"While social media offer an unprecedented opportunity for orchestrating large-scale communication campaigns, it is often difficult to track audience responses on various digital platforms over time and to ascertain if their engagement is aligned with the original intention. In this article, we shar
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e a promising solution—the purposive embedding and tracking of unique content elements as “markers” using text analytics techniques. Four markers were introduced in an Indian melodramatic television serial, Main Kuch Bhi Kar Sakti Hoon (I, A Woman, Can Achieve Anything), which was part of a larger transmedia edutainment initiative in India to promote sanitation, family planning, and gender equality. These markers served as anchors for audience engagement with the originally intended messaging embedded in the narratives as well as for program monitoring and evaluation. We applied various web-based tools to systematically track marker-related engagement on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube across eight months. We also conducted semantic network analysis to better understand how marker-related social media comments evolved over time. Our investigation of using markers for digital engagement and narrative exchange in MKBKSH makes an important and timely methodological contribution to the scholarship and praxis of social and behavior change communication." (Abstract)
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"This book lays out the history of entertainment-education and discusses the boundaries of what counts as entertainment-education and narrative persuasion, includes both authors who work within academia and authors who are practitioners, and chapters focusing on developed and developing countries; d
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raws upon communication principles and theory but prioritizes actionable lessons for how entertainment-education actually works." (Publisher description)
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"The E&E strategy finds its justification in signals from health communication theory and practice. There is an urgent call for the development of methods to reach less well educated target groups and for the adoption of a greater consumer orientation. In the design of health communication programme
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s, more attention must be paid to affect as well as cognition. Entertainment television seems to be able to serve these needs because it: (i) is based on popular culture, (2) is more people oriented (human interest) than object oriented; (3) encourages talcing with family, friends and neighbours about the previous day's television events, as in parochial networks; and (4) is a main source of inspiration and information. Health communication professionals, however, are illequipped to tap this potential. In their relatively television-illiterate and bureaucratic working culture they resemble turtles, who on the one hand are solid and trustworthy, but on the other hand do not quickly assimilate new and challenging developments. The call for innovation in their health communication methods and professional standards is forcing them to change. In these circumstances, collaboration with television professionals in the application of the E&E strategy may act as a catalyst. Television professionals are used to exposure and expect a service-oriented attitude from the external experts with who m they work. They act like peacocks, displaying their feathers in order both to be admired and to exert power and thus stay in charge of the production process." (Discussion and recommendations, page 203)
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