“Healthy adults 50+ can delay an H1N1 shot until high risk groups get it.” This was first text message sent to me after I signed up to test out what Gov 2.0 looked like at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Since then, about one text every two days alerts me to various dangers, health advisories or factoids — the last being that babies under six months of age can’t get flu vaccines due to potential complications. I’m still holding out on any announcements about puppies, but fear I’m tuned in to the wrong channel.

The messages are part of a pilot project involving mobile alerts from the three-years-young National Center for Health Marketing’s eHealth Marketing Division (let's just call it eHealth). The amount of multimedia information being put out by eHealth and the CDC is dazzling by any standard. Blogs, podcasts, images, videos, widgets, texts, tweets, badges, eCards, and even a virtual world presence have made this office an unrelenting pioneer in the application of social media within government. 

The vast majority of the CDC’s social media content so far deals with just a few hot button topics: Swine Flu (H1N1), plain vanilla (a.k.a seasonal) flu shots, and peanut product recalls, with a particularly robust focus on the ever-inspiring Swine Flu. The mobile pilot program is meant to reach those who like their information to go, as well as individuals without Internet access or with shoddy cellular service (a-hem, AT&T).

To opt into the program, simply send a text with the word “health” to phone number 87000 and you’ll be one of about 10,000 people to receive a registration text within minutes that contains a few marketing questions. These questions “will help the CDC figure out the best way to market the program,” said Janice Nall, Director of the eHealth Marketing Division. “We’re also testing out various opt-in words like health, information, flu, et cetera, to see if it makes a difference to subscription rates.”

If Ms. Nall's language sounds more like business than bureaucracy, that’s no accident. The small crew of this division runs their shop more like a go-get-'em K Street consultancy rather than the all too common do-only-what’s-required approach. It is this unique culture and commitment to results that is helping to revitalize and rebrand the CDC’s image from a government research institute with some response capabilities into an organization with a sense of urgency centered around a rapid-response unit connecting millions to up-to-the minute critical information. 

For those still unconverted to social media, the CDC has graciously set up an entire site dedicated to tracking and measuring its communication efforts. A visit to http://CDC.gov/metrics offers a quick snippet of the CDC’s role in information dissemination.

The statistics are quite compelling, and demonstrate the thirst for information from the public. In fact, in one day in April 2009, over 14 million pages were viewed on the CDC’s website. Similarly, the CDC’s “widgets,” of which there are over 20, have generated over 33 million views themselves. For those unfamiliar with the term, a widget is a short message or piece of a website that can be made portable and embedded into other websites.

“As of FY09 (Q3), the Peanut Recall Widget and the Everyday Health widget are the two most popular Widgets from CDC. The Peanut Recall Widget, as of June 2009, was embedded on over 7,018 different Web sites and was at one point found on over 20,000 sites during the height of the Peanut recall campaign,” the CDC reported.

Part of the ultimate success of the CDC’s program is that they cross-pollinate their materials wherever possible. Calls to become one of about 1.1 million followers on either their CDC emergency information account or their flu account on Twitter are mixed in with prompts to become one of 44,000 Facebook fans of the CDC. There’s even a Twitter account for those interested in tracking their social media moves. 

Those entrenched in government looking to repeat the CDC’s successes — but feeling like the resources just aren’t available — should take note that a handful of people produced the vast majority of this work. How? For one, all the platforms being used are free. It takes only a few minutes to setup an account. Keeping up with the daily content grind might at first appear daunting as well, without knowing the tricks.

One trick I can impart is that you need not tweet every fifteen seconds. There just aren’t enough interesting things happening at your agency to do that, nor do people want to read that many tweets. Less is more. On the CDC’s flu Twitter account, the average is about two tweets per day. Part of that entails a strategy of not wanting to put so much information out to the public that they drown in it and aren't able to make decisions. Part of it stems from having to vet the tweets through the scientific community at CDC for accuracy.

On the CDC's emergency update Twitter account, postings come more frequently, but tools like Twitterfeed are available to automatically send updates placed on the Website to Twitter. The same is true for Facebook and other platforms. In fact, if your Website is setup properly with RSS feeds, almost all of these various platforms can be updated automatically. 

Creating videos, podcasts, widgets, and Web content may prove more challenging and time consuming, but it is far from beyond the grasp of most. The nice thing here is, the CDC has created a model to follow. If you’re still not sure if it’s worth the effort, ask yourself this question: how many employees would be needed to fulfill a few million FOIA requests and phone calls a year?