I am personally so thrilled that Government has joined the Social Marketing, New Media World! When I received a forward from a member of the Metropolitan Washington Public Health Association (MWPHA) encouraging bloggers to check out AIDS.gov. I jumped to the site, and was so excited to see various different applications of new media here are a few that I was the most excited about:
Various Widgets applicatins that are available as well as other forms of new media!
(Please refer to my sidebar for the AIDS.gov widgets discussed in this post)
Facebook Groups, Myspace, Twitter (I joined twitter after going to the AIDS.gov website), to name a few new media applications were all created to further AIDS awareness.
Text messages to locate testing sites for HIV/AIDS:
Promoting HIV Testing
We need your help to promote HIV testing!
Issue
In the United States, an estimated 1 million people are living with HIV; of these, approximately 25 percent are unaware of their HIV infection and are at increased risk for infecting others.
Goal
Increase awareness about the importance of HIV testing to help improve the health of those most at risk for HIV and to prevent future infections.
Strategy
Use text messaging to promote HIV testing. Mobile phone users can send a text message with their zip code to “KNOWIT” (566948). Within seconds, they will receive a text message identifying an HIV testing site near them. This mobile phone service connects users with CDC’s testing database found at www.HIVtest.org.
How You Can Help
Promote HIV testing by adding a KNOWIT web badge to your website — just copy the html code below and paste it into your site.
The Website also gave the “haters” or the people that were maybe skeptical of the impact of blogging information about the scope of how many people blogging can reach!
Here is a brief description of what the site discussed:
The Power of Bloggers
According to the blog search engine, Technorati 
, “blogs are powerful because they allow millions of people to easily publish and share their ideas, and millions more to read and respond.” There are nearly 113 million blogs , and an estimated 13.6 million health-related blogs . A recent study by Envision Solutions, Inc. found that nearly half of all bloggers in the U.S. wrote about health at least once last year. There is tremendous potential to reach millions of people this year with HIV/AIDS information.
Tony told us that initiatives like Bloggers Unite “nurture social media into being a proactive and positive tool to raise awareness.” He also mentioned that they’ve seen an increase in participation with each Blogger’s Unite event, “because bloggers enjoy coming together as individuals to do good.”
David said, “With an issue like poverty or HIV/AIDS, different bloggers will highlight different topics and present different points of view. As an educator, I am most excited about this aspect of the World AIDS Day project. I will encourage my students to read and consider a number of the Bloggers Unite posts. I’m sure that the ensuing discussions we have as a class will be wonderful. And, hopefully, some of the students will take action as a result of our conversations.”
