Director's Blog
Health Marketing Musings
from Jay M. Bernhardt, PhD, MPH
On Saturday October 19, I attended part of the first CONNECT. Public Relations & Social Media Conference hosted by the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. The agenda included renowned PR professionals (or "Rock Stars" as accurately described by Dr. Kaye Sweetser) who discussed cutting-edge social media techniques and how they can be used in PR and marketing. Many thanks to UGA for organizing and including me in this event. I invite you to browse the CONNECT blog, where you can find audio, blogs, links, twitter content, podcasts, photos and more from the conference.
I had the honor of addressing the conference attendees about social media and health marketing at CDC. In a previous blog, I wrote about the potential of e-health and new media applications for helping to achieve population-level improvements in health. In the year since I wrote that entry, I believe more than ever that social media can not just impact, but revolutionize, health.
Our health is the outcome—at least in part—of the cumulative effects of the big and small decisions we make over the course of our Lives. While health behaviors are admittedly very hard to change, social media can make a difference by informing our everyday health decisions through powerful messages that are both relevant and ubiquitous. Unlike traditional media in which narrow messages are "pushed down" from experts to consumers, user-generated and peer-to-peer information exchanged through social media allow consumers to constantly send and receive information that is more trusted, relevant, and potentially influential. Our challenge as public health professionals is to find the right mix between "vertical" messages from our experts and "horizontal" messages between our customers.
At CDC, we are carefully, but enthusiastically entering the "new" frontier of social media, under the forward-looking leadership of Janice Nall and her award winning team. We've produced hundreds of original podcasts that have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. We've been working with online universes like Second Life and Whyville to explore how virtual health messaging and simulations can interact with online and offline interventions. We are launching social media activities in MySpace and other social networking sites to strengthen partnerships and increase the reach of CDC's scientific health information. We will soon use sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube to further increase the reach of our health media content. We plan to increase our proactive outreach to bloggers with more webinars like the one we hosted last year on the importance of seasonal flu vaccines.
And last, but definitely not least, we are piloting several projects using mobile media, including our first subscription service for mobile alerts on influenza. Mobile health messaging has incredible potential to carry personalized health information across the digital divide, but much more research is needed to turn this idea into a reality. I strongly encourage all the graduate students, professors, and entrepreneurs reading this blog to start developing and researching innovative mobile applications for disease prevention, health promotion, and preparedness, in the US and around the world. Then, please be sure to us know what works!
Posted by Jay on Monday, October 29, 2007 at 12:00pm ET
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