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Swine flu Twitter campaign

December 4th, 2009 · by David Bradley >> 1 Comment

    My family were recruited into the UK Flu Watch program, and needless to say I started blogging about it. All grist to the mill, and all that. But, while I was putting the finishing touches to the first blog post I thought about how I could spread the word, virally, you might say, about the Flu Watch program.

    As I had the day before had my H1N1 swine flu vaccination, my upper arm was a little achy, so I decided to tweet the experience and while I was writing the first tweet, a little light went on and I thought I could combine the two things together and so promote the blog post and thence the Flu Watch program.

    First tweet of the morning:

    CAMBRIDGE: Breaking news: My arm hurts. Uniformed female in anonymous room wielding sharp implement and plastic vial of liquid blamed. 13 minutes ago from web. 13 minutes ago

    CAMBRIDGE: Vial now known to have contained biochemical fingerprint of H1N1 virus. 12 minutes ago

    CAMBRIDGE: Immunological counter-reaction to injection of vectorised H1N1 remnant causes minor localised inflammatory response. 11 minutes ago

    CAMBRIDGE: Tweeting about marginally painful vaccination symptoms leads to temporal amnesia and analgesic effect. Pain almost gone. 10 minutes ago

    CAMBRIDGE Flu vaccination probe launched, local family involved. 9 minutes ago

    That last tweet linked to the blog post, obviously. At the time of writing, I hadn’t looked at the number of referrals or retweets, but whatever the outcome if it raises awareness of the program, even just a little, that will be a good thing for influenza research.

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    1 response so far ↓

    • David Bradley // Dec 4, 2009 at 8:49 am

      Okay, so after five minutes of the first tweet there had been a few dozen visitors to the blog post. But, it is Friday morning, not even 9am UK time…so…probably not the best time to do a social media experiment and flu awareness campaign.


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