Strategy into Action: Harnessing the Power of Influencer Mapping to Drive Communications Planning for Evolving Public Health Phenomena

Theoretical Background and research questions/hypothesis:  Identifying key thought leaders is a critical strategy for targeting and disseminating public health messages and services. Equally powerful is developing an understanding of the sentiments put forth by these influencers. However, quantifying overall influence is challenging at best, due to disparate data sources and competing messages. For this project, we explored the relative impact of differing influencers within the evolving discourse on Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP), an effective, but controversial approach to HIV prevention. We adapted Richard Posner’s methodology on Public Intellectuals - those who contribute to national debates and help shape public opinions. Utilizing media mentions and citations as proxies for public-intellectual status, Posner measured influence by postulating that those with influence and public awareness are referenced more often than the lesser known. For this project, we sought to answer the question: How can we index and map key influencers in select topic and communication channel/s, and how does the discourse of an evolving phenomenon, such as PrEP, change over time.

Methods:  This study builds on our pilot work that undertook the mapping of key influencers and their expressed sentiments in the discourse temporally surrounding the release of guidelines from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) for the implementation of PrEP in the United States.  Adapting Posner’s methodology, we collected and counted citations and media mentions for recognized HIV prevention influencers, in three channels of influence: 1) scholarly research , 2) traditional media, and 3) social media. For this current study, we sought to uncover how the influencers and discourse in the US had evolved over time since the implementation of PrEP, specifically relative to key milestones in its expanded adoption, both domestically and globally.  As in the first study, for multiple media channels, we applied customized search strategies to measure the number of times an entity (e.g. CDC) was mentioned along with a specified topic area (e.g. PrEP). We calculated each entity’s index of influence, and we mapped relative influence of said entities by building a dynamic and interactive visual mapping system using Tableau Software’s interactive storyboards.  This process was repeated for two timeframes: first, surrounding the release of research addressing the association between PrEP and sexually transmitted infection (STI) rates; and second, surrounding World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations for widespread adoption of PrEP as an important global prevention approach.

Results:  This study supported the reliability of this methodology for tracking  and describing the evolving discourse and its influencers, within different media channels, in the phenomenon of HIV PrEP. 

Conclusions:  Our findings indicate that this methodology can be applied to a broad range of topic areas to identify key influencers, and can play a critical role in identifying new stakeholders, including socially marginalized entities. 

Implications for research and/or practice:  Employing this methodology can be a powerful strategic tool for health communications planning, through its capacity to help align messaging and marketing strategies for tracking the evolution of key influencers and the ever-changing discourse surrounding select fields, such as HIV prevention.