Looking Back on 2011 – Learning With and From You

Leave a comment New Media January 3, 2012

By Michelle Samplin-Salgado, New Media Strategist, AIDS.gov

For us at AIDS.gov, January not only marks the new year, but also the fourth anniversary of our blog. Launched in January 2008, the blog has grown from one weekly new media post to several posts a week (and sometimes a day). Now we feature community and federal guest bloggers, and we’ve expanded our topics to include the National HIV/AIDS Strategy, research, and the global epidemic in addition to our weekly new media post (and we haven’t missed a Tuesday new media post in four years.)
Throughout the year we focus on what we can learn from you – our readers, friends, and followers. We always return to the “P” in the POST method, People. In fact, every week we prepare a social media report to look at trends, hot topics and lessons learned. Here’s our top lessons from 2011:

Wide Reach. It’s about the people and it’s personal. This year we lost some of our heroes -, Elizabeth Taylor, David Cato, and Doug Morgan. Ryan White would have turned 40 this year. These events have been some of our most viral posts/tweets because they touch people. Our weekly report tell us that these are the most shared, retweeted, or clicked items. Amidst all the shiny new tools, it’s important to remember that new media can help us connect to one another.
More and more AIDS service organizations (ASOs) are using new media. We used to get a lot of questions about new media (what’s a blog? Twitter? Facebook?) As more and more ASOs use new media, the focus has shifted to how to develop and assess a new media strategy. There’s a lot we can learn from each other in this space. We include guest posts from our partners to show you that with a plan anyone can incorporate new media into their programming. You can read two recent posts from Cascade AIDS Project and New York AIDS Institute
Mobile is here to stay, and it’s growing. The ubiquity of mobile continued to be reinforced this year. On World AIDS Day we had 6,000 mobile visits and 33% of our visits to the HIV Prevention Services Locator were mobile. However, we have to consider the safety concerns use of using mobile devices in our vehicles.
We are still learning. As we watched the rise of geo-location services, we started using Foursquare . We are still experimenting with the technology and will share with you our lessons learned as time goes on. Natural language processing is also receiving a lot of buzz and we took a look at the impact that it could have on the HIV community.
We are still growing. As new tools came on the scene, like Google+, and others continued to grow such as Tumblr , we’ve been assessing how to use these tools to stay connected to the HIV community.

In the 30 years since the beginning of this epidemic we have gone from buttons pinned to our shirts to web badges posted to our blogs. Although technology can connect us near and far, face to face interaction and community mobilization are as important as ever.
What did you learn in 2011? What are you excited about for 2012?
Related posts:

Looking Back on 2011 – Learning With and From You blog.aids.gov