Public Health Turns to Virtual Worlds to Get Out Reality-Based Health Messages

Public health officials are turning to cell phone texting and social media -- including "virtual worlds," social networking sites and blogs -- to disseminate important health promotion messages.

"Social media is absolutely a huge element of what we're doing now," said Janice Nall, director of e-health marketing at CDC. "Basically the bottom line is that millions and millions of people are going to these spaces. And… a lot of learning occurs there, a lot of interaction. And so what we're trying to do is provide our health information in that context."

Last Christmas, Toronto Public Health used proximity marketing to advertise its inSPOT service, a Web-based tool where people newly diagnosed with an STD can e-vite partners to get screened. Using a hypertag device in Toronto's Gay Village, a message about inSPOT was sent to all nearby Bluetooth-enabled cell phones. Of 1,463 recipients reached, 317 (21.7 percent) agreed to view the message. The department also recently used hypertag to tell students in six high schools about chlamydia prevention and testing.

Earlier this year, CDC sponsored the Texting 4 Health conference put on by Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab. The event attempted to "get all the different stakeholders in the same room and talking," said B.J. Fogg, the lab's director. "People who had just done interventions and people who wanted to do interventions. People who knew the technology piece and people who knew the health piece."

CDC has had a post in the Second Life virtual world for several years, and in 2006 the agency taught tweens about the importance of flu vaccination during a simulated flu outbreak in the youth-focused virtual community Whyville. And before World AIDS Day last year, CDC and partners launched the "Knowit" HIV testing campaign, in which people can text their ZIP code to 566948 for free to find local testing centers.

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