Hey Mike, A behavior change observation and two tips for you. First, understanding pros and cons for new behavior (blogging) is half of the issue. Understand the competition too; what are the pros and cons for maintaining your current behavior, or status quo? For me, opportunity costs weigh heavily - what I can be doing instead of blogging ( exercising for one thing, writing books and articles are recent and current ones as well)? Tips, I get competitive with myself and start looking at analytics everyday. If I am not posting, it shows ( yikes!). Call it " feedback loop." Set a goal, one a week for instance, or every two weeks, and set out a reward (that coffee or chocolate) and self-reward. And/or add a clause that you have to double the posts for the next time interval. Definitely use Dragon. It gets me over that "idea to words" gap. Remember a lot of people are not on Twitter, repurpose those tweets. If it becomes work and not purpose, reset.

Thanks for your comments Jeffrey. I have also had the bewildering experiences of trying to decipher the SMM vendors, especially when they are so divergent. Good luck with your talk next week. We need to start shifting the marketplace dynamic of SMM measurement from the producers' push to users' pull. Broad use of the transparency table for sources and methods is a step in the right direction.

Thanks for all of your suggestions Aarti! Your list spanned a lot of the social marketing waterfront, which I am glad see. The Zaltman article was not on my list. If you have a copy of it, please send it to me along with your mailing address for your free copy of the book. You can use the email link on the right hand column.

Thanks for your comment Scott. The 6 points are the core of marketing approaches to social change and are distinct, as a cluster, from communication, economic or public health approaches. I hope you find them useful tools and benchmarks!

Nice post and important information Mike. Yes, a lot of this is transferable to the idea of how we 'enhance experiences'- whether it be with the products, services, or behaviors we market in our programs. http://tinyurl.com/4yutgoz Everything from the environments we meet in with people, and provide services, to always remembering 'we think with our senses too.' You and others may also want to start looking at service design work as you dig into this more.

Glad to hear you have the 'innovation bias' bug too! Your description of the literature as 'more of the same' is exactly what I mean by the echo chamber comments. I have to go far and wide of the social marketing field to get any inspiration myself (and hopefully bring some of that back here). Last January I taught an 'advanced social marketing course' and the number one comment I received from the students - several with many years of social marketing experience - was how 'liberating' it was in allowing them to think about other ways of 'thinking about and dong' social marketing. A sad commentary on what should be more exciting and rewarding work. Hopefully the book will point down some new paths. In the meanwhile, stay tuned here.

Thanks for your comment Nedra and your ability to take the social marketing approach to so many others.

Thanks for your comments Brian. yes, the Snyder analysis did note differences on effect sizes (behavior change)depending on the behavior being studies. Generally, the simpler, or one-off occasion, the larger the impact on behavior change - which if I recall correctly was not more than about 12% points. Others, notably reducing teen use of illicit drugs, had a slightly negative impact. let me know when that review is done and your paper is ready for publication. Would like to feature it here as the online (and mobile technologies) for behavior change are clearly areas in need of critical review and rational expectation setting.

Thanks for the note Marya, I am sure a number of readers would be interested in your bottom line estimates for ICU needs vs capacity. I know that there were some public engagement sessions going on around the country in the past month or so, but I am not aware of how priority-setting and community support for those actions are coming along. Any others care to share?

Like the new look that makes navigating around posting quite a bit easier. being able to re-size uploaded photos is great rather than starting all over again. Finding that I cannot underline a word or sentence in a paragraph without it underlining the entire thing??? Why cannot I set a default type size - always having problems of blocking and moving everything - especially bullets - from 13 to 15 for example.

Phil and I have talked about this chronology before, but for your readers, the social marketing books and publications that preceeded his book with Roberto include: The Marketing of Ideas and Social Issues by Seymour Fine (1981), Marketing Health Behavior (1984); Frederiksen, Solomon & Brehony), Richard Manoff’s Social Marketing: New Imperative for Public Health (1985), Social Marketing and Public Health Intervention in Health Education Quarterly by Craig Lefebvre & June Flora (1988), and then Social Marketing by Kotler & Roberto in 1989. And many in the international world will rightly argue that the first applications of marketing to social issues, particularly family planning, occurred in India a few years before Phil and Gerald coined the term.

Sounds like you have cracked the nut. The issue with REALLY working with social media, and not just being a social media toolmaker, is that we need to change ourselves and the organizations we work in. That is what scares people. Thanks for adding that perspective, and the DNA mutations that need to be replicated by others.

Thanks for the note Christine, Each of the entries is followed by a link to the primary sources - two papers by Lenhart, then compete.com for the top 25 SNS and Global Thoughtz for the maps.