HealthCommWorks

HealthCommWorks supports health communicators in predicting the effectiveness of a message, quickly crafting new messages, and finding the best audience for a message.

The CDC is launching a new line of health communication products called HealthCommWorks, including:

1.     Message works  - craft and defend effective messages 

2.     Social Works – develop a strategy for using social media

3.     Proof Works – provide proof behind effective messages

www.healthcommworks.com

In terms of developing tools we must have good ideas. We have 60,000 thoughts a day and few of those thoughts are good ideas and good ideas seldom come to fruition. So, being creative involves courage.

It’s easy to use: we craft a new messages: know where we stand: “know my truth”!!!

Social Works:

After your message is created, HealthCommWorks helps us lean how to disseminate that message effectively. Social media is the most vibrant channel of communication – communicate is what people are used to. However, a paradox comes with social media. It is powerful, yet it is difficult to understand. Branding and advertising are confusing, and as health communicators, we need to embrace in an evidence based approach – which is more formal. We adopt effective, powerful and reliable methods for social media health comm using old communication methods. We want to provide value that is unprecedented in order to improve quality of life, reduce risk and prevent adversity.

How do we take the message we’ve created and disseminate it in effective ways? At the heart of this strategy is an entrenched communication methodology: the heart of communications is a step by step process that mirrors effective communication method (goals, audience, timing, management):

1.     Understand our audience – how do people use this and what is their literacy level

2.     Be clear about the goals of our initiative

3.     Manage social media campaign – how do we best take advantage of getting the most of each initiative?

4.     Timing – what do we want to accomplish in the time we have?

Goals are measurable.

Content objectives of social media (check those that apply):
1. Awareness

2. Community building

3. Engagement/relationships

4. Outreach partnerships

Types of Content:

• Long text
• Status updates
• Links
• Photos
• Videos
• Audio
• Documents

Relevant strategy for our social media usage:

1.     Goal – what is the purpose of my social media campaign?

2.     Audience  - who do I want to reach? (Listen to your audience – what are people saying ? Determining your base for your strategy – find key words that are relevant to your topic)

3.     Message – what is the message I want to convey?

4.     Resources – what resources exist that are practical and reliable in the time of this project? How many staff hours/contract hours do we have? What is the monthly/contract budget?

5.     Timing – what do we want to accomplish in the time we have? What is the lead time prior to launch? How much time do we have to observe our audience in order to identify key words/concepts?

6.     Channels – what social media platform is best for you? There are recommended channels: facebook, blogs, twitter, (possible: websites, Google+, email(large audience reach, low budget), electronic newsletters), (Not recommended: youtube (you need video content), community, flicker, sms, etc) These recommendations change based on ‘resource’ criteria.  The more resources you have, the more channels you will be recommended.

7.     Build – How do you launch a blog, for example? Facebook has good instructions for how to build a page.

8.     Schedule – this helps us know when to post status updates. There is a base structure for when to post. When to post… Youtube is usually one time per month. Twitter every day.