Targeting youth, Military Health System adds social networking tools

The Military Health System has added social networking tools including Twitter, MySpace and YouTube in a push to engage more of the individuals it serves -- the 18- to 24-year-olds who make up a large portion of the more than 1.4 million troops on active duty.

MHS' health site is a spiffy, easy-to-use portal that provides news and text-based information. But for about two years it has attracted only 8 percent of the 18- to 24-year-old demographic, said Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, MHS director of strategic communications.

To lure more of the younger troops to the site, the agency started using Twitter in March, setting up it's healthdotmil feed. The move provided a quick way for Debbie Hendrix, an Army spouse with an autistic son, to quickly connect with MHS doctors. Hendrix, who lives near Fort Bliss, Texas, sent a tweet in April asking for help with her son.

When MHS received the tweet, Kilpatrick said the agency connected Hendrix with autism specialists at Fort Bliss within an hour. Hendrix shared her experience with raising an autistic child on the Military Health System blog, an example of a user using more than on social media tool on the site, which is what MHS officials hope will continue to happen, Kilpatrick said.

Brenda Powell, founder of Social Networking Girls, a consulting firm in Malibu, Calif., said the quick response Hendrix received is indicative of how the judicious use of tweets can connect people with the right target audience quicker than e-mails. MHS had 1,088 followers to the feed as of Monday afternoon.

She said the health service has taken the right approach in its use of social media to connect with young troops because they prefer to access their information from media rich sites rather than sites heavy in text, which they are more likely to view as boring.

The agency also uses sites such as YouTube to reach to the younger age group with videos on subjects ranging from prosthetic legs to golf therapy clinics for combat wounded veterans to a short profile of an occupational therapist who works with combat-wounded veterans.

The video on prosthetic legs had the most views last month. The second-most-viewed video was a 2008 video on the Bataan Memorial Death March at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., which features Army medic Staff Sgt. Matthew Sims, an indication that troops crave more than just medical information. Kilpatrick said MHS posted 66 videos on YouTube in May, with the top five viewed 3,785 times.

The MHS site on Facebook had 1,206 views in May, while its MySpace site had 716 views, Kilpatrick said.