The CDC Exhibits Online Marketing Savvy

Monday, May 23, 2011

Ok, Maybe we are in for The Apocalypse – The CDC has displayed a sense of humor.

If you haven’t seen it already, the CDC published a well done article on emergency preparedness for the zombie apocalypse: Social Media: Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse.

In a burst of creativity, Dr. Ali Khan of the CDC crafted a valuable article on how to prepare for an emergency in a manner that people will actually read. It’s brilliant and it worked. A normal blog post on the CDC’s disaster preparedness site gets around 1,000 to 3,000 visits. Before the traffic crashed the CDC’s blog on Wednesday, May 18th (2 days after the post went up), “Zombie Apocalypse” had received 60,000 visits and the topic was trending on Twitter by the 19th. By Friday, it had gotten 963,000 page views and was still going strong.

My hat is off to Dave Daigle, who came up with the idea, and to Dr. Ali Khan who approved it an wrote the article. The timing and the angle both were perfect; posted just five days before Harold Camping’s evangelical prediction that “Judgment Day” would happen on May 21st. The content was not only useful and important, but engaging, funny, and clearly presented.

Now, before the CDC decides to try something like this again, perhaps they should do some “disaster preparedness” on their blog server so a scant 60,000 page views doesn’t bring it down.