4C. Social Media Tools for Tobacco Regulations

The Food and Drug Administration is using social media tools to increase awareness and engage stakeholders about new tobacco control regulations. On June 22, 2010 the Center for Tobacco Products (CTP) launched the Break the Chain of Tobacco Addition campaign to raise the awareness of tobacco retailers on the front lines of this issue as well as consumers, the tobacco industry, and community tobacco control advocates about new tobacco product regulations and their purpose. The campaign features both traditional campaign materials and open government technologies to maximize the impact of the campaign with our audiences and better reach our communication objectives.  The tools are notable because they provide portable content, encourage participation, leverage networks, and provide information in multiple formats.

The campaign has been successful in meeting FDA’s primary communication goals.  For instance, in a few months, FDA received almost 50,000 visits to the website.  The agency also found that almost 90% of the text messaging subscribers were satisfied or very satisfied with our text messaging project.  Likewise, about 88% of the subscribers thought the messages were effective or very effective in meeting their needs.  The campaign had almost 4,000 Twitter subscribers. This campaign is continuing and FDA is working on making data-driven enhancements to the social media components and developing deeper evaluation strategies to assess usability, content effectiveness and impact.