No matter what your religious denomination, beliefs or faith may be; the latest campaign from Australia’s Bible Society is an impressive, integrated exercise in Social Marketing.

What started out in 2002, has travelled across Australia, through Adelaide, Canberra, Tasmania, and is currently underway in Western Australia and across New South Wales for a six week period from September 15, 2009.

According to the campaign website: “Jesus. All about life is about presenting the words of Jesus in a culturally appropriate way, the media is the marketplace of the 21st Century…The media is the catalyst for interest, but each local church involved is the delivery point of the program.”

It’s a different approach for ‘the Church’. Even the campaign website acknowledges that connecting with the community via mainstream media is a new direction, saying that to date “…the church has not used the media well.”

Perhaps we are the target audience, but everywhere we go, we see this campaign.

It has an impressive dissemination strategy, including mainstream TV ads, Billboards, bus shelters, and has a banner on almost every church you can see – talk about utilising prime real estate in a cost effective way… so cost effective that local churches pay to disseminate the campaign materials! According to the campaign website, “For just $100 registration fee, payable on-line at www.jesusallaboutlife.com.au your local church can be a part of this campaign.”

The television advertisement is certainly easy for anyone to engage with – there’s hardly even a mention of religion.

The microsite is clever – appealing to Gen Y, encouraging user-generated content, and looks a bit like a myspace page.

The campaign has certainly attracted all different types of attention, including editorial discussion by key outlets like the Australian and on ABC Radio, blogs, endorsements from well-known people, and even critical review and parody websites.

Who sums it up best? In an interview with the UK’s Daily Mail one of the campaign spokespeople said: ‘Christian or not, it’s a passionate topic. It’s a huge campaign in its own right and hard to ignore.”

We agree. Amen to good Social Marketing.

Many of you may have heard about the trivia game ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon‘. It’s based on the concept of the small world phenomenon and rests on the assumption that any actor can be linked through his or her film roles to actor Kevin Bacon. The game requires a group of players to try to connect any film actor in history to Kevin Bacon as quickly as possible and in as few links as possible. The game was especially popular on college campuses in the early 1990s. In 2007, Bacon started a charitable organization named SixDegrees.org.

Even if you haven’t heard of ‘Six degrees of Kevin Bacon’, we’re sure you’ve probably heard of ‘Six degrees of Separation’, the idea that everyone in the world can be connected in just a few steps. But what if those steps don’t just relate to people but also to viruses, neurons, proteins and even to fashion trends? What if this ’six degrees of separation’ allowed us an insight into something at the core of Nature?

A quick look at an old campaign from Canada which addresses the issue of positive reinforcement amongst gay men when it comes to safe sex.

“Studies show that gay men fall into three groups: those who take HIV risks frequently, very rarely, and not at all. Three out of four gay men are in the latter two groups – they choose safety,” explains epidemiologist Dr. Tom Lampinen of the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV “The really exciting news involves that second kind of guy, the one who takes HIV risks rarely. Real power and potential rests with him. If he can commit to no HIV risk for just one to two years, he will force a decline in new infections.”

The humorous “Gay Men Play Safe” campaign was created to validate and support gay men’s safer sex practices while reinforcing the fact that sexual safety, including condom use, is a community norm. AIDS Vancouver and partner AIDS organizations from across the country worked with Rethink Advertising to create a new kind of HIV message that challenges the widely held perception that gay men suffer from condom-use fatigue and apathy.

“It’s time we recognize gay men for more than 20 years of practicing safer sex and using condoms,” says Phillip Banks, Director of HIV Prevention at AIDS Vancouver and national coordinator of the campaign. “It’s undeniable that gay men’s efforts in the early days of HIV had the greatest impact on reducing HIV infection rates. This campaign validates these efforts and encourages gay men to keep it up.”

According to Dr. Terry Trussler, Research Director at the Community Based Research Centre in Vancouver: “Surveys show that gay men are aware and concerned about the continuing threat to health posed by HIV. This campaign doesn’t threaten or blame gay men. Rather, it acknowledges that as a community, gay men continue to support HIV prevention.”

You can check out the rest of the campaign here