In September, the Department of Health and Human Services launched its renovated Flu.gov website, which assembles influenza information from several government agencies. It’s directed at the general public and at health-care and other professionals. The overhaul aimed to make the site as useful and user-friendly as possible — to attract a larger audience. In working on the site, HHS relied heavily on social media to figure out what people really wanted to know about H1N1. The interactive tools it used and the lessons it learned might be helpful to you in customizing your own H1N1 web page — and also in reporting swine-flu stories.
Andrew Wilson, head of social media for HHS, was a primary architect of the new site. His research included lots of H1N1 keyword searches on sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Google Blog Search to “see what people were talking and asking about.” If the number of relevant Twitter tweets was overwhelming, he’d dump them into a Wordle tag cloud to see what issues surfaced most often.
Wilson also needed to figure out what information people were looking for when they came specifically to Flu.gov. So his team put a questionnaire front and center on the homepage asking for feedback. It also used web metrics to figure out which parts of the site people visited most often.
The overall results? “People really want to know the basics,” Wilson told me, “regardless of what you think they already know.” Many visitors “were going to the FAQ pages, which weren’t well highlighted at the time. So we raised their visibility and put them on the homepage.”
Wilson continues to use social media to “listen in” on the national H1N1 conversation. He has found an online community of people interested in flu issues — people whose expertise he has come to trust. These people, he says, “act as another set of educated eyes” and help him “pull out a meaningful signal” from the “noise in social media.” They are, in other words, sources: people he can consult when a story breaks. He just happened to cultivate them online. You could too.
Wilson left me with a specific tip for local reporters who want to use social media to find H1N1 stories: use location keywords (the name of your neighborhood or town or region) in your blog, Twitter, and other searches. It’ll help you find leads near you.
A final note: Flu.gov of course uses social media not just to listen but also to get the word out. Its Twitter stream is here; it’s Facebook page is here. HHS’s H1N1 videos on YouTube are here. You can find Andrew Wilson here on Twitter, and he’s always eager for feedback about Flu.gov.