I’ve asked Melinda Frost, former lead for NCHM’s Global Communication and Marketing team, to write a guest blog for this month’s edition of Health Marketing Musings. Since early November, Melinda has served in a unique capacity for our Center. She works under the US Embassy in Beijing, China as the first US CDC health communications officer placed overseas. One of her roles is to determine how US CDC can best partner with China’s Ministry of Health to increase their ability to deliver tailored, culturally appropriate health information to affected populations at national and sub-national levels. –Jay Bernhardt

The most important platform in the world for collecting and delivering targeted and tailored health information during the first half of the 21^st Century will be mobile phones. Mobile phones and integrated wireless devices will revolutionize the practice of public health and touch billions of lives around the world.

Health Literacy is the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions, as defined by the National Library of Medicine and as used in Healthy People 2010. According to the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), more than 77 million adults in the US demonstrate basic or below basic health literacy skills.

On December 1, 2007, the world will collectively observe World AIDS Day. Since 1988, World AIDS Day has provided an important opportunity for governments, organizations, communities, and individuals to generate greater public awareness of the devastating impact of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and to re-energize those fighting against it. Worldwide, HIV prevalence-the percentage of people living with HIV-has leveled off and the number of new infections dropped in 2007. However, AIDS remains among the leading causes of death around the world and continues to be the primary cause of death in Africa. In 2007, an estimated 2.1 million died of AIDS.

On Saturday October 19, I attended part of the first CONNECT. Public Relations & Social Media Conference hosted by the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. The agenda included renowned PR professionals (or “Rock Stars” as accurately described by Dr. Kaye Sweetser) who discussed cutting-edge social media techniques and how they can be used in PR and marketing. Many thanks to UGA for organizing and including me in this event. I invite you to browse the CONNECT blog, where you can find audio, blogs, links, twitter content, podcasts, photos and more from the conference.

This is an exciting time to be working in health communication, marketing, and media. While each of these areas has roots in distinct disciplines, what brings us together is our shared belief that customers (however defined) matter most, information is powerful, and protecting and promoting people’s health is a noble cause worth fighting for.

One of the mainstays of health marketing is to designate a day (or week or month) to a public health issue and use that day and the time leading up to it to raise awareness and promote health messages. Unfortunately, this strategy has become so commonplace that nearly every week has one, if not several, worthwhile observances associated with it, thereby reducing the likelihood of getting attention among the many competing stories appearing in the media. Nonetheless, some “days” are particularly important and well worth our attention and efforts.

Last week I attended a morning panel presentation at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School featuring Richard Edelman, Chairman and CEO of Edelman. Richard discussed the 2007 Edition of the Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual survey of influentials from 18 countries and their perceptions of trust and credibility in different organizational sectors and information sources.

When I came to CDC in August 2005, I brought with me one major goal: to improve the CDC website. I am proud to say that as of April 19, 2007, we have accomplished this goal with the launch of the new CDC.gov homepage and top-level navigation pages. Not that the old site was that bad compared to some others (who will remain nameless), but it certainly wasn’t nearly as good as it could be. The design of the new site is based on science, best practices, and evidence-based research, like everything else we do at the CDC and the National Center for Health Marketing.

Before I share my topic for this blog, I have an admission to make. I am a lousy blogger. This blog entry is long overdue. I deeply believe in blogging and the incredible power of personal narrative, but am having a hard time keeping it fresh. I invite suggestions from veteran bloggers to let me know how they manage to do their day jobs and still keep their blog novel.