The Malaria Conversation on a Global Scale & What it Means for Communicators

With smart phones and Twitter at the ready, the first annual International Healthcare Social Media Summit kicked-off at 9:00 am EST on May 18^th in Washington, D.C.

Spectrum’s own John Seng welcomed all attendees, virtual and physical, including GLOBALHealthPR partners from over seven countries and introduced the four panelists: Aurora PR‘s Neil Crump and Aaron Pond (UK) , PR Partners‘ Paola de la Barreda (Mexico) and Spectrum’s Anthony LaFauce.

Panelists presented data found in an 11 country, cross-cultural case study pertaining to the malaria pandemic and the evolving use of social media as an outreach resource. You can watch the event start to finish below.

Malaria and Health 2.0

The malaria case study data revealed a very sparse amount of interaction relating to social media and malaria.

Country-to-country

The United States saw a large number of posts in the blogosphere. Anthony LaFauce chalked the amount of posts up to ‘chatter’, a combination of repurposed press releases, a slew of automated ‘bots’ and a few arbitrary mentions, the quantity of blogs found pertaining to malaria are not of the quality in which would reflect a solid influencer community.

The United Kingdom and Spain saw much less ‘chatter’ more substance in blog and Twitter hits, with a stronger community of quality blogs talking about the malaria pandemic.

Two conversations, no overlap

Additional insights made by the IHSMS panelists included a trending pattern in which those individuals in a higher prevalence market revere the contraction of malaria similar to the common cold whereas in a low prevalence market the conversation is focused on disease epidemiology and science.

The overlap in conversation is therefore non-existent and information is not disseminated from country to country.

The communications solution

• Give malaria a face and create an emotional bond
• Have something interesting to say about scientific advancement and belief that the future of the disease can be improved
• Establish urgency and take action
• Encourage the sharing of experience in the social space

Social media: words from the wise

• Social media is about making connections. Facebook, Twitter, blogs and whatever else becomes popular are all just tools to help fortify those relationships
• Don’t pass your new media tools (aka messaging) off to someone that isn’t trained. This means, interns should not be tweeting without getting posts approved by someone who is well-versed in your company’s messaging and overall voice.
• Understand your audience: Twitter isn’t for everybody, sometimes it’s a letter via ‘snail mail’ that will give you the best ROI.

Some quick stats on the reach of the summit:

• Over 500 tweets including #IHSMS (two days leading up to 72-hour period), from the U.S., UK, Spain, Portugal, Japan, Singapore, India and Australia.
• 130 unique participants in webcast
• 50 participants in Lisbon, 50 in Madrid, and 40 in Washington, D.C.

Did you miss IHSMS?

Check out the video via LiveStream to view IHSMS presentation video and slides.