Transit agencies have been in the social media arena for awhile now and have learned some lessons along the way.
Samantha Cross, business development director for Indianapolis Public Transportation Corp. (IndyGo), explains their first jump in four or five years ago. âWe launched a MySpace page off our website and it was kind of lukewarm.â As MySpace fell out of popularity, it knew it was time to switch over to Facebook a couple years back.
âWe didnât have a lot of followers on MySpace and I donât think we handled it well; it was like a test,â Cross says. âWe probably didnât think it through, we just did it because we thought, hereâs a trend.â
For the second round, launching Facebook and Twitter, she says IndyGo hunkered down and developed standard operating procedures and strategized about what this medium can offer in communication.
New Media, New Engagement
âIn my interpretation, all communications media is social because it invites interaction, even a print piece invites some kind of interaction between the creator and the user,â says Morgan Lyons, director, media relations with Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART).
With so many applications, programs and platforms available now, he says thereâs no silver bullet, so they use a wide variety. âYou donât tend to find a lot of people who really use all of them,â he says. âYou find a lot of people who really, really like Facebook, but donât do Twitter, or they really, really like email or subscription-based services but they rarely use Facebook or Twitter.â
Bay Area Rapid Transitâs (BART) Website Manager Tim Moore says, âYou file that under the rubric, you have to fish where the fish are.â He continues, âAgencies can do some relatively simple, straightforward survey work to determine what platforms are being used the most, whether itâs Twitter or Facebook or whatever, and look at their particular marketing and specific customers to see how they prefer to be engaged on these platforms.â He adds, âThat can be used as a way to target the effort a little bit more effectively.â
As Sound Transit Communications Specialist Jaime Vogt says, social media gives riders new channels into your agency. Riders were used to connecting with the customer service department, now the communications department has a lot more interaction. âI think that just helps keep our department keep our riders, top of mind.â
TransLink developed a strategy to connect with its customers digitally. âIn 20 years or so, the demographic of who is currently young today â 18 to 25 years old â probably like 80 percent of our ridership, we need to know how to connect with them now as opposed to having to catch up later on,â says Jhenifer Pabillano, online communications advisor for TransLink. âWith social media, thereâs a larger way for our agency to have our messages delivered directly to our customers.â
Drew Blevins, director of marketing with TriMet, says TriMetâs participation in social media has provided more avenues to communicate with the customers at a relatively low cost. âWe have a better understanding of rider issues by way of their active online comments and conversations with each other and with us.â
The use of social media has become more refined by agencies as theyâve been learning how to communicate with their stakeholders. âA lot of transit agencies kind of looked at the social platforms as a way to push messaging out, kind of similar to the whole, âLetâs push out a press release and then go home and go to bed and then see how it plays in the newspaper the next day,ââ says BARTâs Moore. âItâs not like that,â he stresses. âItâs got to be a two-way conversation where customers are communicating with you, raising issues, youâre addressing those issues, having that dialogue, having that engagement, making it a true communications medium.â
Agencies have learned to use it as another one of their marketing tools, not some separate entity. You determine your target audience, what the goals are for that audience and then select the tools that are the best fit.
Instant and Direct Notification
Getting messages pushed directly to usersâ cell phones or emails can provide immediate service updates, upcoming events and other timely transit news.
TriMet offers customers the option to subscribe to any and all of its bus and rail lines, along with 13 other categories of information and services. Currently there are about 28,000 TriMet subscribers.
The Fort Worth Transportation Authority (The T) built up its database with a contest that tied in to the agencyâs 25-year anniversary. Riders could text something to the particular number and they had a chance to win a T 25-year annual pass. The T collected a lot of numbers and as Richard Maxwell, assistant vice president of marketing, explains, to opt in to the contest, they had to allow The T to send them updates periodically.
Lyons talks about two services they use at DART for that, GovDelivery and Nixle. GovDelivery is a mass email or notification service and Nixle was introduced to DART by its police. Nixle sends out short email alerts that directs people to your website. âYou can subscribe to it, just like you do with Twitter or Facebook,â Lyons says. âWhere as pretty much anybody can post stuff to Facebook, with Nixle, you canât. There is a vetting process to ensure that if something is on the DART page or the DART account, itâs been put there by DART people.â
Moore also says the subscription-based email messaging and SMS messaging works well for BART for delays, news and project-based information sharing. For those wanting to know what is happening on the Warm Spring Project, that is something you can sign up and receive updates for. With SMS on Demand, riders can text a command into a short code, like âbart delayâ and it will automatically send back what the status of the system is.
And to get more specific, Moore says, âIf you text, âbart 12th,â youâll receive back ETAs at BART 12th Street Station.â He adds, âWhat weâre really trying to do is get all of this messaging in to as many channels as possible.â
By providing this information in a raw feed format, or in a normalized format, third-party developers and other websites can take the information and use it as well.
Moore says, âWeâre sharing our data with as many people as we can in order to push our messaging onto as many platforms or channels as possible.â But for a lot of agencies, as The Tâs Maxwell says marketers love it, but, âIt gives IT people pause, losing control like that.â
Also providing information to the rider on the go are websites for mobile devices. DART currently has three websites, dart.org, transportadart.org, and then a couple years ago started its site optimized for mobile viewing, m.dart.org. On the go, riders are just looking for information to help them get to their destination, so not having the excess images to download; it speeds and eases their navigation process.
Building that Relationship
Most agencies have at least some sort of presence on Facebook and Twitter. The reasons for signing on for those platforms vary for agencies and, though there are commonalities in how theyâre used, there are differences in how agencies connect with their stakeholders.
Transit properties often signed on to Facebook and Twitter because they saw their riders were there. And those riders were talking about the service, so it was a way to join in on the conversation.
As for DART, there were already three âDARTâ pages before DART started its own, official page. Lyons says, âTwo of them were done by basically fans. And there was another one that, weâll just say, wasnât exactly family friendly, encouraging people to do things on trains and send pictures and talk about it.â
He says under Facebookâs rules, they couldnât just tell these people to shut down their pages. âWe could send them a lawyer letter about our trademark and youâre using images without our permission,â Lyons explains. âWe could do that, but we really had no standing with Facebook to tell them to take the pages down.
âWe think itâs important to speak with one voice and thatâs why we bring everything back to our Web pages, because that way we have a consistent message and consistent information.â
To resolve the multiple-page issue, Lyons says, âWe told Facebook, âHey, there are three pages, none of them are official pages and one of them is pornographic and needs to come down immediately.ââ He says, âFacebook had it down within, I want to say 24 hours; they were right there.â
As for the other pages, DART sent messages directly to the page creators. âThe others were, âHey, we see you are out there,â and we were able to get contact information and say weâve got an official page, we would like for you to take your page down.â He says one took it down right away and the other put up a message directing its followers to the DART official page and within a month or so, the page was gone.
Sound Transitâs start in Twitter coincided with the opening of its Link light rail launch. Marketing & Creative Services Manager Tim Healy says they were concerned about crowd control because Phoenix had such long lines when they launched its system; Twitter was a potential way to establish controlled lines.
âJaime and I were actually in the command post for the light rail launch tweeting where the lines were shorter, when entertainment was starting at each station and responding also to media inquiries at the time.â He adds, âIt was kind of our first real practical use of Twitter.â
âIt really showed us the power of it because we were able to get real-time updates from people who were at the event, to hear what was going on,â says Vogt. âPeople would mention an interesting act and we were able to mention it on our stream. It got us into good practice into how to utilize and build off hash tags and share information in real time.â
Now with Twitter, Healy says theyâre finding the riders are getting alerts out to people quicker than they sometimes are. âTheyâll be stuck on a train and weâll be monitoring the Twitter traffic and theyâll give quicker, real-time information than we will from our controls.â
For DARTâs Twitter feed, Lyons says it was a bit of a defensive posture for starting. âWe knew people were talking about us and we could respond in that space.â He adds, âAnd weâve increasingly found that itâs a good way for us to send information during service disruptions or when things are just kind of going on.â
One event they serviced was the Texas State Fair, a three-week period where 3 million people attend the fair. On top of that, a couple of the weekends are huge football games, Lyons says. âYouâll probably have 80,000 people at the game but about three times that having the experience at the fair.â
The first year they had the rail service he says they didnât do a very good job on a number of levels, one of them being communication. âThis time we redid our service to accommodate it and one of the things we did was to give updates.
âWe created a subscriber base of folks who could get updates,â he explains. âWe found that our subscriptions went up leading up to that and people with all kinds of interesting domain names from around Texas and Oklahoma,â he says. And then following the event, many werenât following anymore because the game was over. âThose were really good ways of just communicating to a very specific audience, very specific information, in concise ways.â Lyons says they have found that their riders consistently want service alerts, particularly service disruptions.
TriMet also tweets about service and events roughly two to three times a week, says Blevins. He adds, âWe respond to tweets at the rate of about two to three times a day.
âWe use Twitter for sharing timely information and for taking the pulse of our riders by following the chatter about TriMet.â
TransLink joined on to Twitter because it also saw its customers were there. âOur philosophyâs really been that you go where your customers are,â Pabillano says. From monitoring key words and doing searches for places where people were talking about the agency, Twitter was an obvious one for it to get involved in.
Twitter was also a key tool to distributing messages during the Olympics. âWe had a big team devoted to updating people because it was going to be critically important to make sure people were aware of the traffic situations.
âThat really delivered our customer service really highly rated and this November we got our call center customer information department to do a pilot project with the Twitter account so we had someone who would sit and answer questions and put out information from 6:30 in the morning until 11:30 at night, which is the hours of our call center, more or less.â
For IndyGo, what has worked best is posting a dozen or so tweets a day with route updates because it doesnât have any other real-time access for the public at this time. Cross says, âSo what we do is kind of the old-fashioned way.
âWhen we get information or when weâre monitoring buses and we see buses that are more than 10 or 15 minutes late, weâre tweeting about it.â She adds, âWe recently just started using the hash marks with the route number first so that way people who are only interested in route 19 can put â#19â and theyâll get all the most recent tweets about route 19.â
Not all Twitter use has been about service updates and TriMet shares a success with a contest it did last year. âWe created a Haiku contest for our Twitter followers, based on our key sustainability focus,â Blevins says. âFollowers created Haikus based on a set of âdirty wordsâ weâre working to eliminate, namely greenhouse gas, pollution, waste, inefficiency and congestion.â
Not only did it receive a great deal of attention, he says it was creative and fun for the agency and riders.
Further Building Through Facebook
With Facebook and Twitter, there is the ability to push the same information from one, automatically to the other. Some agencies find they utilize a lot of the same information for both, some have different audiences and tailored messages to each and others find that Facebook just hasnât been as important a tool for their property.
Vogt says when Sound Transit started using Twitter and Facebook, it noticed that the sites had different kinds of audiences so to a certain extent it tailors the messages to each audience.
âTwitter was much more people who were on the go or maybe on our services. They tended to be mostly Link light rail riders,â says Vogt. âFacebook seemed to be people that were less likely to be using a mobile device or on our services when they were talking. They tended to be using it at a workstation or at their desktop, so for them we talk more about Sound Transit in general.â
IndyGo staff has also noticed very different audiences for their Facebook and Twitter accounts, so Cross says they can have more fun information for folks on Facebook, the âinsider newsâ of IndyGo.
âThrough the ARRA stimulus funds we were able to purchase 22 new buses that weâre just now rolling in,â says Cross. âFor the first day when one of the buses was rolling in from California, we took pictures and posted them on Facebok.
âWe let everybody know, âHey, the new buses are here!ââ
âIâve discovered that photos are huge,â says IndyGo Manager of Marketing and Communications Sarah Knight. âThey generate the most comments and very recently, someone built a snowman by one of our bus stops and I posted it and it got so many comments. Things with photos are key.â
A promotion a few months back with Dunkin Donuts was a fun event that generated a fun conversation on its Facebook page. It posted video from the event with the Dunkin Donutsâ mascot. âItâs almost a complete circle promotion,â says Cross. âGiving stuff away, meeting people face to face, then weâre posting information almost immediately; weâre just trying to come at you from all different angles.â
Green Bay Metroâs Ryan Van Handel, in public relations, says theyâre using Facebook to make the riders more aware of what is happening with the agency. âItâs a way for us to let riders know detours or hours are changing; itâs a new resource for the bus system.â
TransLink has a Facebook account which Pabillano says is still at its early development. The page has about 1,300 fans, but itâs still working through the strategy for that venue right now. For its conversations, she finds a blog is easier because you can have long-form conversations where youâre building relationships through lots of discussion â a prolonged discussion.Â
âI just think itâs the way people use Facebook; itâs less to do with going online to engage with a brand as it is to update your own personal stuff that contributes to a larger feed,â she says.
âThe âBuzzerâ blog is the offshoot of the transit newsletter that we have that appears in all of TransLinkâs buses,â Pabillano says. âYouâre really being able to connect to customers and really able to answer their customer service and deeper questions about our planning process and the other larger things that weâre involved in. People start to feel closer to the organization or feel that they understand what weâre doing more.â
One question and concern that comes up frequently with many of the social channels, including Facebook, is how to build your fans, your friends, your followers, etc. This past Christmas, The T in Fort Worth had a creative twist added to its annual tradition which tied in the real world and online realm.
An annual event for The T is the Holiday Lights Tour. A lot of buses go out to a particular area and look at the Christmas lights. As Maxwell says, itâs a way to engage non-traditional customers and a lot of people that have never ridden The T before.
âFor years and years and years weâve always had where you could have your picture taken with Santa,â says Maxwell. âWe used a Polaroid that just printed out a little picture for them. Thatâs the way they used to do it.
âWell they donât have those anymore; Polaroid doesnât make that camera or film at all anymore. So we thought how could we do this?â
Taking pictures and printing them out is a costly hassle, so the solution was to post the pictures to The Tâs Facebook page. âWe loaded all several hundred photos there on our Facebook site and we handed out little cards that said in a few days, this will be up on our Facebook site, so go check it out.â
Maxwell explains in the information it handed out there was a disclaimer that these photos would be going online. Kids had the option of sitting on Santaâs lap to tell him what they wanted for Christmas without getting their picture taken.
Another way that it has built up followers to its page is through the targeted ads on Facebook. Generally theyâre about special services, such as âRide the TRE to see the Mavericks,â and it directs Facebook users to The Tâs page for additional information.
âThe thing I like about it,â Maxwell says, âwe can get actual metrics. We know exactly how many people are clicking through.
âIt seems to be good because itâs really fairly cheap. It seems to be cost-effective.â
Location-Based Offers Different Opportunities
Location-based social media platforms have been gaining popularity in some areas and again, when some agencies saw that riders kept âchecking inâ at their stations, stops and on their vehicles, they went to where their riders are. Two properties that offer âbadgesâ in Foursquare are TransLink and BART.
Moore says they were seeing on Twitter, that a lot of BART customers were checking in at the stations using Foursquare. He says the percentage of Foursquare users compared to the percentage of riders is relatively small, so theyâre viewing the interaction in this space as kind of an experiment. Theyâre also thinking of ways to growing that and adding value to the customers in that space.
âThe thing that really drew us to it, is that itâs a great way, No. 1 for our customers to communicate with each other while theyâre en route using our services,â says Moore. âItâs also a great way for us to communicate with customers while theyâre using our service and third, itâs a really good way for us to expose station area locations for the businesses and events and the services that are around our stations in the communities that we serve because itâs also in our interest to help create more vibrant communities.â
Itâs also been working on Junaio, an application riders can use to see things in real time on their smart phone overlaid on a map, such as real-time train arrivals.
TransLink originally created its Foursquare badge for the Olympics as people would be using the system a lot, so it thought it would be another thing people could do while on transit to make it more fun and for the agency to offer tips practical to where the riders were.
As the Super Bowl comes to Fort Worth, The T is going to partner with downtown Fort Worth in the area where ESPN will be set up, Sundance Square. âThey will be set up for a week,â says Maxwell. âWeâre going to use Foursquare and when people check in at our stations, weâre going to start giving them points.
âWhen they get enough points, weâll give them the Sundance Square gift card and vice versa; when people shop at the merchants downtown, they can get prizes, free passes.â
Maxwell says, âAs far as I can tell about Foursquare, the business modelâs about figuring out how to get people to come to your establishment and you have to give them some type of award.
âHere we have a whole shopping district, plenty of people who could check in, theyâre already in to it. What we want to do is to get their people to come to the train station and get our people to go to their retail locations.â
QR Codes Create Instant Connections
Another way that agencies are connecting the real world to the online world is through the use of QR codes, quick read codes. QR codes are the little square, black-and-white barcodes that are starting to pop up in print ads, on TV ads and on various signs or billboads. You scan the code with your smart phone (once you have the scanning app, you scan the code as you would take a picture) and then you are directed to a website.
At Sound Transit it has been using the code on an ad on its vehicles for a call for developers to help develop mobile apps for the agency.
Vogt says, âWe launched a developer site earlier this year, itâs still pretty sparse, with the goal being that the more of our data that we make public, the more we can leverage the local development community to develop trip-planning tools for our riders.â She adds, âWe donât have the in-house ability to develop specialized apps for each device.
âWe wanted to market this new site, but we knew it was a very limited audience that would be interested in it, so we just targeted our software development centers and we wanted to have a dominant image that would maybe only âspeakâ to that subgroup, so we put just a blank ad with a QR code that would lead developers to the new site.â
Healy adds that theyâve also been experimenting with QR codes with construction signage when expanding the light rail system. âProject people want us to tell the entire life of the project on the sign, so weâve been experimenting using the codes for more information.
âSomeone can just take a picture with their smart phone and it takes them to the project page on our website and they can get that information without putting it all on the signage.â
Measuring Success with New Media
The majority of marketers has already shifted focus and knows that measuring success of online marketing is less about all of the numeric indicators and more about the engagement, reach and influence.
When it comes to measuring ROI, BARTâs Moore laughs, âYeah, I think thatâs the million-dollar question, really.
âEveryone is really looking at how to measure efficacy of the potential.â He asks rhetorically, âHow do you measure the ROI on your telephone system?
âBecause you canât apply traditional cost-benefit metrics, doesnât mean that there isnât value.â
At Sound Transit, one story that came up was someone mentioning on Facebook that they got the transit card a couple of months ago and they were excited to use it for the first time when they went to the airport. Vogt says, âUs on this side knew that the card probably went into hibernation mode, so we were able to warn that person that their card probably wasnât going to work and to avoid missing their flight, they would want to call this number and reactive it.â
Blevins had an example to the kind of feedback they get from time to time that reinforces the appreciation from their customers. The message thanked TriMet for a service alert email sent out because the rider was asthmatic and anything to do with chemical smells or smoke issues were of concern. The rider goes on to say, âThank you for being transparent about matters like this. I am impressed by your actions and respect TriMet when they communicate this way. Keep up the great work!â
Pabillano says that the comments she gets about how much the Buzzer blog has meant to people and how excited they are to hear from TransLilnk has been amazing. âTo get these commendations and people saying that the work that I do with the blog has made things better, has shown that our agency can demonstrate change, that it has given them behind-the-scenes looks and an understanding of what we do that they havenât gotten before ⊠has been really amazing.â
One measurement that many mention is how the number of hits to their website coming from Facebook, Twitter or other social media channels where theyâre active, has grown tremendously.
Managing New Media
One of the things that DARTâs Lyons stresses is that itâs not free. âPeople will say, âThis is free.â Yeah, the account is free, but youâre going to spend time doing that and managing the timeâs a big thing.â
Blevins says, âWe donât have the resources to provide complete, full-time service detour/delay information or to be fully engaged in all conversations. We pick and choose based on customer needs and our ability to respond with useful information.â
âSocial media isnât a one-way conversation, it isnât a conversation with thousands of people,â says Sound Transitâs Vogt. âItâs a conversation with one person. So be willing to invest time to have a conversation with just one person, recognizing that conversation can be seen by thousands of people.â
BARTâs Jordan agrees that time management can be a challenge. âWith just a two-person staff, obviously you have to set priorities and social is going to fall by the wayside if youâre dealing with a major issue that requires immediate attention on the website.â
Lyons explains that earlier in the morning, there were several tweets about service problems that customers had done that needed addressing. And of the three-person work group, he was the only one on.
âIt was one of those things where, OK, I need to stop what I was doing and address those and so that just inserted about a half hour in my day.â
Lyons also says that at DART, they take the âit takes a villageâ approach. âWhile there are two or three of us primarily responsible for the care and feeding of the new media platforms, we canât do that without a lot of serious help and support from a lot of other groups.
âWhen we call our operations people, they know weâre calling because weâre always kind of on deadline, and so we typically get very good response and thatâs been very helpful.â
The Dark Cloud of Negative Conversations
When it comes to dealing with negative comments or the fear of negative comments, it seems that itâs not nearly as daunting as people imagine. And as Pabillano points out, âThose conversations already exist whether youâre participating in them or not. Being a part of social media helps you be a part of that conversation and maybe steer the direction that might be positive for your organization.
âBut at this point now, all you have is the negative things that people are saying that you donât get to participate in, so for some people it might be a missed opportunity.â
âI think the challenge with negative comments is more the internal fear of them,â Vogt says with a laugh. âI think after all this much worry about negative comments itâs been a real pleasant surprise at how few there are.â
Pabillano shares a similar sentiment. âThere was no overwhelming barrage of really angry people who have showed up and made life misery. It really hasnât happened that way.â
âThe most important thing to remember is first of all, donât panic. Itâs not as scary as it seems,â says Vogt. âAnd I think theyâll find theyâll get much more positive outlook then they will a negative outlook. â
âI think agencies need to develop a bit of a thicker skin on these things,â says BARTâs Moore. âJust because theyâre not being said in a public place, doesnât mean theyâre not being said and it doesnât mean theyâre not things that the agency shouldnât address.
âI think you gain a great deal of equity when you talk with your customers and address these negative things, because otherwise youâre just Pollyana-ish, just positive things in a positive context and everybody knows that thatâs not the way things really are.â
This past year, TriMet created a Blog Response Team to monitor local blogs and to respond with useful, thoughtful, accurate information after discovering misrepresented information and to get involved in the conversation. âThis team is made up of communications professionals within the agency who, as content experts, can respond in a timely manner when bloggers present important information about our agency incorrectly or inadequately,â Blevins says.
Of course at times the negative comments will come or you will have negative news you will have to communicate.
âWe try to stay on message and address real issues,â Blevins says. He also says they have a response âtriageâ chart that is used by the U.S. Air Force and Ohio State Medical Centers to help them manage.
Cross says IndyGoâs process is to ask for those that have a specific comment or complaint that they go through either the website or the call center to lodge that complaint. âWe donât want this to necessarily be, âThis bus driver was mean to me today.â Thereâs a way for us to handle that.â
For someone that has a specific problem, Cross says they urge the person to go to the customer call center or website and lodge a formal complaint so there can be appropriate follow up. âIf it keeps up, thereâs just general negativity, weâll try to answer it on Facebook. If it keeps going, we go offline and we contact that person.â
She explains there was someone on Twitter that used excessive inappropriate language. âHe was frustrated and he had every right to be frustrated, just the way he was handling it wasnât great.â
He was invited in to come and talk about his complaints. âThat assured him that he is being heard and that he needs to continue to go through the proper channels to launch his complaints or comments or weâll never fix his concerns.â
She adds, âWe didnât want to block him; we didnât want to get into that.â IndyGo hasnât blocked anyone and continues to contact those necessary directly and to deal with them one on one.
âAt that point theyâre pretty desperate to be heard and we want to give that to them, but we donât want to have a public exchange over Facebook or Twitter. We wonât go back and forth 10 times with somebody.â
BARTâs Jordan says that having been engaged with riders early and having lines of communication open helps to be humanized and people to have trust that itâs not just a spin control sort-of-thing.
At the time of writing this, BART was dealing with a major service delay event in the system. âAs we worked it to communicate through all our channels â not just social but email channels, on the website and through our SMS texting â as we worked to communicate this, we passed the 10,000 threshold of our Twitter followers,â says Jordan. âEven in times when youâre communicating negative information or information thatâs not favorable for customers, they are seeing value in the channel and it just seems like a bit of an ironic way to pass 10,000.â
From Complainer to Champion
BART further explains that the negative commentators can turn into advocates for the system. One example itâs seen this is with the issue of 24-hour service, to which it has a place on the website where it explains the reasons why there isnât 24-hour service available.
As Moore is explaining how customers create a network of people who inform their friends, Jordan pulls up a recent Facebook post where someone was asking again for 24-hour service. She says one of the recent comments was â24-hour service is impossible with only two tracks, they have to do maintenance.
âSo just as he [Moore] says, customers are carrying the message for us and it has a little more credibility when itâs coming from non people-like-us.â
âI hate to say it, weâre borrowing influence from our customers and they can carry our message for us and it is so much more valuable,â says Moore.
Jordan adds, âAnd theyâre real people; itâs authentic.â
âOur experience has been that even people who are critical, sometimes turn into an advocate or at least theyâll say they appreciated getting the answer or having their concerns listened to,â says Moore. âSo being there, the negative feelings are going to be happening anyways. If youâre out there dealing with them and acknowledging them from your customers, youâre better off than just a wall of silence.â
Just Starting
 âI think we experienced what other transit agencies experienced, too much of the hesitancy comes from the legal side, afraid of things like public disclosure and how youâre going to retain comments and do they become official public comment when somebody Tweets,â says Sound Transitâs Healy.
As he says, âJaime is very confident about it and understanding it and that policy, so thereâs a level of confidence in that she understands it, but they donât have to.â Â Another way to raise the agencyâs comfort level, Vogt says, is that up front on the platform, being clear about what the conversation means. âWe try to do that on the front pages of our Facebook and Twitter pages, plus what level of service this interaction means.
âItâs not official public comment, that itâs a conversation and that goes into directing them to the right channels when they do want to say things more officially.â
TriMetâs Blevins offers some simple thoughts, âStart small. Establish rules. And, be consistent.
âThe old paradigm of just pushing information out is no longer acceptable to customers. They want, and expect, bilateral communication. They want to have a voice. They want to be heard.â