The Full Spectrum Blog

Last Tuesday, colleague Molly Hippolitus and I had the pleasure of attending a wonderful event organized by Ogilvy-Washington and the Center for Social Impact Communication at Georgetown University. The event was hosted by Alex Hughes and featured a number of excellent speakers, including:

• Susannah Fox, Associate Director of Digital Strategy at Pew Research Center
• Joel Selzer, Co-Founder & CEO of Ozmosis, Inc.
• Marie Cocco from Tobacco-Free Kids
• Jess Kutch, online organizer at SIEU
• Irfan Kamal, SVP, Digital Strategy in the 360 Digital Influence Group at Ogilvy

There was a ton of information to be learned at the event. What I took from the overall discussion is that despite obvious challenges in social marketing for improving health, there is a lot on “our side,” as it were. While all panelists stressed that traditional methods are crucial in spreading public health messages, they should be complemented (and not replaced) by social media. And there are a lot of advantages of doing so. In the interest of time and space, I thought I would break down the top three reasons the panelists spoke about:

1. E-patients take the initiative and make the personal choice to seek health info online. When organizations and communicators send out health messages into the online space, it is very likely to influence these internally motivated people.
2. Public trust of health information online increasing, and has been over the past five years, as the perceived quality of health information rises. It is a mutual growth–as organizations see the potential use of social media, they strive to put better information out there. As they do so, patients are more trusting, which encourages more organizations to continue using the Internet and social media to communicate.
3. We have the opportunity to bring together once disparate patient communities–such as nonprofit groups and government agencies which can partner and help to promote info together. Sharing information across all these different groups, each offering their own set of expertise is not only helpful for the health communicators but patients themselves.

However, it’s not all coming up roses. For one, many organizations don’t have the time or funds to hire a social marketing team or outside agency–they are busy being doctors and scientists and solving medical problems! There are also still the obvious challenges of exhibiting utmost transparency in an area where you can’t always do so. Of course you want to be able to be as open as possible, but hands are often tied due to financial issues or sensitivies around moral or religious sentiments. When it comes to social media, there are still a lot of fears of how information could affect a Board of Directors or investors. The challenge is balancing those concerns with openness and facilitating information-sharing as much as possible. Because when it comes down to it, some innovation and smart risk-taking can be used in order to achieve your end goal of improving public health.

What kind of challenges have you had with transparency and openness in communicating public health messages? Would love any feedback in the comments.