The Ryan Gosling Effect: Tapping Into Viral Memes to Change Health Behavior

Background: Public health communicators consistently find it hard to show that any type of communication intervention really results in an individual’s changed behavior. In most cases, intermediate outcomes are used to show progress along a continuum with the anticipation that these outcomes will lead to the desired long-term behavior change. Digital and social media, as newer communication channels with opportunities for engagement and real-time data collection, helps bridge the gap between intermediate and long-term outcomes. However, although digital and social media provide platforms that go beyond exposure and awareness, they still present a challenge to public health communicators, who struggle to use the media to effect and measure behavior change. In addition, health messages must compete with viral memes like “Is Ryan Gosling cuter than a puppy?” and "LOLCats," which tap into our obsession with celebrity and provide entertainment and humor. So when social media consumers show an overwhelming preference for these kinds of online phenomena, how can a public health behavior change campaign compete?

Program background: Social media do provide various strategies and tools that allow for public health communicators to tap into this social media zeitgeist – and measure its impact. This presentation will look at what is being done in this space, pulling on data from a couple different public health campaigns. One campaign focusing on increasing annual influenza vaccinations worked with MeetUp.com to reach at-risk target audiences and engage them to get their flu vaccination; while another campaign sought to engage with practitioners around the topic of HealthIT. The presentation will review how each social media initiative was selected to match the communication preferences of the distinct target audiences, the online measures that were used to evaluate the efforts, and the results.

Evaluation Methods and Results: Across the campaigns, traditional metrics such as reach and click-through-rate were all above average, over 10,000 and 0.44%, respectively; however, what is even more compelling are the behavior change metrics with over 300 people vaccinated as a result of one four week campaign. Thus, social media programs can demonstrate results that directly correlate to public health program goals.

Conclusions: Opportunities to connect the online and offline worlds or build in surveys to collect pre- and post-data can help to make health behaviors tangible and doable and gauge behavior change that is driven by social media interventions.

Implications for research and/or practice: This is powerful for public health practitioners who need to deliver certain project outcomes and justify budgets, as it shows a direct correlation between media spend and an impact on both key determinants of, and the behavior itself.