Wednesday, October 13, 2010

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

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