Facebook has Nothing & Everything to do with Health

Check out this Businessweek article: How Facebook Sells You.

No worries, this is not one of those paranoid Facebook articles that's preaching abstinence from the world's largest social networks. So you can still keep your virtual friends, just.. beware of them.

FB is a tool, still very much in development and changing, and one that can be used in many great ways. Take, for example, me & you, together at last. [giggle]. Likewise, however, it can also be abused— or used in ways NOT intended— in equally as many ways, if not more.

The point is to UNDERSTAND how and why FB is used [not just quit it altogether].

The article is great for illustrating how hungry businesses are to wet your appetite and swallow your cash, and, with that in mind, how much media can affect our psyche, behaviors and, ultimately.. ugh, I know, but health.

When it comes to nutrition and health education, businesses really do reign supreme. Is it really any surprise, considering the amount of money that goes into advertising and healthcare?


Some food for thought and some highlighted snippets, in case you don't care to read the whole thing:

Question: How many times have you done something because someone you care about did it?

"The whole premise of the site is that everything is more valuable when you have context about what your friends are doing," says Facebook co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, who started accepting ads on Facebook as a Harvard sophomore in 2004 in an attempt to cover server costs. "That's true for ads as well. An advertiser can produce the best creative ad in the world, but knowing your friends really love drinking Coke is the best endorsement for Coke you can possibly get."

Question: Are there really that many people engaged in advertising and branding?

"A year ago, Facebook was an afterthought," says Carol Kruse, vice-president, global interactive marketing, at Coca-Cola (KO), which has more than 12 million Facebook fans. "As we go into 2011, it's fully integrated into our marketing plans, with a reliance and a focus on it."

Question: How are businesses using social media?

Facebook calls its ads "engagement ads," because they ask users to take action: play a video, vote in a poll, RSVP to an event, or just comment or click a button to indicate that they "like" it. The "like" button, which Facebook has gradually attached to just about every piece of content on its site and others across the Web, is intended to convey a general recommendation to a member's friends. So while a great majority of users ignore the great majority of ads on Facebook, the numbers change when, say, an ad for a local restaurant is footnoted by friends' names: ("Jordan, Jen, and 3 other friends like this").

That social endorsement is a tiny mnemonic designed to make the ad catchier, and it works. Nielsen, which started measuring the efficacy of Facebook ads a year ago, says that if users see their friend "likes" an ad or has commented on it, they are up to 30 percent more apt to recall the ad's message.

If enough of your friends like or comment on the ad, the ad can escape its right-side quarantine and jump into your main news feed, along with the names of your friends and all the conversation around the ad. The advertiser pays nothing for this migration. In the industry, it's called "earned media." (Think of a teenager wearing a Nike T-shirt or Ellen DeGeneres enthusiastically talking about a product.)

Question: What are the consequences?

Facebook's promise to advertisers isn't to get consumers to buy their products—or really even to get them to click through to their website. Instead, it wants to subtly park the advertiser's brand in the user's consciousness and provoke a purchase down the line. More immediately, it also aims to get you to "like" the brand yourself, which then serves as a sort of all-purpose opt-in, allowing the advertiser to insert future messages into your feed.

Think about it. Amongst the advertising fiends is Big Food trying to get you to eat as much of their manufactured crap as often as possible. Diet [& activity for that matter] is about ongoing lifestyle. So essentially, it's their job to take yours over, and, with 2/3 of our population suffering from overweight/obesity, it looks like they're doing a hell of a job. Literally.

What do you think? Do you buy it? ..oops. Not buy buy, but you know.. agree with, or Like, the argument? [grin].

Happy Healthy Juicy Powers of Social Media! For Better or For Worse.
Educators, Pay Attention!

Public Health/Edu, meet Today, Social Technology..

Food+Tech: that's the name of a meetup group I joined recently. Upon signup, they require you to introduce yourself. I didn't fawn over it and kept it succinct: 'electrical engineer turned nutrition educator. i blog about health.'

I didn't really know what the group was about so I attended their latest meetup about a week ago to find out. They call it 'Five On Food', where basically, five presenters have the opportunity to share what projects they're working on, theoretically in the realm of its name, food+tech.

Highlights of the event included these three speakers from..:

1) WindowFarms, which are vertical, hydroponic, modular, low-energy, high-yield edible window gardens built using low-impact or recycled local materials.

Goal 1: Empower urban dwellers to grow some of their own food inside year-round.

Goal 2: Create a web platform that allows citizens to collaboratively innovate globally toward more sustainable cities using locally available materials to suit locally specific conditions, a process we call R&D-I-Y.

R&D-I-Y: Mass Collaboration to Solve Environmental Problems:
The ultimate aim of the Windowfarms project is not primarily to create a perfected physical object or product. Rather, the targeted result is for participants to have a rewarding experience with crowdsourced innovation. The team is interested to learn from participants' experience as they design for their own microenvironments, share ideas, rediscover the power of their own capacity to innovate, and witness themselves playing an active role in the green revolution.

The windowfarms project approaches environmental innovation through web 2.0 crowdsourcing and a method called R&D-I-Y (research and develop it yourself). Big Science’s R&D industry is not always free to take the most expedient environmental approach. It must assume that consumers will not make big changes. Its organizational structure tends toward infrastructure-heavy mass solutions. A distributed network of individuals sharing information can implement a wide variety of designs that accommodate specific local needs and implement them locally. Ordinary people can bring about innovative green ideas and popularize them quickly. Web theorists like Clay Shirky claim that this capacity to “organize without hierarchical organization” will be a fundamental shift in our society brought about by the web over the coming decades.

2) Fresh, which is a grassroots efforts for a grassroots movement.. [It's] more than a movie, it’s a gateway to action. Our aim is to help grow FRESH food, ideas, and become active participants in an exciting, vibrant, and fast-growing movement.

Fresh uses social networking, such as Facebook and Twitter, to help spread the word.

3) NOAH [Networked Organisms And Habitats], which is a tool that nature lovers can use to explore and document local wildlife and a common technology platform that research groups can use to harness the power of citizen scientists everywhere.

An example of one of their current missions is called Vegetable Varieties for Gardeners, where users can share info with fellow gardeners to learn what can grow best in their garden.



Today, I went to another meetup event for another group- totally unrelated- on media and publishing. Co-founder of Foursquare and expert in mobile apps, Naveen Selvadurai, discussed key ingredients that go into creating a fun digital experience.

In case you don't know what Foursquare is, it's a mobile app that's focused on fostering social meetups/gatherings/community and learning/exploration/discovery of cities, particularly one's own, using game-based theory. The gaming aspect basically acts as an incentive for users— users 'check-in' to locations and when they meet certain criteria, they can win various badges [action->reward].

One such badge is called the Gym Rat, which you can earn if you check in to venue tagged 'gym' 10 times in 30 days. At one point in his presentation, Selvadurai shares a user's comment, which said his desire for this badge got him to go to the gym and is healthier because of it. Yoga studios, parks, farmers' markets, health food stores, restaurants with healthy fare, are other examples of how this app can and has been influential within communities, by themselves no less.


While these four ventures are very different from each other in content, they do all have an underlying common principle: that is, social media as a means to influence peoples' [each others'] behaviors. And isn't that what public health/education is all about?

[Rhetorical question.] Yes! Public health and education is about communication and influence. Social media is a [or, currently, the?] major portal & tool for both. We can't deny, overlook, or be ignorant of it anymore. It's time to get with the program, folks, there's a difference [many, actually] to be made.


Happy Healthy Juicy Wake UP! Social Technology [4BetterHealth], umm, rah!