Effectively building social capital: Social networking for public health campaigns

With over 40% of current Americans between the ages of 25 and 40 actively researching health information online it has become increasingly hard to ignore the usefulness of social networks as a viable source for information dissemination. Facebook and Twitter have seen increasing popularity not only from the public but also major industries. Virtual meetings places such as Second Life are frequently being used for online education. In this era of digital information it has become more capricious to rely on these media outlets. It's an era of instant gratification and feeding into this frenzy can be a multifaceted array of social media channels. This program will look at these social networks and try to understand the complexities of using them effectively using the pandemic influenza awareness campaign we created for our school as an example. The areas we focused on were effective showcasing of preventive habits, consistency in messaging, and building social groups for support. Social media provided a great tool for the decision-making mindset but a larger and much more progressive plan was needed to for the communication to be to be effectively persuasive. It had to be both transactional and response dependent that encourages reciprocated communication exchange between the persuader and persuadee. Overall, we will highlight on how social media channels were used to motivate the receiver to actively engage in the message, perceive and interpret content. This allowed for active elaboration of message arguments and counterarguments to encourage individuals to be motivated towards behavior change.