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.

TMN Plans Montgomery County’s Recycling Awareness Week 2010

Each year, Montgomery County sets aside a week in May to raise awareness of the importance of recycling and to showcase the recycling efforts of schools, businesses, and multifamily properties throughout the community. The event is called Recycling Awareness Week, and it is one of the County’s most popular recycling education outreach efforts. This year, the County celebrated Recycling Awareness Week on May 24-28. In close collaboration with the County’s Department of Environmental Protection Division of Solid Waste Services, our event planning team planned the activities for this weeklong event.

Featuring magic shows in area schools, student poster contests, and numerous awards to individuals, businesses, and multifamily properties, the event was a great success. For schools with outstanding recycling programs, the County presented the “Magic of Recycling,” which is a magic show designed to be an interactive educational program on recycling. The goal of the show was to encourage students and school staff to continue supporting the County’s recycling efforts. To ensure that the shows ran smoothly, our team provided detailed logistical and technical support including timelines and production schedules.

One of the challenges of planning Recycling Awareness Week this year was to prepare the venue for the Recycling Achievement Recognition Program (the awards ceremony). Faced with budgetary constraints, the County moved the site from the Marriott Hotel (the customary location) to one of the cafeterias in the Montgomery County Executive Office Building. To make the cafeteria appropriate for the ceremony, our team planned every aspect of the program down to the details of arranging a staging room for the presenters and a shot list for the photographer.

Scores of honorees were presented with awards. Students were given awards for creating the best school recycling posters. Individuals, businesses, and multifamily properties were given awards for outstanding individual achievement, outstanding improvement, and excellence in recycling. For the details of specific awards, go the Montgomery County Government website. In the end, the sponsors were pleased with the program and recognized our entire team for a job well done—during the ceremony and throughout the week.

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 Sponsors Government 2.0 Camp

TMN is proud to announce its sponsorship of Government 2.0 – an “unconference” of social media leaders in government at the Federal, State, and local levels.  The sold out event will be held the weekend of March 27th in the Washington, DC area.  For more information about the event, see here.  We look forward to seeing many of our current, as well as future, clients there!

NHTSA’s 2008 Holiday Media Planner

The Media Network worked with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to launch the 2008 Holiday media planner.

NHTSA’s web page provides the following explanation:

This Holiday media planner provides communications tools and marketing materials to underscore the importance of not driving after drinking alcohol. It includes earned media materials and posters that seek to change the behaviors of Spanish-dominant Hispanics, a segment that has been slow to embrace the dangers of impaired driving. The materials can be customized depending on the needs of your programs.

The media planner includes both behavioral and enforcement messaging. Go to Holidays 2008 section of www.stopimpaireddriving.org to view the full planner.

TMN Research Published in The Journal Of Women’s Health

The Media Network’s project for the CDC to develop culturally competent and effective outreach materials to promote daily folic acid consumption among Spanish-speaking Hispanic women of childbearing age for the prevention of neural tube birth defects, such as spina bifida and anencephaly, has been published as an article in the latest issue of The Journal of Women’s Health.

Our formative research findings from studying 132 Latina women indicated the need for a new brochure targeted at mothers to correct their misperception that the birth of a healthy child reduces their risk of having subsequent children with birth defects.  As a result, materials tested positively with all three audience segments using pre-post test design which demonstrated a statistically relevant increase in knowledge and intent to take folic acid.

The article in The Journal of Women’s Health can be found here.

Reaching Special Populations with New Media

New media has become entrenched in the mainstream public relations campaigns of major corporations such as Pepsi and Microsoft but only recently has it begun to enter the government communications arena. The health sector seems to be ahead of the curve, with the CDC and HHS already adopting several Web 2.0 strategies. The question of exactly which populations are being reached with these strategies is still somewhat unclear, though a new study is beginning to shed light on the answer.

According to a new study by Synovate, part of the Aegis Group, YouTube is experiencing difficulty in attracting female Hispanic and African-American adults at the same rates it attracts their male counterparts. This gap differs from the “general market” population, where YouTube is equally popular among men and women.

Facebook and MySpace are also experiencing similar difficulties with Hispanic females. In contrast, African-American men and women are equally likely to visit the social networking website.

The study findings are significant for any health communications expert trying to reach special populations through Web 2.0 strategies. More information on the study can be found in the MediaPost article describing the findings.

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