Today, I want to discuss this one tiny jewel of a tweet by Optum, one of the largest healthcare organizations in the world. It’s a tweet which has stuck with me for years, mostly because I think it is indicative of what large corporations can do with social media when they choose to marshal their forces.
On December at 7:33 am on 18th 2017 (just as I was boarding a flight to attend a social media conference at the Mayo Clinic), there was a significant train derailment in Washington State. Three people were killed and more than 80 people were injured. It occurred on a train route I take myself periodically, and it’s probably for this reason, combined with me gearing up for a healthcare social media conference right at that moment, that made me follow how (and if) regional healthcare organizations would respond to it on social media.
To my surprise, I found that only one healthcare organization that did respond to it on social media with anything even resembling a useful call-to-action, and it wasn’t regional organization at all, but rather a large national one. That organization was Optum.
Specifically, on the same day, at 12:59 pm—5 hours and 26 minutes after the accident—Optum tweeted out a 24/7 support helpline, free of charge, open to everyone.
Now, I know a lot of people are cynical of all big corporations and are likely saying “Big woo! They are a multibillion-dollar corporation, and its’ probably just a marketing ploy.”
Maybe. But I want to suggest taking a step back and considering another way to look at the content, call-to-action, and timing of this little tweet.
To respond to this accident within < 6 hours with a call-to-action tweet implies Optum:
1. used a national monitoring system to identify this problem (I suspect it is something they call their “Command Center”)
2. Has a pre-existing hotline system in place to offer free counseling services
3. Has a social media decision system in place to use Twitter to amplify this service.
Now, joint systems like this didn’t just pop out of anywhere, like Athena from Zeus’s head! In a large organization such as Optum, I suspect it took at least several core people engaging with dozens of other people over months to make a case for offering this service, and months more for setting these systems up for evergreen use.
Anyway, to me, it speaks highly of Optum that they (or more specifically, a group of motivated Optum employees) created a system that made this little tweet happen. Well done!
(And for those of you poo-pooing this? Well, I didn’t see any regional healthcare organization offering anything even closely resembling a potentially useful call-to-action to help people that day, especially people who aren’t even associated with their organization.)
Addendum
I usually don’t blog too much about specific corporations, and when I do, I tend not to be overly critical, especially on social media. There are various reasons for this, but the two biggest are:
1. I try to remember that most of these companies are mostly filled with people who mostly are trying to do their best.
2. I think to be angry on social media is much more damaging to me (or more specifically my soul), than it is to any specific company.
For more on my approach to social media and corporations, take a look at some of my prior posts, Tweeting To Destroy,