Yesterday, one of my colleagues pointed me to a very interesting case study surrounding a person that leveraged Twitter as a way to seek medical attention.  You can read the article here http://advancingyourhealth.org/highlights/2011/04/27/can-twitter-help-save-lives-a-health-care-social-media-case-study-part-i/, but I’ll also give a quick synopsis:  A grandmother had major health problems and the hospital in South Georgia was not able to provide adequate care.  Apparently, other hospitals were not able to accept a transfer so the individual in the case study, Matt, sent a message to Emory Healthcare via Twitter.  Emory responded, gave direction on how to reach them, and helped make the transfer go through.

So while driving into work today, I started thinking, “Why the hell did someone have to go through Twitter to save their grandmother?”  Then I started to remember back to how many blog posts and articles I’ve read where someone was having problems with a service or product, they complain on Twitter, and within a very short amount of time someone from a rather large corporation would respond and resolve the issue.  Sound familiar?  I hope so, and if not, you now have another way to file a complaint that’s probably more effective than the Better Business Bureau.

Here’s my answer for the above question:  Twitter, like most of Social Media, creates almost total transparency between organizations and people.  In the above scenario, if Emory did not respond, would they have been held responsible?  Probably not legally, but if I heard a story about how someone was pleading with a hospital to help their grandmother, I’d definitely have a negative opinion of that healthcare provider.  So now we have a communication environment, Twitter, where interactions between people and organizations are publicly broadcasted out to the rest of the world.  This creates a heightened awareness of reputation and perception for how organizations respond to Tweets (except me, which bypasses reputation by publicly announcing I’m a fool).  So even though there are several different ways to communicate (email, phone, instant message, etc.), Social Media puts pressure on us to respond, and to do so in a positive and helpful way (except for Charlie Sheen – I don’t think we expect much from him).  In case you didn’t already know, public perception is a very strong motivating factor because it can influence people out there to decide on using, or not using, a company’s products or services.

So is this a good thing?  To have one person help influence public perception of an organization?  Yes, and no.  On one hand, this means your average person has a stronger voice for when they’re being taken advantage of, which unfortunately, happens with big corporations out there that are trying to rule the almighty dollar.  On the other hand, we now have to start filtering out the crazies of the world who are really the ones trying to use public perception as a way to gain something for nothing.  Just like any technology out there, it all depends on the intentions of those using it.

If you read through the comments from the article, someone posted that all the Tweeting is just PR nonsense and the person should have just called 911 or contacted the hospital directly.  That may be true, but I don’t really care about the overall intentions and am not out to become an expert in PR or marketing.  I’m really just pointing out that of all the forms of communication out there, anything that’s public tends to garner a stronger and more productive reaction than traditional “private” communications.  As this case shows, if someone wants something done bad enough, such as saving the life of a loved one, they won’t care about privacy or following HIPAA laws.  Now excuse me, I need to go Tweet about how Verizon and Apple are horrible so I can get a free iPhone.

Michael

Started working in IT in 1999 as a support desk analyst as a way to help pay for food during college. Studied Electrical Engineering for two years before realizing biochemistry was more fun than differential equations, and so ultimately graduated with a Biology degree in 2006. Having (reluctantly) failed at getting accepted into dental school, embraced working in IT and has gone broke becoming an ITIL Expert. Likes to jog, sing camp songs, quote Mel Brooks movie lines and make dumb jokes and loves working for an Israeli tech company where December 25th is a regular work day.