Obama's Wired Campaign: Lessons for Public Health Communication

Lorien Abroms and I take a look at the Obama campaign's use of social media in the latest issue of Journal of Health Communications (2009;14:415-423).

Lessons for public health campaigns include the following:

• Consider new media--social networking sites, uploaded videos, mobile text messages and blogs—as part of a comprehensive media mix.

• Encourage horizontal (i.e., peer to peer and social network) communications of campaign messages as social influence and modeling are important drivers of behavior. Embrace user-generated messages and content, especially in the case where top-down campaign messages are straight-forward and translatable by the public.

• Use new media to encourage small acts of engagement. Small acts of engagement lay the groundwork for relationship building and larger tasks in the future. are important for relationship building and can lead to larger acts of engagement in the future.
  

• Use social media to facilitate in-person grassroots activities, not to substitute for them.

More on

• developing strategies for social media;
  
• social media: threats and opportunities for social marketing and public health;
  
• social and risk communiction during times of crisis; 
• bridging the new media culture chasm: can elephants dance?
• unwinding social media marketing.