Analysis - by Patrick Thornton on Monday, April 27, 2009 17:42 - View Comments

CDC posts to Twitter to update public about swine flu

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Even the government  recognizes the power of Twitter as an information dissemination tool.

Want to know why the government — the Centers for Disease Control to be exact — is using Twitter to get info out about swine flu? It’s a quick and easy (and free) way to get information out to millions of people.

No pun intended, but the power of Twitter is viral. The CDC can get information out there, other people can retweet it, while others find out about it via search.twitter.com and other sites. Using Twitter to get information out to people just makes sense.

The CDC is using their Twitter account, CDC Emergency, to post news bulletins, recommendations and information on how swine flu is treated. Here are some sample tweets:

New recommendations on facemask and respirator use in certain communities with swine fluenza. http://bit.ly/XkqEk

Swine flu – 40 confirmed cases. New York count now at 28. http://bit.ly/KO5pA

Antiviral Drugs and Swine Flu – CDC recommends oseltamivir or zanamivir for treatment and/or prevention. See http://bit.ly/QS1BG

Twitter is a ridiculously easy system to get information out during breaking news events, crisis and other rapid-fire events. The only knock on Twitter in these situations is that it can be overloaded. If Twitter can get its stability issues under control, it could drastically change how governments and news organizations act during crisis and breaking events.

It’s not hyperbole to say that the CDC’s use of Twitter is revolutionizing information dissemination during a health scare. Yes, information like this was available for years on the CDC Web site, but putting it on a viral social network like Twitter completely changes the game. As of the writing of this CDC Emergency has about 22,000 followers (it added about a 1,000 since I started writing this), but it’s tweets are being retweeted like crazy.

I honestly have not found a better source of information about swine flu than Twitter. The hashtag #swineflu is one of the best places to go for updated info about swine flu. The CDC Emergency account, however, is by far the best place to start for swine flu info.

One of the best parts of using Twitter to disseminate information like this is Twitter’s mobile support. I can get swine flu updates via my mobile phone, and qith an application like Summizer for the iPhone, I can even just isolate CDC Emergency tweets and check them throughout the day. I don’t need to be by a TV or even a computer to get updates during breaking events anymore.

And frankly, a news organization can’t compete with an organization like the CDC directly broadcasting to the people. They’ve eliminated the middle man.

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  • http://danmarrin.blogspot.com Dan Marrin

    They’ve also set up a YouTube streaming video resource! Check it out!

  • http://www.watershed-publishing.com/ Olivier Travers

    You’re absolutely right that news travels fast on Twitter, and from the perspective of the information source, it’s a great way to push headlines. As an information consumer though, I find the kind of use case you’re describing quickly overwhelming. Even using filters in a desktop app such as Tweetdeck, you can easily waste time wading through a lot of duplicate content. Information overload all over again, except even more hectic. I’m not saying these challenges can’t be addressed, but there’s a downside to Twitter’s real time efficiency and increasing reach.

  • http://beatblogging.org/2009/04/28/daily-dose-of-social-media-majority-of-new-twitter-users-dont-stick-around/ Daily Dose of social media: Majority of new Twitter users don’t stick around | BeatBlogging.Org

    [...] from the graph below, it can be difficult to process so many tweets at once. That’s why the CDC having a Twitter account of its own makes so much sense: it’s the perfect way to cut through the [...]

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BeatBlogging.org was a grant-funded journalism project that studied how journalists used social media and other Web tools to improve beat reporting. It ran for about two years, ending in the fall of 2009.

New content is occasionally produced here by the this project's former editor Patrick Thornton. The site is still up and will remain so because many journalists and professors still use and link to the content. BeatBlogging.org offers a fascinating glimpse into the former stages of journalism and social media. Today it's expected that journalists and journalism organization use social media, but just a few years ago that wasn't the case.

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Patrick Thornton is the editor and lead writer of BeatBlogging.Org. He is @pwthornton on Twitter.