Child Passenger Safety Week, A National Observance

September 20 – 25 this year marked a time when parents and caregivers were highly urged to verify that their children’s car seats are properly installed. Last week (Child Passenger Safety Week) and until last Saturday (National Seat Check Saturday), September 25, certified technicians peppered the country providing free hands-on child safety seat inspections and advice. Parents were told to visit nhtsa.gov for more information regarding locations they could take their car seats and receive personal assistance with proper installation.

These on-site inspections and trainings served as important awareness opportunities for child safety, and aimed to highlight that all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, have laws requiring children to be restrained while riding in cars. In addition, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), failure to read the child safety seat instructions, in addition to vehicle owner’s manual instructions regarding installation, could result in serious injury or death as a result of a failure of the child safety seat to be securely and/or properly restrained. According to NHTSA, 8,959 lives have been saved from 1975 to 2008 due to properly installed child restraints.

As part of this campaign and piggybacking off a national observance, TMN developed various materials to bring this important message to the Hispanic community. In addition to posters and earned media materials such as press releases and talking points to be utilized by NHTSA’s state offices and the public in general, TMN also successfully disseminated an article describing a hypothetical story of a Hispanic mother, and how properly installing her child’s seat saved her child’s life. The article has been picked up by top Hispanic media outlets and has reached thousands of Hispanic parents and caregivers about the importance of properly installing these seats. To date, TMN’s outreach efforts resulted in coverage in La Opinión, El Mundo and several others including Washington Hispanic, and Ser Padres blog.

In 2008, among children under age 5 in passenger vehicles, an estimated 244 lives were saved by child safety seats and adult seat belts. Research shows that child restraints provide the best protection for all children up to age 8. For additional child passenger safety tips, parents and caregivers can visit their local inspection stations and refer to the following 4 Steps for Kids guidelines to determine which restraint system is best suited to protect children based on age and weight.

And parents should always remember that children younger than 13 should ride in the back seat.
For more information on Child Passenger Safety Week, click here or visit the Facebook page.

Distracted Driving

With virtually every American owning a cell phone, distracted driving has become a threat on the nation’s roads. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), in 2008, almost 20 percent of all crashes involved some type of distraction, and nearly 6,000 people died in crashes involving a distracted driver.

It is clear that distracted driving is dangerous and potentially deadly. It comes in various forms, such as drivers doing one or any number of the following while driving: using the cell phone, texting, eating, drinking, talking with passengers, as well as using in-vehicle technologies and portable electronic devices.

NHTSA has identified three main types of distracted driving:

• Visual — Drivers taking their eyes off the road
• Manual — Drivers taking their hands off the wheel
• Cognitive — Drivers taking their minds off the task of driving

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reports that drivers who use a hand-held device are four times as likely to be involved in crashes serious enough to injure themselves. Based on research by Carnegie Mellon, driving while using a cell phone reduces the amount of brain activity associated with driving by 37 percent.

Recent efforts to ban distracted driving have been initiated by public and private organizations as well as concerned citizens. Under the slogan “Put It Down,” the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) is leading the effort to put an end to distracted driving. DOT Secretary Ray LaHood has encouraged citizens to become his Facebook fan and follow him on Twitter.

This past September, DOT held a Distracted Driving Summit in Washington, D.C. to examine the full spectrum of distracted driving across transportation modes: passenger vehicles, large trucks, trains, and transit. More than 250 leading traffic safety experts, safety advocates, and government officials gathered to define the problem and discuss how best to address it. The summit generated broad agreement among public and private sector organizations and policymakers about the need for texting-while-driving laws. Public surveys also confirm widespread community support for texting bans.

By the end of 2009, 19 states and the District of Columbia had enacted legislation banning texting-while-driving for all drivers, and a number of other states had laws covering specific types of drivers, such as novice drivers or school bus drivers. The  organizations that participated in developing  this sample law included Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, AAA, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CTIA – The Wireless Association, Governors Highway Safety Association, ITS America, International Association of Chiefs of Police, National Conference of State Legislatures, National Safety Council, The National Traffic Law Center of the National District Attorneys Association, Safe Kids USA, and DOT.

As part of DOT’s continuing efforts to ban distracted driving and under the slogan “Phone in One Hand, Ticket in the Other,” a distracted driving demonstration that focuses on law enforcement crackdown was recently launched in Hartford, CT and Syracuse, NY. The demo includes TV, radio spots, earned media materials, and web banners. The Media Network, Inc. produced the radio spots in Spanish and translated and adapted the earned media material from English to Spanish. Focus Driven, the National Safety Council, and several other agencies and organizations also are working on raising awareness of the consequences of driving while distracted.

On Friday April 30, 2010, Oprah Winfrey and Harpo Studios took a stand against distracted driving by launching a new public service announcement campaign and joining forces with some of the country’s preeminent transportation safety organizations to declare Friday, April 30 the first national “No Phone Zone Day.”

DOT, NHTSA, Governors Highway Safety Association, National Organizations for Youth Safety, FocusDriven, Students Against Destructive Decisions and RADD, the Entertainment Industry’s Voice for Road Safety, have joined Oprah Winfrey in the national day of awareness to end distracted driving.

The nation is well on its way to putting an end to distracted driving.

www.themedianetwork.com

New Media Tools Expand Clearinghouse Services

Lots of interesting things are going on in TMN’s clearinghouse business area right now! We just launched a mobile search feature for our clients in HHS’s Office of Public Health and Science. This feature allows people using cell phones and other hand-held devices to locate the nearest family planning clinic by texting a ZIP code to 368674. It’s the mobile version of the searchable clinic database that we also maintain for this client (found at http://www.opaclearinghouse.org/db_search.asp). For the launch, we also created some nifty little promotional materials!

Less than a year ago, we modified the web-based search site mentioned above to allow grantees, who are responsible for updating the information, to do so via the internet. This modification significantly streamlined what was a complex and taxing process. Now, any changes made to the data become live in the database when the changes are approved. As a result, the data in the family planning database can be kept much more up-to-date than was previously possible. Another exciting development is that our data will also be made available through clinic locator services at other websites, such as www.AIDS.gov, in the near future.

For a contract with the newly established Office of Adolescent Health, we created a simple online ordering capability. As soon as it became available, our orders doubled! It’s amazing how much the internet can simplify things for people. Last week, at the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association conference, we learned that an astonishing number of people in the U.S. now have access to online services and information—mainly due to the availability of the internet on cell phones. And on the list of what people use the internet for, searching for health information is number seven, not far behind social networking and getting directions!

The Definition of Social Marketing

The advent of social media has been a welcome addition to the communications world because it allows us to interact with our audiences in a peer-to-peer way like never before.  However, it has brought new challenges to the lexicon of communicators.  So-called “social media experts” like to use the term “social marketing” when referring to the buzz marketing that is common practice using social media tools.  However, many of these people are not communications professionals and do not realize they are conflating the term “social marketing” with “social media marketing.”

Social marketing has been around for decades and refers to the practice of using commercial marketing techniques to effect behavioral change.  Examples include anti-smoking campaigns, safe sex education messages, and other public education efforts mostly (but not exclusively) in the health communications world.  It is important to make a distinction and spread awareness of the correct lexicon within media circles.  It should also be noted that social marketers are increasingly using social media marketing (including us) to promote the public education efforts of our clients.  So fear not, the two are not mutually exclusive practices.  In fact, there is much social marketers can gain from using social media marketing to connect with target audiences.

For a lengthy and annotated definition of social marketing, see here.

TMN Enters the Social Media Era!

Welcome to the new TMN blog! We’ve been proudly unveiling social media initiatives within our company and this post marks our first foray into the blogosphere. Our blog will be written collaboratively by our staff on various topics that relate to our line of work, which is primarily social marketing and communications. Our service offerings range from Research & Evaluation to Clearinghouse Management to Strategic Communications Planning so expect our posts to cover a wide range of topics that fall under the broad realm of “communications.” We’ve pre-populated our blog with posts written by Felipe Benitez, one of our account executives – I hope you enjoy their informative nature. Please do not hesitate to contact us or comment on our posts. Thanks for reading!

Nhora Barrera Murphy, President & CEO