While the rest of us were busy facebooking, instagramming and tweeting our way through the 21st century, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was apparently examining the whole social media craze as if it were some deadly new strain of killer virus.
As those of you who are fans of the AMC TV series The Walking Dead are well aware, the CDC is famous as one of the last places in the world where flesh-eating zombies aren’t in charge of our dystopian world (at least for a while). For the rest of us, the CDC is supposed to be an important government agency that protects the United States population from imminent health threats.
Who knew that the CDC also was an expert on social media? Or that, using its apparently superior scientific powers, it had concluded that social media wasn’t really social media or even social networking, but social marketing? In news that should stun cat lovers and college fraternity and sorority members across the world, social media is apparently not about cat videos or photo albums from the latest kegger.
No, according to the very official sounding CDC website, social media is really social marketing and that “is the use of marketing principles to influence human behavior in order to improve health or benefit society.” Now the CDC may mean this to apply to something more than “just” social media, however, in a worrisome trend, I am seeing many organizations across the country rename social media as social marketing, and those organizations that are doing it in the healthcare space are even referencing the CDC as the source for their decision to rename the field.
So there are few problems with this approach. First of all, if social media is about anything, it is about the significant differences social media channels have from traditional marketing.
Traditional marketing is historically one-way communication that uses bombast, entertainment, theater or humor to “interrupt” your normally scheduled life with marketing messages. In other words, you may not be thinking about buying toothpaste or tires right now, but I’m going to be bombastic, entertaining, theatrical or even humorous, and interrupt whatever it is you are doing to sell you toothpaste or tires.
The key differentiator of social media — all channels and flavors of social media — is that it’s about the conversation. It is inherently about people communicating with each other, not about an audience passively reacting to traditional marketing messages shared in command and control style, focused on the 4 Ps, those 1960s standards otherwise known as Product, Price, Place and Promotion.
Another key differentiator of social media, as compared to traditional marketing, is that traditional marketing is the broadcast of one message or set of messages by one authority figure (a soap maker, a music label, etc.) to everyone else, who passively receives the messages with little or no ability to respond. Social media is about one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many communication. It fundamentally breaks the old command and control paradigm of communication.
Internet search and usage statistics show again and again that health is one of the most searched and discussed topics on the Internet. So certainly, social media could potentially be a great tool to help influence and improve human health, as the CDC hopes to do, by joining the conversation.
In fairness, on many levels, the CDC is a quite impressive communicator. Its own communications and the many, many resources it makes available to others are models of excellent communications behavior. This includes its many social media tools.
My concern (and this should be the concern of everyone who hopes to truly understand and effectively employ social media) is that we don’t take what’s important about social media (it’s NOT like traditional marketing) and try to bend it into the old paradigms, which are dying or dead, if not simply irrelevant in a social media world.
The power of social media as an effective conversation and storytelling tool is far too great to lump it into traditional marketing, a field that is often scourged and abused for its lack of authenticity and lack of two-way dialogue.
Is there any subject that should demand more authenticity and two-way dialogue than communication about public health risks? As I write this, there’s a health hacker story in the news in which computer geeks hacked a Montana TV station to broadcast a message that zombies (like those from The Walking Dead) were on the loose. It seems hard to believe in our don’t-trust-anybody 21st century, but some people believed it was true, apparently.
If that sort of poison is in the health communication water, let’s not muck it up by resorting to, or associating social media about public health with the broken principles and standards of traditional marketing. That show is over.
At WordWrite, we practice what we preach. If you want to know more about how we infuse authenticity and fluent storytelling into our social media work, click here.
