Shiloh
Editor, Senior Moderator
Source: http://www.baxterbulletin.com/artic...5130310/1014/OPINION/Pandemics+in+Twitter+age
Pandemics in Twitter age
May 13, 2009
WASHINGTON ? If you've recently visited Twitter, the Post-it Note of social Web sites, you might have caught people tweeting that the H1N1 flu outbreak was really germ warfare, or that eating pork would give you the flu.
Viral misinformation like that raised the specter of social network pandemic. Down went the price of pork. Rumor and speculation once uttered around the water cooler was going global in a nanosecond.
The pork industry fought back, issuing statements and granting media interviews stressing that the flu was passed by human-to-human contact and challenging the name "swine flu."
Thereafter, government officials went out of their way to refer to it by its H1N1 label. The government fought back, too.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told a Senate committee that she lunched on ham-and-cheese sandwiches for a week.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention got serious about tweeting, with the number of people following "CDCemergency" on Twitter surpassing 110,000. CDCemergency frequently tweeted links to advisories and Q&As, and wrote "micro-blogs" like, "Stop the spread of germs. Cover your nose & mouth w/a tissue when you cough or sneeze."
(For the tweet-challenged, abbreviations are necessities on a network that limits authors to 140 characters per tweet and would have cut the same sentence you're reading now eight words ago).
There are two lessons from the Twitter experience:
# The brash new world of social networking has changed the government's challenges during threatened pandemics.
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and similar sites can be powerful connectors for the good, but they can also unleash weapons of mass misinformation. Public relations professionals say government and business communications plans carefully constructed during the avian flu threat in 2005 and 2006 were obsolete when this latest pandemic threat arrived.
"It is hard to believe, but three years made a world of difference in communications," said Bill Pendergast, a senior vice president at public relations giant Fleishman-Hillard.
(2 of 2)
# Second, even as faith in government's ability to get it right has been shaken (Hurricane Katrina, no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq) many still turn to government for dependable information. The CDC's performance so far is likely to boost confidence in the government's ability to handle pandemics, and its use of social networks has been a big part of its strategy.
Except for Vice President Joe Biden's comment that he would advise his family to avoid airplanes and the subway (What does he know that we don't?), the government overall counseled caution in response to the H1N1 flu outbreak, not panic, and urged citizens to do practical little things, like washing hands and smothering sneezes, that add up to big things in the aggregate.
Health crisis communications expert Mark Senak said the CDC "exhibited a good deal of savvy in employing digital media during the crisis."
Senak, a senior vice president at Fleishman-Hillard who was a top communications consultant during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, praised the CDC's updates on Twitter although he said the CDC could have posted more factual videos on YouTube.
Speaking during Fleishman-Hillard's webinar, Senak said he was "surprised not only by the level of misinformation" on Twitter, but was "astonished at the sheer volume of people who were talking about whether or not they should eat pork."
He said that made him realize that communicators must recalibrate from broadcasting to "nichecasting."
Intentionally or not, Senak described the pandemic-related challenges facing communicators as the same ones facing health care professionals. The social networks are a new and viral strain of an old condition, one with the ability to jump from one person's online network to another's with the click of a mouse, and to expand exponentially as it is transmitted.
"We are talking about segmented messages that go to a particular node that then pass it along," Senak said. "If there is one thing that has changed since 2006, it is the speed of information along these nodes."
Pandemics in Twitter age
May 13, 2009
WASHINGTON ? If you've recently visited Twitter, the Post-it Note of social Web sites, you might have caught people tweeting that the H1N1 flu outbreak was really germ warfare, or that eating pork would give you the flu.
Viral misinformation like that raised the specter of social network pandemic. Down went the price of pork. Rumor and speculation once uttered around the water cooler was going global in a nanosecond.
The pork industry fought back, issuing statements and granting media interviews stressing that the flu was passed by human-to-human contact and challenging the name "swine flu."
Thereafter, government officials went out of their way to refer to it by its H1N1 label. The government fought back, too.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told a Senate committee that she lunched on ham-and-cheese sandwiches for a week.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention got serious about tweeting, with the number of people following "CDCemergency" on Twitter surpassing 110,000. CDCemergency frequently tweeted links to advisories and Q&As, and wrote "micro-blogs" like, "Stop the spread of germs. Cover your nose & mouth w/a tissue when you cough or sneeze."
(For the tweet-challenged, abbreviations are necessities on a network that limits authors to 140 characters per tweet and would have cut the same sentence you're reading now eight words ago).
There are two lessons from the Twitter experience:
# The brash new world of social networking has changed the government's challenges during threatened pandemics.
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and similar sites can be powerful connectors for the good, but they can also unleash weapons of mass misinformation. Public relations professionals say government and business communications plans carefully constructed during the avian flu threat in 2005 and 2006 were obsolete when this latest pandemic threat arrived.
"It is hard to believe, but three years made a world of difference in communications," said Bill Pendergast, a senior vice president at public relations giant Fleishman-Hillard.
(2 of 2)
# Second, even as faith in government's ability to get it right has been shaken (Hurricane Katrina, no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq) many still turn to government for dependable information. The CDC's performance so far is likely to boost confidence in the government's ability to handle pandemics, and its use of social networks has been a big part of its strategy.
Except for Vice President Joe Biden's comment that he would advise his family to avoid airplanes and the subway (What does he know that we don't?), the government overall counseled caution in response to the H1N1 flu outbreak, not panic, and urged citizens to do practical little things, like washing hands and smothering sneezes, that add up to big things in the aggregate.
Health crisis communications expert Mark Senak said the CDC "exhibited a good deal of savvy in employing digital media during the crisis."
Senak, a senior vice president at Fleishman-Hillard who was a top communications consultant during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, praised the CDC's updates on Twitter although he said the CDC could have posted more factual videos on YouTube.
Speaking during Fleishman-Hillard's webinar, Senak said he was "surprised not only by the level of misinformation" on Twitter, but was "astonished at the sheer volume of people who were talking about whether or not they should eat pork."
He said that made him realize that communicators must recalibrate from broadcasting to "nichecasting."
Intentionally or not, Senak described the pandemic-related challenges facing communicators as the same ones facing health care professionals. The social networks are a new and viral strain of an old condition, one with the ability to jump from one person's online network to another's with the click of a mouse, and to expand exponentially as it is transmitted.
"We are talking about segmented messages that go to a particular node that then pass it along," Senak said. "If there is one thing that has changed since 2006, it is the speed of information along these nodes."
She didn't really eat ham every day just to address its safety to a Senate committe, did she? 
