Don't Say the C Word: Marketing Strategy During COVID-19

thank you to the lovely jen and rabina for their wonderful introduction i've been watching on my phone whilst i've had my slides up ready to go so i'm really sad that we're not all together at unisa for this event but it is an absolute privilege to be presenting to you from my home office in campbelltown i've got the husband and the kids at home as well so we're all one big happy

family so today i'm kicking off social media adelaide with my presentation called don't say the c word i'm going to tell you why i've called it this um a little bit later on in the presentation so for those of you who don't know me my name is christy sharma my job with zoc melon is to help public health focused organizations use social media to its fullest potential and i do that through

speaking training and running online courses i would like to acknowledge that the lands that i'm running this presentation on today are the lands of the ghana people i would like to acknowledge the ghana people as the custodians of ghana land and recognize that their cultural and heritage beliefs are as important to living ghana people today i would like to extend that acknowledgement to the traditional lands where you're watching from wherever that

may be and extend respect to any first nations people who are present today so the aim of my presentation is to reflect on public health and social media pandemic communications to look at the good bad and the lessons for the future my handle on all the socials is zoc melon so i would love for you to find me on any channel whatever your favorite is and on any and all of the

social media platforms before i get into the social media side i want to tell you a little bit about my industry because the thing i love about social media day is that people come from a huge range of sectors and industries we've got people in agencies we've got people in not-for-profits we've got people in government organizations we've got people in huge private sector organizations so i want to tell you about my

little patch in the world which is public health you can also use the term population health pretty much interchangeably they basically mean the same thing but let me tell you a little bit about public health so the public public health is really about looking at whole populations rather than individual health issues it's worth also pointing out something that i want to let you know is that we know how important public health

is as we've seen this year with bushfires and pandemics but globally best practice funding of public health is about five or six percent of the health budget and in australia the public health funding is around 1.7 so just to give you some idea about what the public health workforce it receives in terms of overall health funding a little fun fact uh that the public health community are prolific on twitter and in

particular indigenous voices are very strong on all social media platforms so definitely check out the conversations on public health on twitter to explain a little bit more about what public health is some of the top public health successes of the past 20 years include uh things like the uh almost the elimination of cervical cancer in australia through immunization and screening reduction of neural tube defects through fortification of bread prevention of dental

decay through water fluoridation the slip slop slap campaign has reduced skin cancer in young adults we've got fewer people dying through smoking we've got early detection of breast and bowel cancer and we have one of the greatest successes in public health in australia is our effective gun control measures and i approach my work in social media and a big key part of my education is that social media is a really important

tool for public health advocacy and that is both kind of advocacy around attitudes and shifting social attitudes for uh for policy change but it's also to connect with the community around behaviour change the public health workforce is made up of epidemiologists researchers policymakers people on the ground practitioners on the ground and of course communicators like me what we have enjoyed this year in public health is this newfound interest in our work

so this is the google trends screenshot of people googling exponential growth which is a bit of a nerdy epidemiological term which all of a sudden the whole world became interested in in about march this year and we've all had to really learn a lot about about public health very quickly as a community social uh social media platforms themselves have actually been quite proactive in responding to fake news about coronavirus so this

is a screenshot from twitter where if anybody was putting in the hashtag covert19 aus in twitter search that there would be a pop-up to get make sure that people were getting the right information from credible sources like the department of health and the world health organization so we were really happy that the social media platforms were actually proactively ensuring that there wasn't too much fake news there's obviously lots of fake news

but that they were actually very proactive in terms of making sure that people using their platforms were going to be directed to credible sources so what happened with pandemic comms and i love this tweet this meme that was being sent early on in the day oh sweet i was wondering how every corporation i'd ever given my email to was handling covert 19 and what we saw early on was that there was

so much of this kind of generic same z kind of communication that was coming out early on it was like so many brands felt like they had to say something that they couldn't just kind of sit back and not say anything i'm not sure if this was um something that perhaps your organization also maybe sent out sort of this kind of generic email about how they were going to be managing coronavirus

early on we were absolutely all bombarded with emails and updates and then what this contributed to was a little bit of kind of apathy a little bit of confusion and a whole lot of overwhelm we knew that there were people were not really concerned about what brands were doing because we were just trying to figure out what we could do in terms of the current restrictions at the time we were all

really concerned about what this was going to mean and we were all experiencing huge upheaval in our work and our social life our essential services our holiday plans and we were homeschooling as well so there was so much going on in those early days i want to talk about what this means for health information online and those key those key messages around coronavirus now even if you're not in the business of

providing health information if you're in a service that is has any kind of human contact like a shop front or any kind of interaction at all you were actually suddenly you would have found yourselves in the business of having to provide health information because you were talking about uh things like how many meters distance people could be apart how many people could be in the same room of the same store or

the same office building or whatever it is you had to talk about hand washing you had to talk about sanitizing all of these things all of a sudden we all found ourselves in the business of providing health information and i want to talk about um what this means then from a health literacy point of view so health literacy let me just explain that it's not just about the ability to read a

pamphlet or read the information on a box of medication health literacy is about those cognitive and social skills which define the motivation and ability of an individual to gain access to and use the information that we need to promote and maintain good health so it also includes things like being able to successfully make medical appointments understand the information that's been given to us interpret that information interpret things that would that we

read that we're told interpret that effectively and then make decisions around our health about um in relation to that information that we've been given so a little quiz and you can pop your answers in the chat i can't see it but i'll get you to pop your answers in the chat so the question is what percentage of australian adults have a sufficient level of individual health literacy to meet the complex demands

of everyday life is it a 11 is it b 26 is it c 56 or is it d 71 i'll just give you a sec to put that in the chat now think about the people who you might have around you maybe the adults i know that my parents i often have to reinterpret things that the doctors have told them explain medications and i'm not i'm not a clinician i don't come

from that background but sometimes understanding health information is extremely complicated so the answer is c 56 that means that only just over half of australian adults have the ability have the individual health literacy skills needed to basically cope with all of the other kind of information that we that we all have in our lives to understand what we need to kind of look after ourselves and stay healthy so does this mean

that we need to go back to health information that looks something like this this was an actual uh this was actual words that were above this uh sydney uh landscape um telling everybody early on to wash hands i kind of like the idea of keeping it real simple um but of course we're not gonna be always doing sky writing let me show you some examples of some bad and some better health

information that was online in the early days of coronavirus so these were from i think around march where a lot of the content that was produced was getting people to understand what the different symptoms were so the slide on the left and the slide on the right the image on the right i use the same primary information so they're all communicating covert 19 symptoms but the slide on the left which is

from seven news apologies to anyone from seven years here i don't usually kind of name and shame bad content but i thought this was a useful example of less than ideal health information so it uh from a health information perspective it's actually really hard to make any kind of sense of the rare common and sometimes wording the red in the background kind of makes it look super scary more scary than what

we would want people to be we're actually trying to keep people calm at this point whereas the information on the right in a table format um that essay health have have shown here from their instagram is a lot clearer and easier to read and understand so next i want to show you what um what other organizations we're doing and i'm really hoping that this will play this is from tick tock so

this is the world health organization's tick tock account i'm not sure if you can hear the sound or not but basically they're just doing a demonstration of effective hand washing and the world health organization were very very quick to jump on to tick tock and which i absolutely applaud them for because i think that they were really going across all channels they also started a whatsapp channel as well so they were

really trying to kind of cover every platform and get the same information across all social media platforms so it's not the most exciting tick tock in the world seeing um the head of the world health organization washing his hands but it's certainly an effective visual demonstration and certainly applaud them for giving something a go let me just show you what else is um some other examples of some really effective and rapid

response to good quality health information so the uh the national aboriginal community controlled health organizations uh who which are the aboriginal owned health organizations as opposed to government-controlled health organizations we're also very responsive in leading culturally appropriate health messaging knowing that there is no one-size-fits-all that health messaging does need to be tailored for different communities and different audiences so i really liked that they were able to respond very quickly and get

some health information out there um i also hopefully this one will show you this is kind of um not my favorite example of health information this is one that i downloaded last week from tiktok and i had to look up where on earth this came from because it was really obvious to me it wasn't a government uh it wasn't a government-led campaign this has been in the news lately it's a campaign

from uh business and sporting groups to try and get young people and and all australians to download the covered safe app i'll just see if i can get this to play so if the music's not playing let me tell you that it's kind of a bit and the whole campaign looks a bit look like it makes me cringe um so but i'm i'm not the demographic i'm in my 30s but um

i wasn't particularly a fan of the ad and i knew as soon as i saw it that it wasn't a government ad because there isn't a government agency around in australia that would approve that jump footage of a young person jumping down it wouldn't get through the injury prevention committees so that's just some of the some of the content that's going around at the moment um in terms of other digital content

and website content new zealand were fantastic i think with their website um which is still up if you want to go and take a look at it if you are interested in kind of um best practice and not so good practice uh social not social media website help for health information the unite against covert 19 new zealand information was really good and they've got channels of their own for covert 19.

you can link to those from their website in comparison the australian department of health coronavirus information it wasn't on a standalone website it was just on the regular department of health website um it's probably not the most easy to i know that i've got a screenshot here so the text is very small but um which wouldn't normally look like that but from a health literacy point of view i didn't feel like

it really met best practice some of the some of the demands of the website for people um who aren't familiar with some of the complex language i don't think it had kind of been simplified as much as possible the graph is kind of blurry and complicated unnecessarily complicated so there's a few things i wasn't particularly fan of when it came to the department of health website which are all still there like

these haven't been changed so this is still our current uh health information on the australian health website uh this is a screenshot that came from a reddit thread somebody talking um about how to communicate in a more effective clearer way and i completely this is not from a health promotion person or a public health person but i really like the way that they've explained this so it's much clearer to be really

specific and use really familiar terminology like stay at home get your groceries once a week then to use a term like practice social distancing because we're all like the the phrase social distancing is completely new to everybody um doesn't matter if you say social distancing or physical distancing like we kind of understand what that means now but early on we didn't really know exactly what that meant so just a really nice

example of how to how to use clearer more everyday language in our communication so let's learn from these examples and think about how you can apply that to your content strategy no matter what sector you're in so at the moment um we're still seeing a lot of like our news feeds still look like this there's still a lot of covert 19 content appearing on all of our co on our news feeds

and it's important to think that any content that you're putting out there is seen in the context of somebody's newsfeed which is still very much dominated by coronavirus content so it's still important that you're across kind of the bigger picture and not just trying to keep up with the latest um stages of uh that we're in as a country we still need to be extremely sensitive to tone of the content especially

in the context of anyone who is in any anyone who might be seeing your your content in new south wales or victoria which is still really um really up in the air and um the people are locked down and there's still a lot of anxiety going on in those states at the moment even though we're doing so well in in south australia this is the framework that i approach for social media

storytelling now i won't go into this now but basically it's about thinking of each of these elements characters your narrative your conflict and your heroes and thinking about that in relation to your social media content so the characters just quickly are basically your brand values and your backstory of your brand your narrative is what each brand will have its basic it might be um it's basically the story that you're trying to

tell what you're trying to achieve through your existence if you like conflict might be things like what are you what are you against um what are you standing for and your heroes are the people who you celebrate through your content so the conflict for example at the moment in terms of coronaviruses things might be things like uh anti like your conflict is you're against anti-civic behavior like stockpiling it might be that

you're against people who are doing anti-social things like jumping on trains and um trying to flee victoria um your heroes might be people like your frontline staff who who are showing up to work every day your heroes might be the leaders who are making hard decisions it might be the uh private sector businesses who are who have pivoted from making gin to making hand sanitizer so let's talk about some examples of

how i've seen this this play out on social media so an example of some really lovely hero based content has come from sa health who have very very nicely celebrated um saint nicola spurrier our chief public health officer so i've really loved how they have leaned into celebrating professor spiria in their content and showcasing um the important work of a chief public health officer in keeping south australians safe other examples of

hero based content we've seen from sa health who've celebrated other professionals in the sector and i've also seen this approach from other jurisdictions this is from our health service in victoria who are also celebrating frontline health staff through their content as well now the narrative i always talk about you know for something like coronavirus thinking about how to make it how to actually make it relate to your your overall narrative and

what you're trying to achieve this is a screenshot from the australian council of social services and how they're talking about their overall kind of goal of narrative around um social services and people who are on lower incomes and they're talking about how stockpiling can have a huge impact for people who are on low incomes and already have struggle struggle to access essential items through the supermarket and what that means for australia's

most vulnerable people so they're clearly making what's going on in the news relating to their overall narrative and i loved this piece of content from using the dolly parton challenge which was popular a few months ago now this is an instagram post from wait for it the hong kong university faculty of business and economics and how they uh have connected uh wearing a face mask to the dolly parton challenge and uh

kind of showing their uh their sense of humor and their brand personality even though they're the hong kong university faculty of business and economics clearly they have a sense of humor which i thought was um pretty clever of them you can see diabetes australia are also making uh connecting the uh the narrative to specifically related to their message so they're talking about the stockpiling of medicines in particular insulin and diabetes related

products and putting that out as an important announcement and piece of content i also thought it was really useful how this this post from the buy nothing project really showed how to respect their remit and respect their community so on this post they highlighted that they weren't uh they didn't have public health expertise that's not what they had that's not what they were about so for a buy nothing project which is

about um reducing consumerism they were encouraging their community to just be mindful and sensible about how they participated in uh swapping of items in a by nothing group so i think that that was a really important um example of uh not putting too much pressure on yourself as a brand or as a as a project or as an organization or whatever you are and acknowledging what your limits were in terms of

your knowledge of uh of coronavirus so um and finally i just also wanted to show this example from harvard university who were again embracing this whole notion that we've all heard before it's your platform it's your rules it's a bit of a become a bit of a social media management cliche but i really liked that they put on their instagram that they were not going to be posting updates anymore on their

instagram account because life as it was on on at the harvard university campus had changed so their instagram account was to kind of celebrate what student life looked like on campus and because they didn't want to com portray that it was business as usual they decided to stop posting updates and they let their followers know that and this is where the uh the title of this presentation came from it was inspired

by this post from the city of port adelaide enfield and they put out this post which was about library extensions and what i really liked about this was that they didn't even have to mention coronavirus they didn't have to mention the c word that every single other post was about it was kind of implied in the content that they have given all of the borrowers extensions of extensions until may in this

instance without making it about coronavirus so i'm curious i'd love to hear if people have stopped mentioning the c word the context here that we've got going forward is that we are here for the long haul we don't actually know if we're going to be having a second wave in south australia what that might mean it's making it's going to make it really tough to make any kind of plans going forward

but i guess i just want to convey from a social media content planning and public health point of view we are we still have a long way to go in terms of our content planning around covert 19.

it's really really hard to kind of sum up everything in this neat little bow because we are still in the middle of a global pandemic we know that victoria and new south wales are still in lockdowns um and in that context i guess keep in mind to avoid these kind of cliches these are some of my favorites i'd love to hear your favorites um i think that now more than ever is

probably one that really just annoys me the most um but uh so i'd love to um by all means take a photo of this take a screenshot um keep a record of what you're seeing on your feeds over the coming weeks and maybe even do a quick order of your content to see how many of these are coming up in the posts and content that you're creating um i think i might

be out of time so with that in mind i'm going to get to the end and i'm going to make sure to see if there are any other questions from you now just for anyone who is interested in um in those health days that we all hear about i do have a freebie uh on my website which is a list of all of the hundreds and hundreds of health days and events

and awareness days and things like that if you want to have a complete record of all of those then um you can grab those on the zoc melon website so just go to zuckmelon.com.edu and grab those and and i will stop my share and um see if there's any questions that have come through and or if um the refuel team have any questions that might have come through for me so