It's been nine days since the United States declared a public health
emergency to bring attention to a new strain of swine influenza A
(H1N1) that was the cause of multiple deaths in Mexico. It's been impossible to watch a newscast or pick up a newspaper without hearing about the
impending crisis that was sure to be the death of us all.
Likewise,
it was nearly impossible to log in to check what your friends were
talking about on Facebook or Twitter without hearing about the swine
flu; and the CDC was there to ensure misinformation wasn't being
shared. According to Nielsen BuzzMetrics,
at its peak, 2 percent of all conversations happening on Twitter were
about swine flu - by comparison, that's ten times more conversations
than were happening around the salmonella and peanut butter scare from
earlier this year.
Along with setting up a Twitter feed - twitter.com/cdcemergency - the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services used widgets to spread important flu information. From cdc.gov :
a CDC.gov widget to your page means that you will have
up-to-date, credible health and safety content in your favorite spaces
– no more searching or browsing. By adding one of these widgets, you
will be part of the national effort to keep consumers informed about
2009 H1N1 Flu.
The CDC didn't stop there. Additionally, they uploaded swine flu related videos to their YouTube channel, created swine flu related podcasts and, finally, swine flu related photos were uploaded to their Flickr stream.
A look at the stats show that all of this activity is proving to be impactful.
A post on the Nielsen Analyst blog shows that unique visitors to cdc.gov increased by nearly 100 percent last week, while total visits have grown 123 percent. The CDC twitter feed went from 2,000 followers at the beginning of last week, to well over 95,000 at the time of this posting. Andrew P. Wilson, leader of the HHS Web division's new media team, says that, "It's important for us to have a voice in these conversations. By being there [on Twitter] we can help ramp up the discussion and get it out there so it can be shared."
How much do you know about the flu? Take the quiz, from the CDC, embedded below and let us know your results.
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