In January, when consumers were looking for frequent updates on tainted peanut butter, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched a Twitter feed, CDCEmergency. By late April, a modest 2,500 people followed it. Then the world turned its attention to the much more frightening prospect of swine flu.
As anxiety about this pandemic disease rose precipitously so did the number of followers on Twitter, which ballooned to over 100,000 in two weeks. This feed, often featuring five or more daily updates, became a direct pipeline to breaking news of the flu's global spread as well as the government's changing emergency response.
While these numbers are nothing like the 1.6 million that follow "aplusk" (aka Ashton Kutcher) on Twitter, they show that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is poised to use social media like never before to educate Americans during a public health emergency.
'Viral media' to track a virus? The irony is not lost on Dr. Jay Bernhardt, the director of the CDC's National Center for Health Marketing.
"There are pros and cons of our increasingly networked society," says Bernhardt. "The more connected we are, the greater the possibility of viruses being passed. But there's also a greater opportunity to share critical information through electronic networks."
For this reason, the National Center for Health Marketing has pushed out Twitter feeds, a Flickr photo stream, podcasts, videos and a Facebook page. It has been a 24/7 effort to get important messages out through every medium.
"Many feel that information shared through social networking is often more credible," says Bernhardt.
Yet, as the agency has learned, each medium demands a specific kind of messenger. Videos produced by the CDC-TV group and uploaded to YouTube must be emotionally charged and compelling --- "more 'CSI' than CDC," as Bernhardt puts it. Facebook postings need to initiate a friendly dialogue between real people. And Tweets? They're tricky --- only effective inasmuch as they encourage Retweets or drive traffic to the CDC Web site. Further, they're only credible if written with an ear for the spare poetry and an eye for the enthusiastic punctuation of the Twitter format.
"The social media team has learned to use a lot of exclamation points in these kinds of things," Bernhardt admits.
The numbers have been encouraging across the board. Since April 22, the agency has counted more than 1.2 million viewings of H1N1-related videos and nearly half a million podcasts. The Web site has had nearly 100 million hits, over 300,000 of them click-throughs from the Twitter feed.
The Facebook page (www.facebook.com/CDC) has proven a challenge.
"It's very participatory," says Bernhardt, noting that the agency hadn't anticipated the large number of comments it would get on its various posts, such as links to videos about hand washing. But Facebook demands a real human connection, of sorts, and so CDC staffers have jumped in to answer questions.
Bernhardt himself pops up in the comment threads. Though you have to be his friend to see his profile, you at least see an image of him, standing by a blue body of water in a pair of dark sunglasses. He looks like a nice man.
Copyright 2009 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution