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This is a multiple methods study that highlights the tension between awareness- and behavioral-based campaign successes, particularly when communicating using social media and pop-culture-referencing humor. To illustrate, it examines the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) “zombie apocalypse” all-disaster-preparedness campaign. An interview with a CDC campaign manager, campaign document analysis, and a 2 (information form: social vs. traditional media) × 2 (message strategy: humorous vs. non-humorous) experiment uncovers benefits and pitfalls of using social media and humorous messaging for risk communication. Findings show social media can quickly spread information to new publics for minimal costs; however, experiment participants who received the humorous (i.e., zombie) risk message reported significantly weaker intentions to take protective actions in comparison to those who received the traditional, non-humorous risk message.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Dr Brooke Fisher Liu, Dr Allison Smith, and the anonymous reviewers for their excellent feedback on this work. The authors contributed equally to this research. This research was supported by the Resilient Systems Division of the Science and Technology Directorate of the US Department of Homeland Security through Award Number HSHQDC-10-A-BOA36 made to National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the US Department of Homeland Security or START. An altered teaching case version is included in START's Training in Risk and Crisis Communication (TRACC) program, and an earlier version of this work was presented at the annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.