Surgeon General's next tobacco report to get Web 2.0 push

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are hoping the Surgeon General’s 2009 report on tobacco — the first under the Obama administration — will go viral.

CDC plans to hire a digital marketing company to develop a strategy for publicizing the report through popular social-networking applications, according to a notice posted on the Federal Business Opportunities Web site.

The report is intended for a variety of people, including consumers, health care professionals and policy-makers. The winning contractor will tailor messages for each audience for delivery via Web sites and mobile devices.

Agency officials hope “to reach modern audiences that prefer to receive news, health and other information through Internet sites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace through multiple devices, including mobile phones,” the notice states.

CDC’s mobile strategy calls for delivering audio, video and picture messages to devices such as iPhones, BlackBerrys and other personal digital assistants.

The contractor will also develop audience-specific Web feeds and devise ways to make it easy for people to share the information with others.

CDC plans to break out content modules from the report, and the contractor must code the modules so they can be shared on social media sites. The company must also have the ability to code content in Extensible Markup Language and format those documents into a Really Simple Syndication format.

CDC officials also want to measure the impact of the campaign in terms of the public’s awareness about the report and its key findings.