Could the Center for Disease Control and Preventions blog post, "Preparedness 101- Zombie Apocalypse" be the best blog post of 2011?
Just before Christmas, I was at a BierWerks, a pub in Woodland Park listening to the Mike Maddux Band. All of the people in my group loved to run and we talked a lot about running. Then, one of the ladies in my group, an engineer, started talking about the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) article about preparing for a zombie apocalypse. She wondered could a zombie apocalypse really occur. Now, a lot of the Army guys I work with LOVE talking about zombies and how they would fight them. They get so excited about it that you would think that zombies are real. Generally, I’ve always just kind of tuned them out. Zombies aren’t really real. Are they? Anyway, the engineer’s comments about the CDC peaked my curiosity.
The next day I did a Google search. Sure enough there really was a blog post last May about preparing for a Zombie Apocalypse. The post was so popular that at one point that the blog's server crashed. And…..7 months later people are sitting in a bar talking about a Center for Disease Control blog post.
The blog, released just before hurricane season on May 16 by Dr. Ali Khan, was designed to be a “tongue in cheek campaign to engage new audiences in disaster preparation. See: Preparedness-101 ZombieApocalypse, It turned out to be a wildly successful.As of today, the post had 700 comments. Prior to the blog post, the CDC reportedly had 12,000 followers on Twitter. Two days after the post, they had 1.2 million followers. As of today, the CDC has over 1.325 million Twitter followers. http://twitter.com/CDCemergency
Why has this blog post been so popular? The pictures? The great disaster preparedness checklist? The zombie history? The humor behind it?
How can this post help us in the real estate community?
1. Do you have a disaster preparedness kit in your car? At home? If not, this might be a great attainable New Years Resolution. http://blogs.cdc.gov/publichealthmatters/2011/05/preparedness-101-zombie-apocalypse/
2. Do you know who the target audience is that you are trying to reach with your blog? Are your blog posts geared towards that audience? Be willing to think out of the box.
Comments(14)