Primary Perspectives in Meme Utilization as a Digital Driver for Medical Community Engagement and Education Mobilization: Pre-Post Study

Abstract

Background: Memes have gone “viral,” gaining increasing prominence as an effective communications strategy based on their unique ability to engage, educate, and mobilize target audiences in a call to action through a cost-efficient and culturally relevant approach. Within the medical community in particular, visual media has evolved as a means to influence clinical knowledge transfer. To this end, the GetWaivered (GW) project has leveraged memes as part of a behavioral economics toolkit to address one of the most critical public health emergencies of our time—the 20-year opioid epidemic. As part of a multidimensional digital awareness campaign to increase Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)-X waiver course registration, GW investigated the results of meme usage in terms of impressions, website traffic, and ultimately user acquisition, as determined by web-based training enrollment and attendance outcomes. Objective: The objective of this study was to determine the efficacy of implementing humor-based promotional content versus the traditional educational model, and how the translation of the increase in engagement would increase the participant count and website traffic for GW’s remote DEA-X waiver training. Methods: The approach to this study was based on 2 time frames (pre- and postcampaign). During April-July 2021, we developed a campaign via advertisements on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the GW website to expand outreach. These memes targeted medical professionals with the ability to prescribe buprenorphine. The time frame of this campaign measured engagement metrics and compared values to preceding months (January-March 2021) for our GetWaivered website and social media pages, which translated to registrants for our remote DEA-X waiver training. Results: By the end of July 2021, a total of 9598 individuals had visited the GW website. There was an average of 79.3 visitors per day, with the lowest number of daily visitors being 0 and the highest being 575. Conclusions: The use of memes may provide a medium for social media engagement (likes, comments, and shares) while influencing viewers to pursue a proposed action, such as e-training registration.