If Children's Healthcare of Atlanta wanted to get people talking about childhood obesity, they have certainly succeeded with their latest ad/media campaign, "Strong4life." Utilizing social media and a traditional website, Strong4life.com is asking people to "join the community" against childhood obesity. The campaign has a Facebook page and have utilized a Twitter feed. They have also posted short videos on YouTube that illustrates the need for Georgia to start addressing the problems associated with childhood obesity. As of February 1, their Facebook page had 684 likes. A glance at their Twitter page shows Tweets acknowledging other Tweets commenting on the initiative, both positive and negative and Tweets acknowledging stories regarding the initiative in the mainstream media. They definitely have people talking.
Not all of the talk is in support of the campaign. A very vocal group of bloggers, i.e. mommy bloggers, started their own campaign, via social media, complaining about what they perceived as the negative message conveyed by the "Strong4life" ad campaign. Claiming the Strong4life ads focuses on shaming obese children, they unleashed a "Twitter Party" utilizing the hashtag #Ashamed. I've included a link showing the statistics of the tweets from that day—the bloggers' Twitter Party was pretty effective with the #Ashamed hashtag showing up in just under 1% of 200 million tweets for that day. Not bad for a ground roots campaign. Children's Healthcare of Atlanta is listening too. A spokeswoman for the hospital stated "We needed this to become front and center. We needed to start tackling this as a community."
The fact that comments, both positive and negative, are being made via the social media stream, and the fact that the originator of the conversation—Children's Healthcare of Atlanta— is listening to those comments, proves that social media is clearly an effective tool for creating a community, albeit a virtual community.
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