"When will healthcare have its 'occupy wall street' moment?" This is the question Dr. Ben Miller asks to begin the Occupy Healthcare website back on October 4, 2011. The group also has a strong core group of organizers who tweet out with the #occupyhealthcare hashtag. And, I admit that I got caught up in the excitement and took my own pic which you see above.
The group has definitely been lucky in the last few weeks. First of all I've been impressed with their marketing and their "creating buzz" factor that they have done. In their name, they want to frame themselves as activists - like those of the occupy wall street fame - who just don't want to take it anymore in healthcare. Secondly, last night, they took advantage ot the most popular twitter chat for healthcare, the #hcsm chat (or health care social media chat) - taking a night off.
I wasn't able to join the full #occupyhealthcare chat last night, but you know twitter was excited when there were multiple people posting transcripts of the chat - the most impressive of which was from foxepractice. In addition, using twitter metric resources out there, there were some estimates that there was impressive reach - maybe as much at 70,000 impressions. But, was this due to the content, or their lucky twitter chat time slot?
The final question this post will ask is this - Now what? Attention cycles and news cycles in the world of social media last nanoseconds. While last night, you may be golden, this morning, people may ask, "occupy what?" Now, don't get me wrong, I definitely support these people, and I think what their doing is a good thing.
However, I seen lots of stuff come and go out here in the wild west we call the internet. Just like the music industry, the movie industry, the television indusrty, and whatever other industry you can think of - The first success is easy. But, what's the follow-up? How can the group scale last night's success to get to the next level? Plus, getting people upset and fired up is one thing, what do you do with all that emotion to actually make healthcare change happen?
#OccupyHeathcare - Have they just been lucky or are they going the be around for a while? We'll see....