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The Age throws Metro a bone
METRO is counting on cruising through the rest of summer without any heat-related train cancellations after fixing the airconditioning on half its fleet.
The state government has spent $18.7 million retrofitting its ageing fleet of Comeng trains so that they continue to run in temperatures up to 45 degrees. Previously the airconditioning units on these trains failed at 36 degrees, which has caused mass cancellations on hot days. Metro contributed $1.2 million to the upgrade of all 93 Comeng trains, which was completed in November and follows previous works on the train tracks to stop them buckling in the heat.
In this article, headlined "Metro on track to beat the heat", the first two paragraphs are odd. If not contradictory, they're certainly misleading. In the first paragraph, it's Metro that has fixed the air conditioning in their trains. But read on! It's actually the state government who paid the lion's share of the bill ($18.7m vs Metro's $1.2m). The trackwork was also mentioned, and that was paid for by the government too.
So, when your train carriage is still nice and cool on a 40-degree day, don't thank Metro; thank the state government. Well, mathematically, I suppose you can thank Metro for 6% of the cooling - which is about one row of seats.
But more importantly, I find the timing of the publication of this article decidedly odd. It's not announcing anything - the aircon upgrade finished up in November - and there's nothing really newsworthy in the article itself. The newsworthy aspect, I think, is the fact that this fluff article with its misleading positive spin to Metro, appears the day after The Age ran a fairly negative news article about Metro. Coincidence?
More on the @metrotrains Twitter insanity
They're now deleting old tweets. What? Why? Then it hit me. The reason behind all these boneheaded shenanigans.
Someone in the Metro Trains PR department (or perhaps the CEO) decided to look at the @metrotrains Twitter account, probably because they went to a seminar on how important social media is. They were horrified to see pages and pages of mostly-negative news. "Service cancelled", "service delayed", "police action", "ghost of Harold Holt scaring people at Malvern Station" (okay I made up the last one).
So their knee jerked, and they decided to get rid of all the negative and replace with positive. A perfectly logical reaction if you're in PR and a) Think that Twitter is all about following celebrities, and b) Have no idea what your followers are actually following you for. So they're only posting vague, useless service congestion tweets and PR doublespeak. What's more, they're deleting all the old, useful "negative" tweets, so that when people look at the web page, it'll look all happy and positive. Useless for the train-riding public, but the CEO will love it. And if the CEO loves it, so will the PR department.
Here's what I'd do if I ran the place:
- Keep the useful "negative" tweets about service disruptions and changes, because that's the reason people are following the company.
- Add some PR fluff: human interest stories, advocacy stuff, safety reminders, contests, other fun things. That will please the CEO.
- Actually engage with the people who are talking about Metro Trains on Twitter. Telstra's Twitter account is actually doing a really good job with this. They're frequently proactive with responding to complaints, even if it's obvious that the person is just having a whinge. (Yes, I know, I'm saying nice things about Telstra's customer service. But really; credit where credit is due. They're doing a very good job). Engaging with customers well creates happy customers, which tell other people about their experiences. It's a slow process, but it works. Just look at Telstra.
For a company that needs all the goodwill it can get, it's really sad and somewhat baffling to see Metro Trains throw so much of it away.
This entry is a followup of sorts to my previous one on the same topic.
Metro Trains not tweeting service disruptions anymore
''Sadly, now they appear to be turning their Twitter feed into a propaganda arm of their publicity department, rather than providing the vital information the travelling public need,'' [said Daniel Bowen of the Public Transport Users Association].
Imagine you're in charge of one of Melbourne's most hated companies. Rightly or wrongly, you're copping abuse all the time about all kinds of different things.
Some bright spark in the operations area decides to start a Twitter account. It provides timely updates about service difficulties, changed timetables and extra services for special events. In other words, all the things that a traveller would find useful. In fact, over ten thousand people find it to be useful, and rather liked the service. It was the one bright spot in an otherwise bleak and uncommunicative organisation.
So - here you are, running this organisation. What do you do? Of course! Stop issuing useful service updates through the Twitter feed and hand it over to the PR department; Metro's land of fluff and uselessness.
Great idea. People are going to love it.
appiChar launches cloud platform for NFPs
Disruptive technologies are generally great for everyone apart from the old-fashioned companies who would really rather cling onto the old way of doing things. They're making good money out of charities and fundraisers and would like to keep the flow coming. A measure of our success will be if they have to change or they just become irrelevant," said Ryder.
Gee, I wonder who they're talking about with that quote…
Dearest creature in creation, study English pronunciation
If you can correctly pronounce every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world. After trying the verses, a Frenchman said he’d prefer six months of hard labour to reading six lines aloud.
It's a well-put-together (if slightly long) exposé of the idiosyncratic nature of English. Fun to read.
Ta for the link, Mig.
It ain't no Tweetie
So, bottom line, I don’t care for the new Twitter app much at all.
Again, Gruber saves me the trouble of writing something for myself. The most important point he makes is the fear that since Twitter is seeming to push different features of Twitter than the ones that are important to me, they're moving to change the service into something that isn't important to me. That's somewhat worrying.
What Nuns Can Teach Brands About Social Media
I found it a refreshing change to deal with professionals whose mission had less to do with profit and loss, but rather life and death.
I agree with his sentiment - I have to keep reminding myself in $DAYJOB that, while money is important, we have different goals. It's nice.
Anyway - he's got some good points here about social media and nuns. Useful if you are (like me) working through a social-media-policy process.
