Toward Spreadable Entertainment-Education: Leveraging Social Influence in Online Networks

"The media landscape has changed radically since the early nineties, presenting challenges and opportunities for the EE strategy."

Increasingly, offline societies intertwine with online communities in global digital networks that have the power of social influence. Entertainment-education (EE) is a communication strategy that uses popular media to engage with audiences on prosocial topics such as health. This article introduces the concept of "spreadable EE": an approach that builds on transmedia storytelling and that entails collaboration with online platforms, communities, and social influencers to stimulate meaningful conversations and, potentially, to impact individuals' knowledge, beliefs and attitudes, and behaviours.

Noting that "[n]arrative theories provide a playground to create compelling and persuasive storylines for EE serials", the researchers examine the theoretical basis of EE, such as its rooting in the Elaboration Likelihood Model and the Social Cognitive Theory (SCT). This theoretical grounding can help explain how a dramatic storyline about an unplanned pregnancy in a popular TV series can stimulate conversations, instilling the uptake of norms that facilitate and support the use of contraceptives.

Changes in the media landscape mean that, for example, "online communities have emerged as new avenues for audiences to have interpersonal conversations about popular media and EE serials, thereby providing new points of engagement to discuss ideas, knowledge and practices." Many of these online conversations are sparked by "social influencers", who are akin to "innovators" or "early adaptors" in the Diffusion of Innovations Theory.

Next, the researchers explore how "spreadable EE" can be approached in practice, drawing from relevant scientific work and illustrated by practical examples. In EE initiatives like East Los High (see Related Summaries, below), the transmedia storytelling strategy has been used to creatively coordinate elements of a story across platforms, thereby providing multiple entry points across a wide range of channels. Another example, from the STD/AIDS Foundation in the Netherlands (SAFN), provides an example of how EE professionals can collaborate with social influencers. In a series of YouTube videos (see one of them, below), several beauty experts asked their followers for their opinions about Dutch women's reluctance to carry condoms and shared their own opinions. Through this process, SAFN and the social influencers provoked the online communities to converse about and ultimately introduce an alternative norm: carrying condoms with you is smart, not "slutty" (promiscuous). The intervention also invited audiences to reinforce or reappropriate SAFN's message, ultimately rippling through the social networks around them.

The article explores how digital storytelling tools offer audiences rich opportunities to create and share media content of their own. For instance, EE interventions can spur conversations by stimulating the creation of memes with the story's locations, characters, and events as a source of inspiration. However, the researchers note, "we cannot assume that target audiences will automatically participate or create content once an EE intervention raises certain issues. For an EE intervention to truly function as a point of engagement, audiences need meaningful incentives to engage in 'narrative exchange'. One way to achieve this is by setting up story circles." For example, in the third season of the Indian EE series Main Kuch Bhi Kar Sakti Hoon ('I, a woman, can achieve everything' - see Related Summaries, below), the social media team of Population Foundation India (PFI) set up story circles around key issues following a 4-step cycle: inspire, enable, activate, and aggregate. This led to a series of Facebook posts in which audiences shared their own experiences and commented on the role of girls and women in the family - thereby challenging existing gender regressive norms.

Another way EE can be spreadable is through "markers", which in EE are unique, identifiable elements of messages such as new words, phrases, or novel behaviours that ideally model new realities to break oppressive power structures in society. For example, by including stickers, GIFS, and visual effects that refer to particular scenes, characters, and events in an EE intervention, a visual lexicon of markers may empower audiences to have a meaningful conversation about the topics, themes, or issues that resonate with them most strongly.

The researchers note that spreadable EE requires collaboration with social influencers, content strategists, and data analysts, as well as with community managers and data scientists who are adept at using digital methods to study the behaviours and dynamics of online communities (and thus track the diffusion of ideas, knowledge, and practices).

In concluding, the researchers stress that: "The power of spreadable EE lies not in reach, but in the quality of engagement of specific target audiences with the EE intervention, as these actions will ripple through their social networks. In this context, EE professionals play the role of conductors, orchestrating a 'transmedia symphony'...that sheds light on all relevant aspects of social issues, and empowers audiences to join in and share their perspectives."