Promoting Web-Based Smoking Cessation: An Exploration of the Smokefree Women Strategy

Background: Recognizing the impact of an individual’s social and environmental landscape on their smoking provides a foundation for executing a promotional strategy.

Program background: As part of an ongoing effort to effectively reach and engage women in smoking cessation, the National Cancer Institute’s Smokefree Women (SFW) Initiative has launched a comprehensive strategy to promote web-based cessation resources among women smokers.  The primary goal is to increase awareness and utilization of the website, women.smokefree.gov. The plan is designed to penetrate both the social and environmental media landscape of the target audience using traditional and non-traditional approaches.  Traditional media promotion includes health briefs utilizing NAPS (North American Precis Syndicate), a national news distribution service, as well as AP and USAToday and targeting women’s magazines that regularly feature health information.  Other on-the-ground cross-promotion tactics, such as “quit kits,” print media, health fair attendance, and SFW “swag” are also being utilized.  However, the Internet has transformed many spheres of society and enables us to communicate, work, and play in a global context.  This phenomenon has cultivated relationships where they wouldn't have been possible otherwise.  Due to this fundamental shift in communication, the SFW Team is also actively utilizing non-traditional promotional approaches, including viral marketing via social networking websites.

Evaluation Methods and Results: Monitoring and evaluation are ongoing and detailed outcomes of each promotional component will be presented. Ultimately, we will convey our ability to compare the strategies and identify those proven most effective.  The SFW cross-promotion strategies, lessons learned, campaign responses to tactics, challenges to promotion, as well as the potential impact of Web 2.0 on smoking cessation/behavior change will be presented.  A content analysis of our social media platforms will also be presented, identifying types of content most influential in promoting engagement.

Conclusions: Results suggest that our target audience is eager and willing to engage in conversation about smoking cessation.  The evaluation data also highlight the need to utilize social support, encouragement, and the benefits of quitting (rather than the negative aspects of smoking) when it comes to promotional tactics and outreach strategies.  Creating communities and materials that allow women to solicit support from other real women has proven vital to a successful campaign.  Our social media evaluation data also suggests the use of Facebook, as a support community, is the most influential platform to talk to women about quitting smoking.  Although other promotional tactics seemed promising, further results suggest that women come to websites and social media networks for one primary reason (to talk about smoking, quitting, challenges, and a “cry for help”) rather than engaging in contests, games, or solicited activities.

Implications for research and/or practice: Although continued research needs to be done to evaluate the effectiveness of these emerging technologies, web 2.0 strategies provides unlimited potential for disseminating health promotion messaging and promotional activities.  Data from the SFW project can help inform future efforts targeted at “hard-to-reach” groups, by helping us understand how to market and promote cessation services in ways that reach smokers – especially underserved smokers – where they are.