Ready for Life

With social media and emerging technology, public health agencies can utilize more tools than ever in a public health emergency. In this panel at South by Southwest (SXSW), social media strategists and researchers, working in the front lines of the pandemic H1N1 response, will discuss strategy, innovations and the changing relationship between citizens and government.

Presenters for Social Media response to Health Emergencies

Ann Aikin is the Social Media Strategist at the CDC
David Hale Project Lead from the National Library of Medicine
Andrew Wilson New Media Strategist from SAMHSA
Andre Blackman from Pulse + Signal

Introductions from the panelists include background on activities during the 2009 breakout of the H1N1 virus media peak in March and April of 2009.

Ann starts with several new projects the CDC rapidly expanded or created during the H1N1 breakout.

• Worked with Community Voice Mail to write emails and send voice mails to under-served communities.
• Twitter was used to monitor messages and see if there were gaps in knowledge or discrepancies in the information.
• Used several different accounts to deliver messages. WebMd partnered to expand reach, the information on that blog was the second most popular blog on WebMD by pageviews.
• Modeling behavior partnership with kids at Whyville.
• Finally, the CDC encouraged innovation in XML to provide transparency and collaboration. http://www.cdc.gov/socialmedia for data metrics on what worked and didn’t.

David Hale worked on situational awareness (ability of group or individual to have access to information needed to make decisions). Works on Semantic webline at NLM and decided to release auto semantic reviewer. Ex. “swine flu travel” vs “how fast swine flu travels” are different salient tweets and with different needs for information. Used the Natural Language Processing system designed to read medical abstracts and used to analyze tweets. Real opportunities came from biosurveillance, respond to misinformation trends, monitoring of wide-spread sentiment, and potential for evaluating authenticity. Example: Monitor twitter streams and if everyone is tweeting about washing hands and coughing into sleeves, then good. Tweeting about using painter’s mask, then need to key in on that and see how to modify information. Partners with Swift River (Ushahidi) with the University of Wisconsin to evaluate ongoing work.

Andrew Wilson at the Department of Health and Human Services took a brief moment to show a PSA (barnyard conference) from their contest around the H1N1 flu spread of information. Great use of spread of social media and reaching people where their audience is. “Need to leverage social media to produce content that is more personally relevant that will resonate with all of our audiences.” As much as they can deliver a core message to their peers, they need people to deliver to their own personal networks in the tone needed impact to individuals and spread. Example: Spike in twitter traffic. See connectedthebook.com. Worked with Google Health Map via a quick connection during Twitter in initial information storm. Flattened the top down network structure to directly impact response time and spread of information to update and add H1N1 to the list of Diseases.

Twitter accounts for Health Emergency

@flugov
@cdc_eHealth
@cdcemergency
@cdcflu
@NLM_Sis

Web Site for Flu and Health Information

www.flu.gov/socialmedia
www.cdc.gov/socialmedia
www.newmedia.hhs.gov

Facebook accounts from H1N1 and CDC

www.facebook.com/h1n1flu
www.facebook.com/cdc

YouTube for video response and information of CDC

www.youtube.com/USGOVHHS
www.youtube.com/CDCStreamingHealth

Find relevant hashtags to follow include #opengov #gov20

Final wrapup included a discussion of how to manage during non-breakout communication. CDC continues to push content consistently and engage during non-ermergency issues. Primary takeaway is all or most of the social media tools were already in place prior to the breakout, so were readily available as people began looking for the information in real-time.