The List: Canada’s MarComm bloggers

I had a cousin who wanted to train herself to need only three hours of sleep a night, so that her days could be more productive.

Sean Moffitt, blogger Buzz Canuck, must have trained himself along a similar regimen. His research in uncovering Canada’s 1% Blogging Army, must have taken a significant amount of dusk-til-dawn time commitment.

It’s quite an exciting find  (and I’m not just saying it because I’m listed there!).

Information-sharing, and communities that share knowledge, are among my favourite things, and I love learning (see philomath), so to me, this list is equivalent to what a freezer-full of Toblerone must be to a chocoholic.

He decided he would visit and categorize every marketing communications blog in the country.

He categorizes this website as ’social media’, and with the summary ‘Nonprofit Social Media Activist’.

As for the “1%” ? Here’s how he explains:

Posted here previously, outlined by both Jackie Huba in her new book Citizen Marketers and validated by companies like Yahoo, Harley Davidson and Wikipedia (and certainly embraced by my company Agent Wildfire), in every audience of 100 people, you find 80 people who pretty much stay to themselves, 20 percent who browse, consume and talk about things when asked, 10% who actively go out of their way to talk with others, investigate and have an intellectual curiousity (these people comment frequently on blogs) and then, a special 1% who create content, who lead opinion and who influence through their insight and collaboration with others.

I’ve spent a couple of hours exploring this vast network so far, but there is much much more value here, and I’ll be back.

After this monumental task, he went on to build a wiki so that the network of Canadian marcomm blogs can continue to expand.

I have also not yet checked out his Power 150 post on the Top 150 American MARCOM bloggers.

That will be down the road a bit: I still need more than three hours a night.

How can health communication address declining immigrant health post-settlement in Canada?

Two years after immigrants arrive in British Columbia, their health is worse than when they arrived.

To me, that fact is staggering.

Post-settlement, health declines.

Why?

If a very significant percentage of your population have social, cultural or language barriers in the way of access to and through the health care system, how do you communicate health information to these communities?

In British Columbia, one way it’s being addressed is with an event called the Multicultural Health Fair. I’m promoting the event for AMSSA. It’s the largest of its kind in Canada - an event designed to provide multilingual, culturally-sensitive health screenings, health workshops, and health information to newcomers who aren’t comfortable accessing, or have difficulty accessing, the health care system. The research is both discouraging and fascinating.

Women who’ve been in the country over ten years fare worst of all. People from multicultural communities often don’t trust the health care system. In this country, it’s tough enough for the Canadian-born to find their way through the system. It can be extraordinarily difficult for people with cultural and language barriers to figure out how to understand and access health care services.

1. basically, the MFC develops and implements programs WITH the communities, as opposed to FOR them

2. Everything about the Latin American community garden will be in Spanish

3. Re Diabetes: specific cultural groups are at higher risk for Diabetes than the general Canadian population, whether Canadian born or immigrant. The reason they don’t go to health screenings is mainly lack of information about health issues, and a lack of services in languages other than English. This creates the trust issues.

Exhibitors include some grassroots services that are out there for the
multicultural community … like the Multicultural Family Centre. One cool program MFC is launching is with the Latin American community - one of the largest they work with here in Vancouver. They are creating a big Latin American community garden in East Vancouver. The community is designing it, the plants chosen will be related to their culture, and all signs will be in Spanish. It will have a grow-your-own-food aspect, and offer community-building to counter the isolation (threatening mental health) that immigrants often face.

One other MFC example has to do with diabetes. Specific cultural groups are at higher risk for diabetes than the general (Canadian-born / immigrant) Canadian population.

Immigrants often don’t go to to health screenings - because of lack of information about health issues, and because of a lack of services in languages other than English.

As I understand it, the Multicultural Family Centre trains people in each specific culture to run the screenings in their own language, and adapted to their own cultural sensitivities. And the public do attend.

Facts:

• One million immigrants live in British Columbia.
• One quarter of the BC population have a mother tongue that isn’t English.
• BC has the highest proportion of visible minorities of any province in the country.
• The South Asian countries of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal account for about a quarter of the world’s population and contribute the highest proportion of cardiovascular diseases compared with any other region worldwide.
• Immigrants are under-served by the mental health service system.

• Recent immigrants from non-European countries were twice as likely as those Canadian-born to report deterioration in their health over an eight year period.

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$75 K for winning HIV-AIDS video game concept

Interesting to see that mtvU (an MTV college network) and the Kaiser Family Foundation (innovative entertainment education initiatives) today announced the “Change the Course of HIV Challenge”.

The health goal is to reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS among young people in the United States.

The challenge asks gamers, activists or any student with a great idea to propose a viral, Web-based video game concept to help raise awareness about HIV/AIDS among 15-24 year olds in the US and - this part will be particularly interesting - to promote personal action in response to the epidemic. The winner works with the sponsors, and $ 75,000 USD, to develop and market the game.

The“Change the Course of HIV Challenge” follows on the success of “Darfur is Dying” (a student-developed, viral video game), which has been played by over a million people.

Deadline is March 16th.

Other interesting initiatives that bridge entertainment and education with HIV-AIDS information campaigns include Viacom/CBS partnering on KNOW HIV/AIDS, Kenneth Cole’s We All Have AIDS, India’s Heroes Project, Russia’s Stop SPID (AIDS), and the African American youth-targeted Rap It Up.

The Global Media AIDS Initiative, launched in 2004, aims at the media leader and programming decision-maker level, working to inject HIV-AIDS messages into all kinds of programming.

In the city of New York, 100, 000 people have HIV or AIDS.  To the population at large, the city of New York hands out 720, 000 free condoms a year.  Some health officials think they should be considering package design, figuring that they’re missing out on some tremendous opportunities for branding.

If they don’t go with an image of the vein-like NYC transit system, maybe they could find a third-party funder enabling KFF to use the condoms to promote the winning game.

Healthcare and new media - the cart or the horse?

Some interesting debates on how healthcare should engage in new media, from the CDC - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.