A few months ago, I was lucky enough to be able to write a guest post on Amber Naslund’s Altitude Branding blog that was all about how we think about social media at Humana. At the time that post was written, our social media “un-committee” was about 4 months old. Now that we’re approaching our collective first birthday, I wanted to revisit the Altitude post, and to share a bit more about how we think about social media in our Fortune-100 enterprise. This is the first of three posts on the subject.
Humana made the decision to step – lightly – into social media last year. But the interesting thing is that it wasn’t really one decision, but many . . . perhaps dozens of decisions, happening all at about the same time. And when you think about it, it’s really not all that surprising that in a company of 29,000 people operating a complex business, the benefits of using social media became obvious to lots of us. Or, at least, too enticing not to try.
For those of you who don’t know our company, we’re one of the bigger health benefits companies out there. Here’s a pop quiz: How many of you love your health insurance brand? Nobody? OK, how many of you find your health insurer easy to work with? Ahh, yes. A few more, but still not many. How many of you find the health system easy to navigate? Crickets again.
Can you imagine why we might want to make a deeper connection with consumers? Why we might want to collaborate better with doctors and hospitals to make sure that our members get the best care for a reasonable price? To connect healthy people with programs that will keep them healthy? Then you can imagine why social media started to appear on everyone’s “solution radar” in 2008.
How it started
For me, it started with a realization that I couldn’t keep telling people that social media was a solution unless I started actually living it out. So, I started doing the usual stuff – blogging, setting up a facebook page and even a twitter account. You can read more about it here and here .
But things really took a turn when our team got some good press from the social media campaign for freewheelin. That led to a presentation to Humana’s executive committee, and a directive to create some kind of company-wide platform that we could use to help bring together Humana’s social media activities into a common place. After having done some pretty low risk exploration, we figured that the first thing to do would be to lay out a set of principles to live by – and the Town Square was born.
The Town Square is a concept that says every department in the company can get a “lot” on the town square, and build whatever kind of building suits their business needs best. It’s the place for Humana to understand, explore and use social media to take its business forward. It’s not about tools or technology; it’s about a new model for interaction and collaboration. It’s for our customers, yes, but not JUST our customers. It also applies to the way we work with doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, employers, the government and – yes – each other.
Tomorrow: The Town Square
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