Really using Social Media In Public Health

Background: In 2009, in order to address preconception health in Louisiana, the state’s Maternal and Child Health (MCH) program developed an innovative and creative multi-tactic health communication campaign that included a social media component. This project called, The Stork Reality, birthed a 7 foot stork named Sammy whose antics and interactions with Louisianans can be viewed at www.thestorkreality.com.  Since his inception, Sammy has evolved into the spokesperson for the greater MCH program, particularly in the Social Media arena.

Program background: Sammy the Stork lives on Twitter, Facebook and MySpace and engages the community in maternal and child health conversations and provides relevant information, facts and links.  In order to assist MCH program staff in guiding Sammy’s efforts, a formal Social Media Plan & Policy document, and a schedule of messages were developed.  Monitoring and evaluation efforts were outlined in the plan and are rigorously pursued. These include collection of basic metrics (such as friends, followers, tweets, retweets, likes, mentions etc.), tracking the number of click thru’s, google analytics, and qualitative assessments.  YET: The questions of  ‘return on investment’ continues to be a challenge.  How the program is dealing with that question, and its answer, will be described.

Evaluation Methods and Results: The presentation will highlight monitoring and evaluation strategies and methodologies used to assess the social media component of Louisiana’s Maternal and Child Health program.  Results of these activities will be shared, and how the project uses the analyzed information to adjust and modify strategy will be a featured component of the talk. As of Feb 2011, Sammy the Stork has 382 friends, 503 followers. On average, Sammy posts and tweets 65 times per month. Facebook and Twitter click-thru rates are usually within the industry standard between .9 %-6%.

Conclusions: The presentation will tell the story of a state program’s successes, challenges, and struggles to incorporate social media as part of an ongoing mechanism to communicate with MCH audiences and stakeholders. Recommendations for applying and integrating social media as a public health communication channel within the structures of a state agency will be made.

Implications for research and/or practice: We will address how public health programs and agencies can use social media … we mean really use it, not just theoretically. Valuable lessons learned, have both broad as well as very specific implications for applying social media in health communication, and these will be shared.