Unwitty Grumblings of a MPH Student

Sleep-deprived commentary on public health and society. 

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Hello Eric!

Thank you for giving such an eye-opening talk in our class two weeks ago. You have a very unique perspective as someone who simultaneously works with public health and the porn industry at the same time. I do want to hear your thoughts on a couple of things that were brought up, but we didn’t have the time to go too much in depth about.

First, what are your thoughts about how to portray women in a more positive light in porn? You emphasized that there are a lot of women leaders in the industry and how actresses tend to get paid more. In other words, the porn industry does have women voices. However, there is no doubt that some of the porn out there are degrading to women and seem to promote violence, etc. towards women. What has the porn industry done to address this? Is it an issue that people are concerned about? This leads me to my second question...

Do you think porn influences people’s behaviors and perceptions? What role do you think porn plays in shaping societal norms regarding sex? In your talk, you mentioned the importance of empowerment and destigmatization, which I completely agree with. However, what if some of this translated into bad unintended consequences? The porn industry has a powerful reach internationally. Where do you think boundaries should be set, in terms of the messages that porn sends to its audience?

Lastly, what would porn and people’s consumption of it look like in your ideal world? You are so passionate about your work! What’s your ultimate goal? And also, how long do you think it would take us to get there?

Thank you so much for your time!! Cannot wait to hear more about the exciting things that you and Joe are working on to improve public health. :)

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Social Listening & Public Health Interventions

A recently published article by Keim-Malpass et al. (2017) utilized Twitter to analyze people’s perceptions around the HPV vaccine. The researchers used an analytic tool called Topsy to search for Twitter content that mentioned #HPV or #Gardasil, which was done every hour over a two-week period. They dissected each tweet according to a pre-established codebook that combed through the content for themes such as sentiment, category of tweet (e.g., awareness, share research findings, share media source, offer opinion), and self-described user type (e.g., lay consumer, advocate/provider, political/religious affiliation, news media organization, unofficial lay media). If URLs were shared via the tweet, they were also analyzed as a part of the original tweet.

Keywords that they used to search for Twitter content were “#HPV” and “#Gardasil.” These keywords were very straightforward and pulled up tweets that were relevant for analyzing people’s perceptions of the HPV vaccine. They ended up with 1,794 tweets gathered for assessment. 

Social listening tools can be powerful additions to public health interventions. In the aforementioned study, the researchers were able to acquire a deeper understanding of the conversation around the HPV vaccine and how they could intervene to increase vaccine uptake. Social listening tools like Topsy allow public health researchers to “tune in” to conversations around health issues on major social media platforms, straight from the people themselves. They can also hone in on specific populations, which is especially useful for penetrating hard-to-reach and underserved populations. Expanding beyond Topsy, I would be interested in applying more powerful tools, such as Salesforce’s Social Studio, to my work in public health program design, implementation, and evaluation. While I am not necessarily focused on specific health topics, I am especially interested in integrating these social listening tools into the needs assessment process to understand my target population and design a more effective, high-value intervention. It can also be tremendously helpful to use these digital analytics to monitor program progress/impact and make adjustments if necessary, during the implementation and evaluation phase. A fun experiment to do would be to compare social media conversations and focus group findings of a particular population to see if there are discrepancies in the results obtained.

Citation: Keim-Malpass, J., Mitchell, E. M., Sun, E. and Kennedy, C. (2017), Using Twitter to Understand Public Perceptions Regarding the #HPV Vaccine: Opportunities for Public Health Nurses to Engage in Social Marketing. Public Health Nurs. doi:10.1111/phn.12318

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BIG SIGH.

If I were to summarize this post in one sentence, it would be this: if Albus Dumbledore represents public health and all that is good, then Donald Trump would be Voldemort. Hands down, this is the perfect analogy. Hear me out…

Donald Trump’s relentless pursuit of repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) without any plan for replacement is absolutely irresponsible and evil. “Obamacare,” as many opponents of the ACA call it, is not something that can be taken away without complex, adverse consequences. In addition to making health insurance and medical services more accessible to millions of people, the ACA includes many provisions that focus on improving the overall health status of Americans through prevention and public health. Repealing the ACA without replacement means the defunding of the Prevention and Public Health Fund, which comprises 12% of the CDC’s budget (Vox, 2017). Public health funding is already low enough as it is, since money is usually allocated towards more short-term issues with results that can be seen immediately (Vox, 2017). Public health focuses more on addressing long-term issues, such as chronic diseases and climate change (Vox, 2017). Since Donald Trump is such a “good businessman,” he surely cannot have missed the fact that “every public health dollar leads to a savings of $5.60” right (USA Today, 2017)? Or maybe he missed the mark, just like he did with his countless failed businesses.

Public health media campaigns provide the necessary education and behavior change motivations that are needed to help reduce the $3.2 trillion spending on medical services and pharmaceuticals. We cannot keep putting bandaids and temporary fixes on our nation’s health problems. We need to take the long-term approach and use prevention and education to generate better health outcomes for Americans.

It does not stop there. Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), Tom Price, is an embarrassment of a man. Much like Voldemort’s right hand man, Lucius Malfoy, he is hateful and ignorant. His discriminatory views against the LGBT community has very negative health consequences (Time, 2017). If Price were to become the Health Secretary, the LGBT community would not get equal access to healthcare (Time, 2017). In combination with Trump’s repeal of the ACA and defunding of the Prevention and Public Health Fund, LGBT individuals would not be able to access the health information, resources, and services needed to safeguard their health. Why Donald Trump has picked Price as his nominee for Health Secretary is beyond me.

Public health media campaigns are about to take a very severe blow from Donald Trump’s presidency. Federal funds have been the traditional avenue of financing public health media campaigns for education and behavior change. With the impending defunding of necessary funds, public health professionals will find other methods of practicing public health. Perhaps, campaigns will be funded by the private sector or by large non-profit foundations. Either way, we will find a way to survive Voldemort’s terror. It is only temporary. Dumbledore’s army will prevail. It has to.

Sources:

http://www.vox.com/2017/1/19/14310220/trump-public-health-funding

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/01/16/obamacare-repeal-threatens-public-health-funding-states/96535262/

http://time.com/4637046/donald-trump-hhs-lgbt/

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Possible Jobs & Questions

RTI International

Questions:

1) Is it possible for a MPH graduate to be hired for this job if they have solid experience in public health programming, project management, and research, but most of it is domestic?

2) Is this job (and other ones like this) mostly independent work or is there a team?

ICF

Questions:

1) Although ICF does do work in public health, how would having a MPH benefit a candidate applying for this type of marketing position? Is subject matter knowledge important?

2) What makes ICF’s marketing team “award winning” and unique?

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Quiz #2

1. FILL IN THE BLANK

To ultimately change behavior: the campaign goal was to increase AWARENESS and ENGAGEMENT, in order to CHANGE BELIEFS, CHANGE PERCEIVED ____NORMS____________, and therefore change INTENT… established precursors to changing BEHAVIOR.

 2. Which research agency handles the external evaluation contract for the This Free Life campaign?

A. ICF

B. RTI**

C. Banyan

D. CrossMedia

 3. What is the “gold standard” REACH and FREQUENCY goal of a behavior change campaign?

A. 70% of your target audience, 15 times a quarter**

B. 70% of your audience, 20 times a quarter

C. 75% of your audience, 15 times a quarter

D. 75% of your audience, 15 times a quarter

 4. Define the media metric IMPRESSIONS in 1-2 sentences.

 Impressions is the number of times people have come in contact with your campaign marketing content.

 5. Define the media metric UNIQUE IMPRESSIONS in 1-2 sentences.

 Unique impressions is the number of people have come in contact with your campaign marketing content (i.e. not counting the repeated times they have seen it). 

 6. Define the marketing term EARNED MEDIA in 1-2 sentences.

 Earned media is the media coverage and publicity that comes from doing things such as hosting events that promote your campaign. 

 7. Is YouTube an example of a BROAD APPEAL, BUT TARGETED REACH opportunity? (circle or underline one)

T**  /  F

  8. The metro station “take over” (advertisements on the station floor, stairs, and walls) described in the lecture occurred in which neighborhood in San Francisco?

 Castro!!

 9. Which app was more effective at reaching members of the LGBT community? (circle one)

GRINDR** or OKCUPID.

  10. The campaign makes extensive use of influencers.  Some of these influencers are YouTube influencers, with their own popular YouTube channels.  What format did these YouTube influencers use to create content for the campaign? (circle one)

A. Spoken Word

B. Q & A**

C. Reading Mean Tweets

D. Animation

@globalcommunicationproject -- I’m ready to take on Part 2!

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Battle of the County Health Depts!

The Facebook pages of the Counties of San Diego and San Francisco were analyzed through Likealyzer.com to see the effectiveness of their pages. Social media presence and effective utilization are essential for engaging with the audience and getting your message out. Likealyzer gave the County of San Diego a score of 72, which is pretty decent. The County of San Francisco received a score of 53, and greatly needs improvement. Both counties had their page information filled out completely, except for Milestones (San Diego had no Milestones and San Francisco had 1). Both could be improved by liking more pages on Facebook and integrate with other organizations. Although San Francisco has a lower overall score, it has a strong number of followers (255,280 Likes). San Diego also has a decent number (17,515 Likes) too, though it excels in PTAT (People Talking About This) and Engagement Rate. San Francisco, on the other hand, has very low PTAT and almost nonexistent Engagement Rate, which is surprising due to its high number of followers. San Diego does a good job with frequent posts on its page, though the timing of the posts, number of likes, and diversity of post types could be improved. San Francisco does not have enough frequent posts, number of likes, or good timing of posts. However, it does have a good diversity of post types. San Diego’s top posts are all within the last week. San Francisco’s, however, are mostly from the summer.

Recommendations for San Diego includes: 1) Add more Milestones, 2) Like more pages on Facebook, 3) Try to get more followers/likes, 4) Have more diversity in post types, especially photos, 5) Post at more popular times of day, and 6) Ask questions in posts to engage people to participate. Recommendations for San Francisco includes: 1) Post more frequently, 2) Post at more popular times of day, 3) Ask Questions in posts to engage people to participate, 4) Enable a comments section and encourage people to comment on the Facebook page, and 5) Try to get more followers/likes.

San Diego Top 2 Posts:

San Francisco’s Top 2 Posts:

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UNICEF #EarlyMomentsMatter Persona GIFs

To target each persona of the UNICEF #EarlyMomentsMatter campaign, I have created one GIF to appeal to each of the personas. They focus on three areas that are crucial for early childhood development in the first 1000 days of life: Stimulation, Nutrition, and Protection. 

The Mommy Blogger:

The Pinterest Mom:

The “When I have Time” Mom:

Hey, @globalcommunicationproject -- What do you think of the content? :)