With the Christmas season in full swing, we are all going to be spending a lot more time on social media and engaging in a quite a few social media figh…. let’s call them, discussions. This is also a time when public health messaging is often in full swing, with the change in seasons and routines often being a perfect storm for potentially dangerous behaviour.
That’s why a paper in Health Communication by Myrick et al. (2023) that looks into the impact of user-generated mockery on health campaigns caught my eye. The study placed a focus on an ongoing campaign by the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) to highlight the dangers of eating raw cookie dough.
The campaign, which tackled an indulgent but potentially dangerous past-time, was met with backlash from social media users, leading to the generation of a number of memes mocking the campaign. I have provided links to some breakdowns of social media responses below. Myrick et al.’s study used campaign social media, combined with either mocking or serious user-generated responses and used it to test how exposure to this social media potentially impacted an audience’s behaviour.
They found that those who were exposed to mockery were more likely to believe that the behaviour is acceptable (ie. it’s ok to eat raw cookie dough because everyone else does it), led to increased anger against the public health organisation and reduced the intention to follow health advice. In addition, they found that mockery also increased the level of amusement of the audience, both towards the organisation and towards users mocking the campaign – which impacted how seriously the audience took the health message.
What it reveals is that those annoying comments on your public health campaign, are likely having more impact that you would have hoped.
Key takeouts
So how do you tackle this when you are developing your next social marketing campaign? Here’s some thoughts based on the findings of this research:
- Avoid mockery – The authors of this study recommended that avoiding mockery in the first place is essential. This is easier said than done, however the authors did make a great recommendation of using research to test possible mockery outcomes. I love their idea of using a meme generator as part of development research and encouraging participants to go to town on the campaign. Great way to identify the potential risk for your campaign.
- Read the room – Listen to research and advice (like the advice from communications/PR/issues professionals) about your campaign. Is your message going to land the way you intended it in the current health climate and your organisational climate?
- Choose the right channels – Social media has become a standard for all campaigns but might not be right for every campaign. For example, if you think a health message (such as stop eating cookie dough) is not going to land correctly coming from your organisation are there other ways to get this out? This could be through warnings at point of sale for pre-packaged cookie though, or a campaign through home-backing influencers to back your health message.
- Get ahead of the pack – The study authors also suggest that self-mockery by a health organisation can also help balance the risk that is posed by users mocking your campaign. It may mean taking a bit more of a light-hearted approach to messaging.
Links
- CDC Say No to Raw Dough campaign: https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/communication/no-raw-dough.html
- Some of the backlash:
- Paper: Myrick, J. G., Chen, J., Jang, E., Norman, M. P., Liu, Y., Medina, L., Blessing, J. N., & Parhizkar, H. (2023, Articles In Press – 2023). An Experimental Test of the Effects of Public Mockery of a Social Media Health Campaign: Implications for Theory and Health Organizations’ Social Media Strategies. Health Communication. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2023.2282833
Dr David Micallef 
Leave a comment