Spare Change

This week's edition of the Tip Jar comes to you live from the Las Vegas Strip, where I am participating in the Healthcare Blogging Summit. I haven't been to Las Vegas in about 15 or 20 years, and it sure has changed. What hasn't changed is the choking clouds of smoke on the casino floors, which is definitely not endearing this city to me. I do, however, love love love the Bellagio fountains.

• When we are thinking about how to segment our target audience, we often break them out by demographics and psychographics (how people think about things related to our issue). Forrester adds another dimension to consider -- technographics, or how a population interacts with technology. Charlene Li writes about the social technographics ladder, which divides the population into a number of groups: Creators (13%), Critics (19%), Collectors (15%), Joiners (19%), Spectators (33%) and Inactives (52%). Understanding how most of your audience uses technology will help you determine how to best engage them.

• It's not a very sexy issue, and not many celebrities have been speaking out about it, but as Tony Blair recently announced, traffic injuries are the second leading cause of death for young men, after AIDS. Blair is calling for a global conference on the issue of road crashes, which cause 1.2 million deaths each year. Sometimes we need to be reminded that we should not ignore the mundane, readily preventable causes of death and injury. We have a long way to go in addressing the behavioral and environmental factors that increase the risk of being hurt or killed in a car.

• Sometimes it is the most obvious things that are overlooked in trying to come up with solutions to problems. In Stockholm, schools that banned sugary foods and drinks reduced the numbers of overweight children by six percentage points in four years -- from 22% to 16% -- while the control group actually rose. It should not take a nutritionist to figure out that reducing access to high-calorie foods will result in reduced weight gain. Schools do not have an obligation to provide their students with junk food -- in fact, it is the opposite. I hope more schools will take this report to heart.

• Guy Kawasaki shares an interview he did with Dr. Philip Zimbardo, the researcher who conducted the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. For those of you who never took an introductory psych class, this was a study which randomly assigned students participating in the research to the roles of either prisoner or prison guard. While it was supposed to run a two-week course, it was terminated after only six days because of the cruel and inhumane way the guards were treating the prisoners. In the interview, they explore how situational factors can influence people's behaviors without them being aware that they are devolving. It's very interesting both as a cautionary moral tale and for its implications for social marketing.

• Phalligator explores some of the ways we could use a new tool called Wiffiti for health communications. It is essentially a dynamic billboard that people can send text messages to for viewing by anyone. It could be embedded in a website or enlarged as a public billboard, used at events or in educational settings.

• Via Trent Stamp, I discovered the Gender Genie -- a computer algorithm that guesses whether you are male or female based on the way you write. Though it was accurate for Trent, for four out of five of the blog posts I submitted, it said I write like a man. Oh well, at least I throw like a girl.

• Finally, Garr Reynolds' Presentation Zen blog is always a source of inspiration and insightful tips on how to improve my presentation skills. This week he went old school with a post on using flip charts to get your point across. We don't always have to be high tech to be effective in our communication. Make sure you watch comedian Demetri Martin's presentation of his "findings" to prepare for the next time you have to report on some data.

That's it from here. More on the Healthcare Blogging Summit to come later...



Photo Credit: Sneaky G