By Penny Langfield

Social marketing may be an effective online tool as long as it is not used to preach to online communities, according to an American expert.

Craig Lefebvre, from the Department of Prevention and Community Health at George Washington University in the United States, urged social marketers to join the crowd of online communities and social networks.

“The more different ways that people are exposed to messages and to programs and ideas influences whether they adopt them,” he told delegates at the International Nonprofit and Social Marketing Conference in Brisbane recently.

“The most important thing is not what to do – it’s how many different things can we do.”

Professor Lefebvre explained that traditional health communication campaigns, including anti-drinking or non-smoking initiatives, typically had just a 5 per cent chance of creating a positive change. While social networking systems could help break through the clutter of advertising messages, they required a new set of strategies.

According to Professor Lefebvre, traditional marketing methods should be dropped when using these systems because being a part of the community is more important than preaching to it.

“It’s not an audience, it’s a community, so we have a choice as social marketers to either join the community or not, but the expectation…is that we have to participate in the conversation, not guide the conversation and not lead the conversation.”

Professor Lefebvre emphasised that assimilating social marketing with social networking is the most effective way to elicit behavioural changes even though audiences could quickly respond or “mangle the message” through blogs or other means. He added that governments should not shy away from the medium for fear that that audience could put their messages alongside the official line.

“Hello! They always changed it, you just didn’t know about it before. Now you see the blog post and the words are different. Before they just did it by word of mouth and you didn’t have any way of tracking it,” he said.

Professor Lefebvre used weight-loss goals as an example of social networks bringing like-minded people together.

“Someone wants to lose weight but is surrounded by groups of friends who are overweight, so how can we connect you, virtually, to people who are also losing weight? You can create a social support network.”

He said mobile phone and internet dieting services such as My Food Phone could provide education and scientific support to help social marketers and citizens reach their goals.

“Take a picture of what you’re eating, send it in to My Food Phone company and their nutritionist will actually look at that picture and give you a rough estimate of calories and a couple of macro nutrients and send that back to you,” Professor Lefebvre explained.