CDC Shows Off Its Stats

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has become the star of the Government 2.0 movement recently, as the agency has been wildly successful in deploying social media to raise awareness of recent public health crises, including the peanut butter/salmonella outbreak and the recent swine flu scare.

Now the agency has decided to let everyone just how well they've been doing by publishing the metrics for its various Web sites. And what do the numbers show? Surprisingly, the public is turning to CDC for a whole lot more than just information on the latest pandemic.

The most popular feature on the site after the homepage is actually CDC's Adult Body Mass Index calculator, which uses a person's height and weight to determine if they are overweight or obese. Also popular are pages on travelers' health and sexually transmitted diseases.

What these metrics show is that CDC has successfully positioned itself as one of the most trusted sources for health information on the Internet, which is exactly what the agency has been trying to do by reaching out via blogs, Twitter, Widgets and Second Life. By leveraging the public attention during the recent health scares, CDC has managed to penetrate its market and raise its online profile in a way that few if any other agencies have achieved.

To be fair, it has taken some rather unique circumstances for that to happen, in the form of two major public health crises. Furthermore, a huge part of CDC's mission is to keep the public informed and provide reliable health information, two areas where the Internet and social media can be extremely helpful. It is admittedly more difficult to get people to visit the Web site of an agency whose mission is more inwardly focused.

Or is it? CDC clearly understands something many agencies don't: that the public is actually interested in getting its information directly from the source, which in many cases is federal agencies. If the public is willing to follow CDC's Twitter account for information about swine flu, why wouldn't the same people be interested in following the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for the latest on weather and climate change? Likewise, agencies like TSA and EPA have used blogs to open a dialog and increase public understanding of their policies. Why couldn't the Treasury Department or the Securities and Exchange Commission use a similar approach to help the public understand what they are doing to stabilize the financial markets?

These examples show the value of simply re-packaging information that agencies have always made available and using more user-friendly and innovative ways to distribute it. There is a wealth of information available on agency Web sites, but so much of it is difficult to access or time-consuming to wade through that the average citizen simply doesn't bother. If Obama Administration officials are serious about using technology to increase public engagement with the government, they would be wise to start building on the success that agencies like CDC are already experiencing.