HE “Wild Wild West of marketing” it might be, but social media’s rapidly-growing influence in societies all over the world means that transport operators should ignore it at their peril.
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Facebook now has over 1 billion worldwide subscribers, while Twitter has 200 million active users. A vast number of these “likers” and “tweeters” also use public transport which inevitably means they are instantly commenting on the services they use, good or bad.
“Social media does not exclude anyone,” Mr Ciarán Rogan, marketing executive for Northern Ireland’s Translink, told the International Public Transport Association (UITP) social media workshop in Mechelen on March 7. “You are on it whether you want to be or not.”
Indeed in many cities where operators have yet to embrace social media, passengers have taken it upon themselves to set up their own pages dedicated to reporting performance. When Vienna’s publically-owned transport operator, Wiener Linien, was embarking on its social media strategy, Ms Claudia Riegler, Wiener Linien’s content manager for social media, said that she found 68 pages and feeds dedicated to its activities which were set up by so-called “co-creators.” “One even used the official logo,” she says. “This had the potential to leave a bad impression.” It was a similar story in Dresden where Mr Jan Bleis, head of marketing and traffic planning at Dresden Public Transport (DVB), reported that his company contacted Twitter and actually took over an account that had been posing under DVB’s identity. Losing control of the message is clearly a dangerous proposition for operators; it is therefore no longer a case of whether an operator starts to use social media, but when. As is often the case when reacting to
new trends, the railway industry has been relatively slow to pick up social media and explore the full advantages that it could provide. Many operators seem to have deferred engaging with some platforms through fear of doing a bad job or the cost of maintaining a responsive online presence. However, Rogan believes that the
more you put in, the more you will get out in terms of improving an operator’s reputation and ultimately the quality of service provided to passengers. He believes that operators should “treat it as an opportunity” and not shy away
IRJ April 2013
from dedicating resources to social media.
“It shouldn’t be a space for what we have not done, but somewhere where you are able to say what you will do,” Rogan says.
He added that with Twitter and Facebook now driving the news agenda with photographs and video of news events appearing on the platform in real-time, well before media outlets are able to pick up and disect them, transport operators have to equip themselves to respond quickly to these events. He says that Facebook in particular has been useful for Translink to state its official position on an issue before it gets out of hand, recalling its response to a recent picture of a rioter in Belfast who was wearing a Translink uniform. Rogan said that by responding to the incident immediately, Translink was able to quell negative reaction to a potentially damaging story. He also recalled recent heavy snowfall in Belfast which had a huge impact on train and bus services during the morning commute, and the way in which social media helped to mitigate its impact. “I went into the control room for our train and bus operations at 04.00, sat in the corner with the laptop open and posted constant service updates from the information I was being fed,” he said. “At 09.00, I closed the laptop and carried on with my everyday activities. It was simple to do and did not take up a huge amount of resources. And in the immediate aftermath I received a lot of comments from people saying that the information provided was the most comprehensive and best they had ever received on the status of our services during bad weather.”
Constant stream
The ability to post a constant stream of instant service updates to passengers is the major attraction of social media. Like Translink, operators have found it particularly useful during service interruptions, and often experience a spike in followers during these events. Mr Claudio Cassarino, managing
director of Metro Service, the operator of the Copenhagen Metro, which is not yet using social media, says that surveys have identified passenger information as an element of its service that could be improved, with 70% of its passengers saying that receiving up-to- date and accurate journey information is the most important thing to them while they are travelling. “Social media
appears to be the logical way to address this,” he said. Providing accurate, consistent and quality information are all critical elements of a social media strategy, and one of the major challenges to using it as a communications platform. Rogan says a feed has to remain active and live. However, he says passengers do understand that they may not get an immediate response to their query outside office hours or at the weekend as long as an operator is clear from the beginning when the feed is staffed.
“Social media does not exclude anyone. You are on it whether you want to be or not.” Ciarán Rogan @Translink_NI
Paris Transport Authority (RATP), which began using a corporate Twitter feed in 2011, took a more pragmatic approach to using social media for public information. It launched four Twitter feeds for its services in September 2012 following a long and extensive development process. This has since grown to 15 separate feeds for individual metro, tram and RER lines, with each now boasting between 700 and 4400 followers. Mr Dominique de Ternay, head of marketing at RATP, said the reason for this approach was a desire to build a database of quality information on its own website which RATP and the public could access to answer any possible query. “This enables us to very quickly answer questions with attractive content,” he says. In contrast, as an early starter with social media, Transport for London (TfL) took a step-by-step approach, allowing gradual growth as it, and its passengers, learnt how to use the different mediums most effectively. Mr Steve Gumbrell, TfL’s head of marketing strategy and business management, says steadily ramping up its presence helped to avoid a “big bang” in costs. Gumbrell says Twitter is the focus of
TfL’s social media strategy and in 15 months it has gone from nothing to having dedicated Twitter feeds for each London Underground line as well as Overground services, a feed for the Oyster smartcard, a general TfL news feed, and feeds for bus and road traffic updates.
Mr Brian Dobson, TfL’s online governance and planning manager, says
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