As of the morning of January 7th, the attached @CDCFlu tweet had only been retweeted 116 times, and, by my count, only 16 retweets were done by healthcare organizations, mostly small and local. the rest of the retweets were done by individuals.
So far this year, per the CDC there have been around 2900 deaths in the 2019-2020 season. And that’s 2900 and counting.
Why aren’t the larger healthcare organizations (and smaller clinics) using tweets such as this to send out daily ( or at least weekly) trusted information, which, incidentally, can be converted to actionable information by a simple addition of a clinic phone number to schedule a flu shot or links to a list of locations to get a flu shot?
I believe it is because there is a disconnect between marketing people of an organization, who are the gatekeepers of the Twitter account, and the medical people of the organization, who are the health gatekeepers of the organization.
I don’t believe the person (and it usually is a person, not persons) who tweets for an organization has not been authorized and encouraged to aggressively retweet and addend these highly trusted sources.
I believe in marketing there is a culture of “protecting brand” rather than directly saving lives—and let’s not kid ourselves, getting vaccinated for flu is about saving lives, usually the elderly and the very young or otherwise immunosuppressed.
That’s the downside of senior healthcare leadership not using Twitter themselves—they simply can’t understand the amplifying power of Twitter, or the nuances of actionable content, or ideas such as virility without actually having tweeted themselves.
So, if you are in healthcare leadership, ask yourselves this: how bad does a disease have to be—how many lives have to be lost—for you to risk “diluting your brand” and tweeting actionable content seven days a week?