This Week's Featured Resource

In last week’s blog, I mentioned that one of our goals in hosting Going Viral against HIV and STIs is to share resources that can assist organizations as they plan, implement and evaluate social media.  To whet your appetite, you were encouraged to visit AIDS.gov, our forum co-sponsor, and to explore its new media resources.  While you are at AIDS.gov, visit that site’s blog where Jeff Crowley, Ron Valdiserri, Kevin Fenton, Howard Koh, Miguel Gomez and others reflect on HIV, new media, policy and research.  Miguel, who is AIDS.gov’s Director, has been very helpful in planning for the forum; and we are honored to have him as one of the presenters on December 7^th.

Today’s featured resource is The Health Communicator’s Social Media Toolkit.  Although this Toolkit from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Electronic Media Branch is intended for a beginner audience, those with an intermediate knowledge of social media are likely to benefit as well. 

This Social Media Toolkit has the following elements:

• An Introduction to Social Media. Here, in addition to an overview on social media, you will find helpful tips and resources for developing a structure, policies and leadership that can manage the new media. This section also contains ten lessons learned by the CDC’s social media team based on over four years of experience with these media.

• The Specific Social Media Tools.  This section contains abundant resources, examples and best practices to help the reader understand each of the following tools: buttons and badges, image sharing, content syndication, RSS feeds, podcasts, online video sharing, widgets, eCards, electronic games, mobile health, micro-blogs, blogs, social networking sites, and virtual worlds.

• An Example of a Social Media Campaign. This section of the Toolkit explains how various media were integrated into a multi-prong, coordinated social media response to the 2009 – 2010 H1N1 and seasonal flu outbreak. 

• A One-Page Listing of Social Media Resources.  If you are already rolling with social media, you are likely to be familiar with several of the ten listed web-linked resources. If you’re a newbie, prepare for a marvelous voyage.

• A Social Media Communications Strategy Worksheet.  This three-page tool will help your organization define its potential social media audiences and choose the appropriate messages and media for engaging them.  This is called a worksheet for a reason.  It’s work!  But if you take completing the worksheet seriously, you will have a better understanding of what roles social media can play in your organization.

• A Social Media Evaluation Worksheet.  If you are allergic to logic models, you might find this section of the Toolkit to be challenging.  Evaluation, however, is essential.  If you can’t demonstrate something’s worth, there will always be someone to question its value. Bon courage!

Well that’s more than enough to chew on for today.  Please feel free post a comment.  And sharing this blog with your friends and colleagues is always welcome.

Mark Hammer

Social Media: Going Viral Against HIV and STIs Forum Blog

On December 7, 2010, the New York State Department of Health’s AIDS Institute is breaking significant new ground in hosting the first forum ever convened specifically focusing on the use of social media for HIV and STI prevention and care.  This one-day event, Going Viral against HIV and STIs, may be a game-changer for some participants (and by that I don’t mean Farmville supplanting Monopoly as parlor entertainment).  Everyone joining us at New York University’s Kimmel Center will be able to have a deeper understanding of how these media can be strategically harnessed to address HIV and STIs.  We encourage you to shout out about the forum in tweets and in blogs so that executive directors, administrators, and communications specialists know about this event and register immediately.  The registration response so far has been robust.  We don’t want those who could really benefit from this event to be shut out.

One of our goals in hosting this forum is to share resources that can assist organizations as they plan, implement and evaluate social media.  Periodically in this blog—both before and after the forum—we will highlight some of those resources.

One extraordinary resource very deserving of mention in our first blog is AIDS.gov, the co-sponsor of the forum.  Not only does that site (and site doesn’t begin to do it justice) share timely HIV-related information from a Federal perspective (its content and support spans virtually every agency and office in the Department of Health and Human Services), but it has a special focus on the role of new media and HIV. Your time will be well-spent exploring AIDS.gov’s new media resources, where you will learn about “opportunities to CONNECT, COLLABORATE, CREATE and ENGAGE around HIV/AIDS.”  These resources are also an excellent pre-forum primer.

A word or two is in order on terminology.  AIDS.gov generally refers to the media that will be the focus of our forum as “new media.”  Some “new media” because of their interactivity may be referred to as “social media.”  Making the distinction between the social and the non-social new media can be mind-numbing. If a blog doesn’t allow comments, is it truly social???? Yikes!  So for our purposes, we are putting new and social media together and use the terms interchangeably.  And quite frankly, “new” is getting older every day.  If you are interested in how the contributors to Wikipedia fall on this subject, you can check out their articles on Social Media and New Media.

Come back to this site regularly, not just for these blogs, but also for agenda and speaker updates, and yes—for those resources.

I look forward to seeing some of you at the forum.

Mark Hammer