Building Meaningful Collaborative Relationships for HIV Prevention through Social Media

Throughout the United States, HIV prevention professionals seek out information on program design, new research, prevention strategies, and events- and often within an isolated framework. By staying disconnected from national partners and relying on individual research to build HIV prevention programs, institutions and individuals have been unable to access existing programs, make collaborative contacts, obtain lessons learned from successful campaigns, and share innovative techniques in HIV prevention programs. CDC NPIN addresses this problem by building online collaborative relationships between NGOs, CBOs, non-profits, state and local health departments, grantees, activists, federal agencies, and public health employees across the United States through social media.

By using social networking, location-based networking, personalized web communities, blogs, microblogs, social networking sites, online conversations, town halls, and real-time interviews, CDC NPIN's social media outreach promotes conversations around conferences, meetings, awareness days, new research, important publications, and other major milestones in prevention. Through the use of new media technologies, those with the common interest in HIV prevention have their choice of new media outlets to share their own insights on developments and challenges in HIV prevention.

By making multiple new media forums available to varied audiences, social media users engage in the CDC NPIN and partner forums to collaborate, network, and develop more innovative web prevention tools. Organizations of all levels and sizes can now create visible and responsive HIV campaigns, and they are able to share their successes and strategies with colleagues from around the world.