Kevin Durant, Alex Morgan, Michael Johnson and Summer Sanders are teaming up with GE to help Facebook users get in better shape just in time for the 2012 Olympic Games.
GE and Facebook together announced the launch of a Facebook app called Healthy Share on Tuesday. It’s designed to provide users with challenges to achieve better health, which they can then track publicly on Facebook to motivate friends and hold themselves accountable.
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Linda Boff, GE’s executive director of global digital marketing, says partnering with Facebook to build and launch the app was a natural fit.
“Facebook is all about sharing and connecting, and people being healthy is like a mantra for us,” she told Mashable. “We started talking to Facebook about how we could align around health and wellness. The journey started there with this idea of, ‘How can we use the power of friends and people supporting each other, but focus it around the idea of health?'”
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Boff and Paul Adams, Facebook’s global head of brand design, see Healthy Share primarily gaining traction through, well, sharing. When a Facebook friend undertakes one of the app’s challenges, that update will show up in your news feed. If you click on that story, you’ll be taken to the app’s landing page, which will show other friends using Healthy Share and provide more details on its use.
The app features simple tips for a healthier lifestyle — how to eat better, why you should walk more and the benefits of taking the stairs instead of riding the escalator, for example. But it also provides specific fitness challenges from former Olympians Johnson and Sanders, as well as probable 2012 participants Durant and Morgan. As you complete tasks — running a certain distance or doing a set of pushups, for example — you can check them off and let friends see your progress for encouragement and motivation.
While Healthy Share is being launched in time for the Olympics and features Olympic athletes, it’s planned to be a longterm project.
Adams says that leveraging Facebook’s massive user base and culture of sharing will incentivize people to actually follow through on their fitness goals.
“With the rise of Facebook, other social networks and digital devices, we see a lot of people tracking their health,” he told Mashable. “Friends are good for our health and influence us in many parts of our lives. The social proof will show you what you did, that will show up in your friends’ news feeds, and then the cycle will start again.”
Does Healthy Share sound like something you might use? Let us know in the comments.
Thumbnail image courtesy iStockphoto, amygdala_imagery
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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