Saturday, May 21, 2011

A great piece of lateral thinking and writing for communication

I talk to my students a lot about some of my deepest fears.  Preeminent among them are 1.) my fear of dying in a gas station explosion caused by a lit cigarette and 2.) zombies.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has as part of its mission preventing major medical emergencies, but sometimes has trouble making itself heard in a wide enough venue.  So someone thought to themselves, "If I write about zombies, people will read it," and they did.  And they were right.

According to this article, where I first heard about the blog post, a typical CDC blog post will get between 2000 and 3000 hits.  After 2 days, traffic to this blog post crashed the web site after 60,000 hits.  That's reaching your audience.

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