional marketing relied simply on predictions of consumer behavior that often led to business mistakes. Furthermore, while goods in physical retail stores can only be organized in one way, people can navigate the long tail of the web in a variety of ways. For example, web radios categorize music by artist, genre, user playlists, click path behavioral analysis, and other means.
Here, SEO (search engine optimization) and appropriate tagging of online content are of utmost importance for increasing visibility. My client can take advantage of this by integrating keywords into website code, and coordinating with similar campaigns and relevant blogs to increase inbound links.
All of this can increase the likelihood that web users will arrive at the campaign amidst the highly competitive field of information on the Internet. And when they get to the campaign web pages, Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think is an excellent resource on how to make websites user-friendly and effective in generating action.
Along with the expanded market for niche products, marketing itself is becoming fragmented. Companies are no longer as in control of their image. The Internet is taking us back to an earlier time when word of mouth, not public relations departments, dominated product and brand perception. As emphasized in Brian Solis’ Engage!, this is regularly occurring through social media sites like blogs and Twitter. Companies need to pay attention and respond to the online community, and Anderson gives various examples of successes and failures in this arena.
My client also needs to monitor conversations that are taking place online to determine the best way to contribute, and to get influential web users interested in and talking about it. In The User is Always Right, Steve Mulder and Ziv Yaar demonstrate the importance of developing online personas to predict how the largest segments of your audience will think. We can plan for optimal click paths and how we will align our needs with theirs, but ultimately we need to measure user behavior and refine our tools – all made possible through Internet technologies like Google Analytics.
Some things have changed since Anderson’s book was published. For example, as he predicted, Netflix’s reach is no longer limited by mail-exchange of DVDs. It’s now all digitized, and its inventory is immediately accessible.
This is what he describes as the elimination of production costs by selling content that exists as information bits instead of physical atoms. This article in the Huffington Post describes the amazing possibilities of 3D printing and the “democratizing of manufacturing,” which Anderson briefly discusses.
The central point of Anderson’s book is that we as consumers tend to inaccurately perceive cultural conventions as choice. This explains the wider popularity of limited-variety goods such as Hollywood hits, print newspapers and top-brand kitchen appliances prior to the advent of the Internet. Now that we know there is so much more available and have access to it, we no longer accept the status quo of lowest common denominator goods, services and information. The long tail is everywhere, even in search keywords.
We seek something different, and what each of us seeks is unique. Rather than try and predict what will be popular, Internet-based companies and organizations can maximize their business or information transactions by making everything available. For my client, this means framing its message in ways that are targeted to different niche audiences, rather than pushing out a one-size-fits-most message to all web platforms.
Because the Internet is constantly evolving, successfully engaging means continually learning and adapting to new platforms and online cultures. Solis recommends this be done through anthropology, sociology, and ethnography, which is conducted through engagement and observation. This was an interesting theoretical standpoint, and was well supported by his arguments for social media observation, participation, and using feedback to revise strategy.
There’s a book by Marty Neumeier called The Brand Gap (2005) that drives home the point that a brand is determined by public perception: “A brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.” What people are saying on the Internet is a huge window into public perception. By listening in and participating in ways the public appreciates and values, a company can guide public sentiment in a more positive direction.
Solis’ Conversation Prism can be used to find out where on the web we can best represent our particular brand and message. We can observe the cultures within each platform and develop what’s called a “Conversation Index.” By performing a social audit – looking at specific keywords, what’s being said, how and when, the tone and language, who the thought leaders and trendsetters are – we get a better picture that serves as a starting point for our social media interaction. This Ted Talk by MIT’s Deb Roy is a fascinating visual model of how we can trace activity over a long period of time. Like Solis’ social audit analysis, we can create a landscape of activity and look at it from the perspectives of location, time, and content.
Solis argues that documentation lets us know what we can contribute, and where and when we have opportunities to do so. In combination with some serious and thoughtful consideration of its core values, a company can develop specific policies and a style guide. Documentation and planning help it to avoid undesirable brand representation, and synthesize its efforts to avoid overlapping content.
All this is great planning theory, but it is extremely rare for small businesses, non-profits and other smaller groups (like my client) to conduct this level of research prior to engaging online. This diagram shows just how complex the development and adaptation of a social media strategy can be. Nevertheless, they certainly would benefit by doing at least some research and monitoring.
Once a solid plan is in place, content can be distributed to various online platforms through syndication of social objects and/or manual distribution. Then, aggregation tools such as activity streams and social media dashboards (along with dedicated content curation) can track the relevant web conversations about the company and its competitors.
Solis provides numerous examples of research and social media tools, but emphasizes that the tools are always changing, whereas the desire of people to communicate, receive attention and share gratitude is eternal. In this regard, he mentions the brilliance of the Facebook “like” button. I found this a particularly strong point, not only because it provides for the personal gratification of endorsements, but also because it allows content to spread more broadly.
It’s critically important to listen to the dialogue already taking place, and to engineer a path for becoming part of it. This facilitates seamless integration, while moving the conversation in the desired direction.
This is especially true in reputation management – allow “the good, the bad, but not the ugly” to reside, according to Intel’s social media guidelines. The “ugly” refers to content that is either deeply offensive, off subject or out-of-place. Negative feedback should be responded to in a way that corrects misinformation kindly and earnestly, and promises to make any needed changes in the organization.
Solis explains how Twitter has fundamentally changed the way brands are perceived, and forced them to pay attention to and guide the conversation in a desirable direction. He argues that Twitter did this “singlehandedly,” but this article from the Corporate Eye blog discusses how Facebook analytics are now enabling business to easily track negative web-based brand commentary on Facebook.
Also, a company’s web content can’t simply promote products or services. It needs to serve customer needs by offering information, answers, and entertaining content, and respecting the audience. Consumers can readily detect and tend to disregard pure marketing. Nevertheless, they should be connected to an “endgame” or tangible action. For a business, this might be the purchasing of a product; for an advocacy organization, getting the user to sign a petition or write a letter to a member of Congress. Solis writes, “popularity is not influence. Influence is the ability to effect action.” An effective web presence entices some form of action from its audience.
More and more, people are congregating around ideas and interests, and through patterns of online behavior that are not dictated by demographic factors. Businesses, therefore, can’t simply market to demographic target audiences – the “one-to-many” approach formerly used. They now need to take part in the many-to-many model of social media communication surrounding interests and other psychological factors.
Regarding blogging, specifically, Solis argues that we have to earn our reach and influence by adding value, being genuine and transparent. We also need to be interesting, using, for example, images, videos, and other multimedia content. Rather than using blogs to extend marketing, companies should use them to humanize their brand, and demonstrate empathy for customer needs and desires.
This article from Social Media Today offers insight into another way to gain interest and attract users. With the enormously popular “meme,” the same funny picture gets captioned and recaptioned over and over, spreading across the Internet in a variety of adaptations. A company could use a meme to say something about itself, a product or technology.
Blogs can also be used to develop connections with other information sharers and opinion leaders. Linking to other blogs often helps generate relationships, as does communicating with others through the backchannel of messaging, and using a blogroll to create “tunnels” between blogs. And linking back to company blogs in external online activity also increases visibility.
This is something I’ve seen a lot in the organization I work for, Public Citizen. Our new media strategist is consistently working to develop relationships with influential, “lefty” political bloggers to increase our visibility, but also connect bloggers to our policy experts as an informational resource so that they can produce higher quality, higher impact pieces.
This semester, I’m working with Public Citizen’s infant formula marketing campaign, which seeks to get hospitals to stop giving out free formula samples and coupons to new mothers. The practice discourages breastfeeding, ends up costing mothers more (because they tend to stick with the familiar, but more expensive brands), and inserts commercialism improperly into a public health setting.
The campaign can learn from Solis’, teachings, even though it’s an advocacy and not a business effort. Solis offers several best practices that are effective for all bloggers, such as providing helpful information for website visitors, answering questions, outsourcing to experts and other bloggers for posts, developing relationships with other bloggers and opinion leaders, and tagging appropriately to improve social media optimization (SMO, search visibility).
Engage! is a great tool for companies, organizations, and other groups interested in wielding the opportunity of a robust online presence to make valuable connections and improve image. It’s written primarily for businesses, but the processes it endorses for tracking and becoming involved in web-based conversations are useful for anyone.
The take-home message is, don’t just jump into the vast pool without looking. Take time to see what’s in there and how it operates. Develop a plan. Assemble a team, if it’s available, and train all members. Track successes and failures, and revise the process accordingly. Learn from the feedback and evolve. And don’t expect to become a master – the landscape is always changing, at an ever-faster pace. The best we can do is to try and keep up.
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