Mysterious trends and fads

From Google Trends, a popularity chart of social change buzz words over time (in Australia).

Noticeable:

...the decline of "environmental education" and (thankfully) "capacity building";

...the rise and rise of "social marketing";

...the steady popularity of "behaviour change";

...the strange invisibility of "diffusion of innovations" (arguably the only one of these buzz words that represents a coherent body of knowledge!)

The power of the world's best question

Steph Twaddle, Community Relations Officer at Environment Bay of Plenty writes:

"I was in Sydney on the weekend and saw huge flags on Darling Harbour and newspaper ads proclaiming: What would you like to change?

"There was no branding for any government agency or business so I checked out www.whatwouldyouliketochange.com.au. Price Water House Coopers are gaining huge amounts of community input on a huge range of issues, from all sorts of people. It’s worth a quick look."

"What would you like to change?" - That's a question you hardly ever hear from government...and PWC is getting flooded with answers, about everything!

It's hardly connected to a credible change strategy, I mean, they're an accountancy firm for heaven's sake...but it just goes to show people's hunger for being asked a really great question!

I wonder what government agencies and councils would learn if they stopped worrying about what they might hear and let rip with some really strategic questions?

Facilitating a community consultation for Warringah Council in the last couple of months, we got to pose some big strategic questions to workshops of randomly recruited residents, like: "If more money was available in the council budget, how would you spend it on?" and "If there was less money, what would you cut?" and "What should council be doing that it's not doing now?" The results were surprising, affirming, and useful, since they are exactly the same questions that councillors themselves must struggle with.

Is change social? Well, yes.

Nice article on research that shows how Quitting smoking travels (like practically everything else) through social networks of people who know each other.

http://socialmediatrader.com/smoking-and-social-networks

P.S. We keep being surprised by this kind of research, but the insight goes right back to the very start of diffusion research... a simply written, plain English, article written by Bryce Ryan and Neal Gross in a humble rural sociology journal in 1943...

To see it, go to http://chla.library.cornell.edu then search under "diffusion" with the author names "Ryan" and "Gross". Their article is in Rural Sociology Volume 8.

Against communication

Here's part of a conversation I'm having with a Luke Wright, a journalist who's writing about communicating change:

Well of course communication is vital however even the cleverest communication is a waste of effort if it does not meet a vital condition - that the communication is part of a conversation about things that matter to the audience. So, even though I've spent my professional life as a communicator, I don't talk about communication any more, I talk about conversation. A good conversation is, of course, two way, about concerns, stories and solutions that matter to both sides of the conversation. The commonest reasons communication campaigns fail is that they are only about things that matter to the sender, not the receiver; and treats the receiver as a passive vessel for 'truth' to arrive. The vast majority of social marketing campaigns fail for this reason - they are little more that government agencies having elaborate conversations with themselves.

Even though you want to run your story as about communication, I'd like you to ask yourself whether you may be perpetuating 'message fetish', rather than opening up a new and interesting discussion.

In the Arabic smoking story*, for instance, what mattered was the time spent listening to the concerns of Arabic-speaking people and hearing some of the solutions they had spontaneously innovated to their own social dilemmas around smoking, then depicting those solutions in an ad campaign that acted as a virtual conversation, providing solutions to matters they already knew were at stake in their lives. The interesting work was the listening and spotting answers to problems people were experiencing. The communication was not unusual or remarkable. It was just how the solution was packaged. What makes a gift great is how it fits into the peoples' hopes and dreams, not the packaging. In this way, the ad campaign packaged up just the right gift, and the art was in selecting the gift not choosing the packaging.

* See "The Art of Stickiness" chapter on my web site.