Tweet might be spark the opioid crisis needs to help
You can’t save the world with a retweet. So chide the naysayers, as they mock an admittedly unorthodox social-media campaign that Lance Laifer is pushing on Twitter, via the @ScaramucciPost account he runs with friend and business partner, Anthony Scaramucci.
Yes, Anthony Scaramucci, the famously short-tenured White House communications director.
Scaramucci and Laifer — a former hedge-fund manager and social-media marketing guy who spent a few fondly remembered years of his childhood here in central Ohio — kicked off a Twitter blitz on Nov. 26 to spread awareness of the opioid crisis.
“Who else wants to fight the Opioid Epidemic? Answer and retweet. Let’s make this the most retweeted tweet ever.”
In the days since, the @ScaramucciPost has gone state-by-state, retweeting opioid-abuse statistics and news coverage while actively soliciting retweets of that original tweet.
Twitter cynics these days are as easy to find as street heroin.
“Well thank God you did your part in solving the opioid epidemic,” one crank replied to @ ScaramucciPost. “What problem are we going to solve next with a retweet?”
Snark like that loses some of its bite when bracketed by tweets like these:
“I lost 3 brothers on opioids. I’d love to help the fight.”
“I have a nephew who destroyed his life on it … but he destroyed my sister in the process.”
Managing this sea of commentary is Laifer. After seeing a recent column of mine about the opioid problem in Ohio, he contacted me to explain what the Post was up to.
Long before he found a home in the world of New York finance, Laifer spent part of his childhood in Columbus. His dad’s career as an Air Force doctor brought the family here, and they lived on Old Forge Road just south of Bexley. One of his earliest memories is walking with his family along Rt. 33 to Beth Jacob synagogue on every Sabbath. Now 52, he still has friends here and harbors a fondness for the Buckeyes.
He and Scaramucci explain the Twitter campaign by citing the penny-compounding principle, in which repeatedly doubling even a small amount of money leads to big gains. That’s the general idea behind the retweets.
As of Friday, the original tweet had been retweeted more than 2,800 times. That’s a long, long, long way from the 3.4-million retweet record now held by a Nevada kid who desperately wanted a year’s worth of free Wendy’s chicken nuggets, but it really isn’t about Twitter records.
It’s about starting a conversation about opioids, raising awareness, building energy, and connecting people.
“You need a rallying point to get everyone under one umbrella,” Laifer said.
That’s why the critics don’t faze him.
“We will have them, and they will help amplify our message,” he said. “I realize the hook for a lot of them is to make fun of us, so if they do that it’s better than silence.
“I’m very good at taking the plug and putting it into the outlet.”
Twitter devotees might know the story about actor Taye Diggs. It was a bit of a mystery a few years ago why Diggs, a celebrity, followed so many seemingly random, “regular” people on Twitter. Celebrities are to be followed. They do not deign to follow.
Diggs seemed to follow everyone. He became a man of the moment and the butt of jokes. Either way, people were talking about him. In an interview on NBC’s “Today,” he eventually revealed it had been the idea of a “social network dude.”
The dude was Laifer. Cute but inconsequential, one might argue.
But more than 20 years ago, Laifer helped to found the Sohn Conference, a renowned gathering of investors who share ideas and raise money for pediatric-cancer research. He also coordinated a long-running awareness and fundraising campaign to combat malaria in Africa, which at the time was killing a million people a year. In an article written by consumer advocate and activist Ralph Nader in 2005, Laifer called malaria “the worst positioned and marketed disease on the planet.” The crisis had not been well-publicized, and there was no way to donate online even if you wanted to, he said.
Hedge Funds vs. Malaria, Laifer’s coalition, eventually helped to change that by raising awareness and funding clinics, supplies and medication.
“It is time for relentless repetition of the message, drama in its delivery and a firestorm of emergency,” Nader wrote, describing Laifer’s vision. “I suppose Mr. Laifer believes that if you try for the impossible, you’ll be more likely to achieve the possible.”
Sound familiar?