"Let's Move!" Campaign: Critique

2. Part A: Pick a current social media campaign and critique it with an eye on your niche goals. Examine how the growing conversation is affecting our world.

The “Let’s Move!” federal initiative, organized by the first lady Michelle Obama and backed by the White House, officially began last winter. Its objective: to help prevent childhood obesity by promoting physical activity and healthy eating among children. Seventeen percent of all children and adolescents in the United States are considered obese – triple the rate from just one generation ago, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Reducing those numbers can not only help children to grow up to be healthier adults but also reduce health care costs down the line. (Obese people in general spend about 40 percent more on health care than average-weight people, government data shows.)

In a statement on its Web site, Mrs. Obama, a mother of two young daughters, said she was “determined to work with folks across this country to change the way a generation of kids thinks about food, nutrition and physical activity." Last month, she appointed Dr. Judith S. Palfrey, the former president of the American Academy of Pediatrics and director of the Children's Hospital of Boston's global health efforts, to oversee the initiative as its executive director.

To help get its messages across, Let’s Move uses social media extensively, with a blog connected to its very detailed Web site, a Facebook fan page, Twitter account and a YouTube channel. The target audience includes parents, educators, health care providers and the food industry.

The Let’s Move blog offers frequent posts from different writers, including Dr. Palfrey, on subjects ranging from healthy recipes to “success stories,” but it doesn’t allow comments from readers, which can be considered a flaw.

But reader interaction is permitted – and encouraged – on its Facebook page, which had 75,291 “likes” as of Oct. 6. You don’t have to “like” the page, either, to comment, which is a good idea to keep the conversation going.

Its Twitter account, with 14,130 followers, also encourages conversation through feedback. In fact, on Oct. 5, the group held its first “tweetup day,” which basically invited anyone to tweet questions or ideas about the campaign and/or improving lifestyle habits of youngsters. There was a moderate response.

The Let’s Move channel on YouTube – which has dozens of public service announcements, including several with Mrs. Obama featured – had 121,085 views and 458,312 upload views as of Oct. 6. That’s not enough to generate buzz, especially when you look at viral campaigns like the Old Spice man. The problem can lie with some of the videos, which are not terribly engaging.

The fact that Mrs. Obama initiated this campaign might prompt many individuals and groups to support it, but in this heavily bipartisan climate, it may be turning others off. Others, too, might be turned off by the fact that it's run by the federal government and feel less inclined to participate in the discussion. Still, the campaign, with a clever short name, does make an effort to focus on the big picture and a universal cause of obesity, which, hopefully, can garner more widespread support for this important cause.

We won't really know until another 20 years or so, when the kids are grown into adults, however, if this campaign actually helped to fight obesity.