Social Media | barfblog

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that a modest 2,500 people followed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Twitter feed, CDCEmergency, when it was launched during the outbreak of Salmonella linked to Peanut Corp. of America products earlier this year. Now that the CDC is tweeting about the H1N1 flu (aka swine flu), over 100,000 members of the interested public are following.

In addition to the Twitter feed, CDC’s National Center for Health Marketing has responded to public demand for information with a Flickr photo stream, podcasts, videos and a Facebook page. These are the media familiar to today’s consumers.

The director of the National Center for Health Marketing, Dr. Jay Bernhardt, explained that the effectiveness of the agency’s communications through these media is dependent upon public trust, which is developed by speaking the audience’s language.

For example, Berhardt said of the CDC’s Tweets, “The social media team has learned to use a lot of exclamation points in these kinds of things.”

This lit review that I’ve been working on is full of evidence of the effectiveness of communicators that target an audience and then reach out to them with relevant, reliable, rapid and repeated information through the media they use every day.

The review also supports the evaluation of communication efforts to determine their effectiveness (and make changes, if necessary).

Polls by the Harvard School of Public Health have attempted to evaluate the effectiveness of the CDC’s efforts. And while direct observation of actual consumer behaviors would provide a more accurate evaluation, results of the consumer polls have been promising:

“[T]he poll shows that 67% of Americans are now washing their hands or using sanitizers more often, compared with 59% who said the same thing a week ago,” stated a report by MedPage.

“61% of respondents said they were not concerned that they or a family member would get the H1N1 flu within the next year. That’s up from 53% who weren’t worried a week ago.”

People can handle more information—not less—about the risks in their lives. Kudos to CDC.

Do you remember how you first heard about the latest round of Salmonella in the peanut butter? Was it on the evening news, in the paper, or did you hear about it through Facebook or Twitter? If you’re in the under 30 crowd you might fit into the latter category. Social networking sites, like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace are increasingly being utilized for up-to-the-minute recall information.

During the recent Salmonella outbreak, the United States Department of Health and Human Services – specifically the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – engaged in a heavy social media push to inform citizens about the health risks and product recalls. As a result, the CDC Social Media Center was created as a central hub for harnessing the power of social networking to spread recall information.

Twitter is one of the sites currently used in the assortment of links. Twitter allows users to “follow” one another’s “tweets” about what they do during the day. The website is on the rise among medical professionals and there are accounts for all ranges of industry available. Why not food safety?

Federal health agencies have been experimenting with new Internet tools, dubbed Web 2.0, that make it easier to deliver information directly to the public. The "Health 2.0" movement got a big boost with the arrival of President Barack Obama, who is pushing federal agencies to use the tools to make the federal government more transparent and participatory.

Current news about FDA recalls can be found @FDArecalls and public health updates from the CDC can be found @CDCemergency. The only snag is you have to sign up in order to receive tweets from the FDA, but hey, its free. After all, you’re no one if you’re not on Twitter.