THURSDAY, JANUARY 19, 2006
Friday Edition: Volunteer Vacancies
Out in rural
Kansas, a story popped up that
emergency management officials say is common nationwide now. The little town of
Pretty Prairie, Kan. saw all of its
Emergency Medical Service volunteers resign on the same day. There were so few other townspeople willing to
volunteer that the few who did were constantly being called out to emergencies.
KWCH-TV (Wichita, Kan.) and
The Hutchinson (Kan.) News both covered the issue.
I have seen this come up more often than usual around the country. Interestingly, the shortage in some
fire departments is most severe during the daylight hours, when people
are at work, according to this story from Sheboygan, Wis.
In Texas, where droughts have made wildfires a daily exercise, the departments need volunteers as much as they need a good rain.
There are a couple of stories here.
One is to focus on the great dedication that it takes to be a volunteer paramedic or firefighter, especially in a rural community. It is not just the action
involved in responding to a call. Volunteers have to do the grunt work
of maintaining equipment and responding to false calls, too.
It also
might be useful to show the public what kind of training volunteers
go through in order to join the department. Several news stories I read
while working on this said that departments are getting older, and and younger
folks just don't volunteer as much.
New Pill-Bottle Inserts
The Food & Drug Administration said this week
that it is time for drug companies to write drug-package inserts that
somebody other than a brain surgeon can understand. This is the first
time that the rules governing inserts have changed in 25 years, a number of papers report, and drug companies have to comply by
June 30. It would be interesting to get some drugstore
customers to pull the box inserts out of the meds they just bought and
see if you could make any sense out of them. These are important
little publications,
because they can tell you what to do in case of an overdose, how to
properly use the medication and what you need to know about drug
interactions.
See stories in:
The Associated Press reported:
The
new rules banish many of the legal warnings that have choked the
multi-page inserts and move the diagrams of each drug's chemical
structure farther to the back. Now, there will be easy-to-read
information about the drug, including a highlights box about its risks
and benefits.
The
reduction in warning information had sparked concern among
pharmaceutical companies worried it would open them up to greater
liability, said Dr. Rachel Behrman, deputy director of the FDA's office
of medical policy.
Apparently
to assuage that fear, the FDA articulated in its preamble to the rule
the agency's previous policy position that federally approved
prescription drug labels preempt state liability laws.
New Pill-Bottle Labels
Last year, Target stores started using a nifty new kind of pill bottle and easy-to-use labels. (Take a look.)
A Guide to Cold Meds
The Greensboro, N.C. News-Record gave readers an easy-to-follow guide to the key words on different cold-medication bottles.
Buzz Marketing
In these days of high-tech communication, one of the most interesting "new" marketing ideas is... word-of-mouth marketing. In fact, there is a "Word of Mouth Marketing Association" meeting today in Orlando, Fla. AdAge [free login required] says
one of the big questions at this year's convention is this: "Should the ordinary Joes enlisted to spread buzz about products and
services tell others that they’re part of a marketing program?"
WOM (word-of-mouth) marketing includes buzz, blog and viral marketing. Word-of-mouth is the act of a consumer creating or distributing information to other consumers. It
can be as simple as encouraging customers to write reviews for a
product or pass an article or Web page along to somebody else. It might be as different as inserting your company message in fortune cookies that Chinese restaurants hand out and customers read to each other over dinner. It starts a buzz among customers.
Buzz marketing is not
like regular "publicity," because WOM goes from one consumer to another.
Publicity comes directly from the person/company doing the selling. There are even companies that attempt to measure buzz marketing.
Here is a study that says a little more than a quarter of all restaurant customers said they chose a
restaurant in the last year based on the recommendation of another
customer (as opposed to a TV or newspaper ad, for example). Cruise
lines, hotels and airlines also get a significant amount of business
from word-of-mouth advertising. Presumably, bad word-of-mouth would hurt a lot.
A June 2005 Wall Street Journal story
said companies are increasingly turning to "blog watching" to
understand what people are saying about them and their products.
Monitoring
the blog buzz can give important insights into consumer feelings that
could turn into habits.
Another Wall Street Journal story [subscription required] said potential customers trust "word-of-mouth" advertising more than they do paid advertising:
For the first time in its seven years of studying corporate reputation, Harris Interactive Inc.
analyzed the effect of word-of-mouth communication and found that it
strongly influences reputation and people's plans to buy a company's
products.
The survey of the American public shows that word-of-mouth -- comments
from friends, family members, co-workers and others -- carries much
more weight than corporate advertising and public relations.
About 85 percent of
survey respondents said word-of-mouth communication is credible,
compared with 70 percent for advertising and PR.
About three-quarters rated media stories about a company as credible,
and 84 percent found the opinions of company employees believable. Only
personal experience with a company scored higher than word-of-mouth,
with 92 percent of people calling it credible.
A big issue in the
WOM world, however, revolves around instances when a person who appears to be a regular
customer is also acting as a WOM advertiser and others don't know it. It
would be like an author writing a favorable online book review for
himself/herself. It would be like a company hiring people to viral market a product by
passing it along to friends without those friends knowing that the
person sending the recommendation has been paid to do so.
Volcano Cam
Here is a live camera trained on an active volcano in Alaska. The Augustine Volcano has produced some spectacular pictures in the last week. Click here for a gallery. You might be surprised by how much volcanic activity there is in Alaska. Click here for a map.
We are always looking for your great ideas. Send Al a few sentences and hot links.
Editor's Note: Al's
Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and
other materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as original
concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly from another
source, it will be attributed and a link will be provided whenever
possible.
Posted at 6:11:02 PM
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