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Background: Our rapidly evolving digital environment requires us to efficiently manage information across multiple channels that include the web, social media, and mobile apps, and that we optimize content for display on smartphones, tablets, and desktops. We must also enable the reuse and recombination of media and content so that it can be customized to best fit the needs of specific audiences, and engage them right where they are.
Program background: This presentation describes how CDC has implemented a syndication platform that allows the maintenance of content, data, and multimedia in one location while distributing it through to many channels. We will discuss how public health partners, private industry and the general public can access and customize our web content, images, video, and data to complement their own web sites, apps, and widgets. Because these media are syndicated, updates to source content are immediately reflected across all channels. CDC is using syndication to populate innovative apps for iOS, Android, and Microsoft Windows 8. The CDC Mobile Application gives users access to health articles, public health blogs, image libraries, newsroom feeds, and a “disease of the week” feature. Other apps that use CDC’s digital sharing platform include those for Seasonal Flu, Health eCards, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders, and CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report and Preventing Chronic Diseasejournal.
Evaluation Methods and Results: To date, HHS has over 900 registered syndication partners in all 50 states and in 17 countries. There are approximately 10,000 HHS content pages available for syndication, with more added every day, and this content appears on over 5,200 partner pages. Syndication accounts for an additional 270,000 page views of HHS content per month, or approximately 3.2 million page views per year. RSS feeds are used to deliver content into widgets, mobile apps and web pages, accounting for 9.6 million views and 4.5 million click-throughs monthly. In total, syndication contributes 120 million additional views of HHS content through multi-channel redistribution. And this is just the start.
Conclusions: Syndication allows us to share, compile, and disseminate credible, science-based information from multiple sources and through multiple channels. Syndication helps reduce development and maintenance costs of digital assets for ourselves and our partners, so that we can positively impact the health of our nation by engaging people where they already go for information – their favorite websites, mobile apps, news readers, and social media.
Implications for research and/or practice: Mentioned as an example of content reuse in the White House’s Federal Digital Strategy, content syndication increases our reach, reduces product development efforts and improves our ability to serve the American public. Current collaborators include HHS, FDA, NIH, and the Ohio Department of Health. Syndication is used to coordinate content from multiple agencies for topic-based web sites like Flu.gov, power mobile applications and widgets through RSS and full-page syndication, or customized podcast feeds. As we integrate other media types into the API platform, we will create applications that share images, video, audio, data visualization and content from multiple sources into a single product.