When does common sense make little sense? How do we sense-make evidence when it seems to make little sense? The answers could lie in getting inside the heads of those we seek to influence and designing our communications for empathy and health. Evidence in public / health Last week there was a brief uproar in …
Yesterday I posted on the story of Toronto Public Health tweeting a call for its followers to voice concerns to the TV show “The View” about the recent hiring of Jenny McCarthy, a prominent anti-vaccination advocate, as its new co-host. Today, Nicole Ghanie-Opondo reflects more deeply on what kind of impact such tweeting really has …
Attack on Anti-vac – Toronto Public Health vs. Jenny McCarthy Read More »
Public health is regrettably not a field that I often think of when I consider powerful examples of using social media for change and impact, but every so often something changes that. Monday something changed. Toronto Public Health, one of the largest health units of its kind in North America, took to Twitter to voice …
Public Health and Social Media: Catching Fire From Small Sparks Read More »
If a health scare manifested itself in the world and there were no journalists to cover the story, what would the impact on the public be? That is a question that lingered with me throughout the start of the 2013 Ontario Public Health Convention (TOPHC) which began with a morning dedicated to improving public health communication. Opening up …
The Importance of Journalism to Public Health: 10 Years After SARS How Are We Doing? Read More »
Health content needs systems in place to do support its integration into practice. These are human systems and those are built on relationships. We are starting to pay more attention to the way in which content is created now it is time to pay as much attention to how it is translated in real human terms and create the same kinds of supports for people that we try to do for content.
The revolution most likely will be Tweeted, but whether that is the cause or the consequence is why research on social media and social activism is needed. Otherwise, we will wind up with another chicken and egg problem.
Social marketing can be a problem when what we ‘sell’ has unintended consequences. These are discussed in light of certain health behaviour change concepts and theories.
An increase in well-intentioned health and education groups are violating the etiquette of social media by sending unsolicited emails to people and the blowback that comes from that might be enough to derail the good health communication messages to come.
