Health Awareness in Business

Key Words: Health, Awareness, Communication, Social Media

Companies promoting health awareness is a way an organization can strengthen its reputation. 

Wix Site, (2025)

Social Media's Power

The FactNotFiction Campaign was a pivotal movement that strategically used social media to promote sexual health and emergency prevention among the youth to increase awareness. 

In 2022, a study was done that showed TikTok is one of the top online platforms U.S teens use to gather information. 

Sucessful Campaigns

The article "A Strategic View: #WhatIDidInstead – A Social Media Rather Than Social Norms Approach to Curb Teen Drinking" talks about how using social media to share the dangers of drinking underage. 

Wix Site, (2025)

The use of the hashtag #WhatIDidInstead helped generate organic, peer-to-peer content across social media platforms, like X and Instagram, creating this created a safe conversation about making alcohol-free choices. 

While it was a great campaign for students to see that they have other options rather than alcohol remains important. Quite a bit of underage drinkers say they will not stop drinking due to this campaign.

The CDC did a campaign, “Zombies Gone Viral,” which created a light-hearted, fun way for consumers to receive information from the government (Kruvand, M., & Silver, M, 2013). This was a fun and unique way for the public to get critical health information that is typically ignored. 

Understanding this as part of their demographic and integrating a campaign into a teenager's everyday life made for a successful campaign. Teenagers can be a tough crowd to reach so having good implementation for this plan is important.

Beware of Side Effects Concerns

The Dow Corning breast implant crisis paints a picture of a critical failure in health communication and crisis management, where public trust was severely damaged due to a lack of transparency and accountability within an organization (Dow Corning and Breast Implants: Dealing with the Perception of Deception, n.d.). 

The controversy began when women reported serious health complications allegedly linked to silicone breast implants. Dow lost trust in its consumers, and this has now negatively impacted them years later.

All in all, it is so important that companies are transparent about health concerns from a PR perspective.

Citations

Dow Corning was accused of not sharing all the side effects of breast implants and now several advertising myths were being promoted (Flanders, 1996). 

Flanders, L. (n.d.). Beware - P.R. implants in news coverage | breast implants on trial | frontline. PBS. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/implants/fairarticle.html

Kruvand, M., & Silver, M. (2013). Zombies gone viral: How a fictional zombie invasion helped CDC promote emergency preparedness. Case Studies in Strategic Communication, 2, 34-60. Available online:

http://cssc.uscannenberg.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/v2art3.pdf

Ragsdale, K., Harper, S. K., Kathuria, S., Bardwell, J. H., Penick, C. B., & Breazeale, M. (2015). Social media to

enhance sexual health education for youth: FactNotFiction’s (re)design and launch. Case Studies in Strategic Communication, 4, 88-112. Available online: http://cssc.uscannenberg.org/wp-

content/uploads/2016/06/v4art5.pdf

Vogels, E. A., Gelles-Watnick, R., & Massarat, N. (2022, August 10). Teens, social media and technology 2022. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social-media-and-technology-2022/ 

"A Strategic View: #WhatIDidInstead – A Social Media Rather Than Social Norms Approach to Curb Teen Drinking", n.d.