Twitter – Mike's Twitter Overflow – Tech, Travel, other stuff

Life imitates parody twitter accounts…

Everyone loves to moan at UK transport operators. Me included. Too slow, too crowded, late, early, unreliable, you name it.

Many now use social media as a powerful method of quickly getting service information out to customers, but this has also given rise to the parody twitter account – gently mocking the real organisation – for instance TlF Travel Alerts and Southern Trains – the latter of which is often confused by real frustrated commuters with the real operator. Hilarity ensues.

So, this tweet shot past this morning from South Eastern trains…

Seems reasonable, right? But to the average Londoner, this shouldn’t make sense. For those unfamiliar with Kentish geography, Stonegate & Robertsbridge are about 50 miles from London. How’s that got anything to do with the Tube accepting tickets?

It reads like something the parody TlF account would say! “Due to event A, completely unrelated consequence B will apply”

So, did their twitter account get hacked? Or just some automated system gone haywire?

Bit windy out! Using social media for good…

Unless you’ve been living below ground for the last 24 hours, those of you in the UK can’t have helped notice it’s a bit windy out.

This sort of severe weather inevitably brings disruption, but I’ve been heartened to see a number of organisations using social media to spread the word quickly.

The social media folks @VirginTrains, Amy & Ste, have been doing a great job of relaying information out via Twitter, especially regarding heavily disrupted services into Scotland. Behind the scenes Virgin has been leading the UK rail industry on a project to improve the flow of information to passengers during disruption, and from what I’ve seen today, it seems to be working really well.

They are clearly providing a bi-directional conduit for information – they are getting their info from regular incident update calls (which should happen every 20 minutes, apparently), and direct from their route control, which means the information is very fresh, rather than out of date, which has classically been the normal complaint if you were to phone National Rail Enquiries.

What is missing is a copy of the Twitter feed on the Virgin Trains website – there’s currently no realtime information about the state of their service today provided on their website, no banner saying, “It is windy. Stuff is broken. Please check before you travel.” It is relatively trivial to embed an “alert bar” and/or a Twitter feed into a webpage, and would help those who happen to not use Twitter.

Also worthy mentions to @HeathrowAirport and @LondonCityAir(port) who have been using The Force for good today, providing regular updates about issues with travel to LHR due to a fallen tree on the Piccadilly Line, and to LCY due to an earlier meltdown on the DLR and the high winds making landing and taking off a challenge for the pilots on the smaller planes which fly to London City.

The main thing I think the LCY Twitter folks could do better right now is actually give more info about what is/isn’t cancelled – rather than “contact your airline” which sort of smacks of “not our problem”, even if that’s not the sentiment.

Ah well, wind has picked up again and the sideways rain has returned. I’ll see if I can spy an ark coming down the street.

Using Social Networking to build Corporate Kudos

Many companies have leapt on the Social Networking bandwagon as part of their marketing and public relations strategy. They have staff for whom posting on things like Twitter and Facebook is a major part of their day.

Why wouldn’t you? It’s an easier way of getting information out to, and interacting with, your customers (and potential customers).

Airlines have been fairly quick to catch on to this – it’s a great way of rapidly disseminating service info during disruption, and collecting rapid feedback from pax.

One of my industry colleagues recently tweeted at United Airlines because he saw something that he thought UAL HQ should know about. Obviously the stress of the weather-related disruption hitting the area was getting the better of both pax and airline employees alike…

“@UnitedAirlines your ground staff is yelling at an old man since 15 mins airport IAD gate D6 flight UA7599 Time Jan 27, 2011 1439”

UA’s Twitter person was responding within about half-an-hour…

“@mhmtkcn The Dulles manager will follow up. Today. Thanks for the heads up.”

Two things to take away:

1) Speed of contact and response – this was quicker than sending email, or probably trying to phone someone up in UAL to let them know this was happening. Getting the message to the right person isn’t always easy. The Social Media team can act as a rallying point for this info.

2) The positive response from the UA Twitter scribe – “This will be followed up today” – does a lot to show that someone in what could otherwise be percieved as a large, faceless, inaccessible, uncaring corporation, does give a damn, that the user can get their attention, and get something done.

This simple action shows how social networking can bridge the communications gap that often exists between large companies and it’s clients, and does a lot to raise UA’s kudos amongst those who saw the message.