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On Sunday April 9 2017 a passenger boarded a United Express Airlines flight in Chicago. Forty-eight hours later hundreds of millions of dollars had been lost from the stock market value of its parent company (see graph, page 57), though it later recovered. What happened in between is a cautionary tale for any organisation in this new age of social media.
Anyone with a smartphone in their pocket has the tools to be a multimedia journalist. More importantly, they also have the power of a publisher. The story of how Dr David Dao was removed from the overbooked flight 3411 from Chicago to Louisville might not have been told at all ten years ago. Without the pictures to support either his or his fellow passengers’ account of what happened, newsrooms might well have ignored it.
Social media - internet applications with user-generated content - strips away nuance and bypasses the traditional editorial chain. The pictures of a man with a bloodied face were quickly passed from reader to reader via the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube, and soon United was at the centre of a viral storm, with traditional news outlets following afterwards.
In its opening statement, the company said using security guards to remove people from the aircraft when there were no volunteers to give up their seats was an effort to “re-accommodate” passengers. This too was circulated widely on social media, prompting a second surge in unwelcome attention and a second apology, this time the UAE’s chief executive saying that what had happened was “truly horrific”.
By now the airline’s share values were falling sharply. In its official review into what happened, United concluded: “We can never apologise enough for what occurred and for our initial response that followed.” It has since settled with the passenger.
Share values can recover, but reputations often take longer. It’s tempting to disregard social media as a passing fad, but many platforms have been around for approaching a decade and are becoming embedded into societal habits. It’s legitimate to feel that networking such as sites aren’t something for you personally, but understanding their power is essential - not only in case the railway’s own flight 3411 moment should come, but also to help it flourish.
Carmel O’Toole is a senior lecturer in public relations at Sheffield Hallam University, and has spent many years working in the communications industry.
“Facebook began to take hold in 2005, and the seminal moment for Twitter for me was the plane crash in the Hudson River in 2009,” she says. “I think that’s when we saw the first Twitter picture circulated globally - you had the iconic image of people standing on the plane wings waiting to be rescued.”
She believes there are many positives about social media, the major upside being that it allows you to speak instantly and globally to targeted audiences.
“In a commercial setting companies can do their research. They can look at what their customers are talking about. It’s a valuable insight for free into what customers are saying. That helps companies target exactly what they do, when they do it and how they provide it.”
But she warns that it is a two-way thing - a dialogue that can go either way. “As big companies will know, people are very ready to tell them when they are not happy about something. The era of global reputational risk is upon us,” she says.
With so many platforms each at different stages of maturity, O’Toole believes it is also essential to choose which one is the right fit for your company, particularly when you have limited resources to deploy.
“Things change so quickly. Bands like the Arctic Monkeys started on MySpace. Who remembers that? It is consigned to history in terms of online tools,” she says.
“You have to monitor the fortunes of these sites. Twitter - there is debate about whether it has peaked. Facebook is now much more middle-aged in terms of use. Your 18 to 25-year-olds are more likely to use Instagram and Snapchat. Social media users are fickle. They go where the wind blows, where it looks more interesting, more functional, more attuned to their age group. Companies have to understand the pleasures and the pitfalls and put resources into managing them, keeping that feed vital.”
Even though MPs have criticised social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter for not policing and removing extremist or racist content, there appears to be no slowdown in take-up.
In early May, Facebook said it now had close to two billion users - with almost one-and-a-half billion using it every day. In other words, a quarter of the planet is signed up. It allows users to post images, videos and text of things that are important to them, and invites others to share in them. Twitter, where brevity is soul, limits users to updates posted to the world in 140 characters or fewer. It claims to have 313 million active users.
The rail industry certainly numbers among them. Network Rail is active on both platforms, informing passengers where delays are occurring and when they are resolved. British Transport Police shares safety messages and appeals for information in connection with unresolved crime. Train operating companies promote offers, give real-time journey information, and retweet positive passenger experiences.
Virgin has a separate team managing feeds on its West Coast and East Coast franchises. Richard Shilton is the head of social media for Virgin West Coast.
“We’re in a digital age and people expect things instantaneously - this is what we’re trying to provide,” he says.
“Social media allows us to reach customers, and potential future customers, in a way we’ve never been able to before. This includes communication like new advertising, promotions, special offers, new partnerships, crisis communication like disruption messaging, ticket restrictions, and how to claim compensation. I think the days of calling a brand to see what’s happening have gone - now it’s all about real-time activity and what’s happening in the moment.”
Some 136,000 people follow the Virgin Trains East Coast Twitter account. Its social media manager is Nick Wood: “The main platforms we use are Twitter and Facebook, but we also have a presence on Linkedin. We use YouTube, Pinterest and Instagram to a lesser extent.
“There are platforms like Snapchat that have a young audience. If we want to innovate we should be looking at that more and challenging the fact that our current audience doesn’t match that profile - why not target a younger audience? The big thing at Virgin is to be ahead of the game.”
It can, of course, be a double-edged sword. There’s instant gratification if you’ve run a successful campaign. But on the flipside, if you have disruption or the website is down, then you’re going to get a huge volume of people coming to you - none too happy.
“It is challenging meeting expectations, and keeping the information accurate and updated as often as possible,” Wood adds. “You’ll always have a certain amount of firefighting because people turn to their smartphones when they are on the move. They could be on a train with just a ten-minute delay and get annoyed. In the past, people perhaps wouldn’t have gone home and thought about writing a letter to say ‘I was delayed for ten minutes’, so there is a culture shift.”
Adjusting to the changing channels of communication has also meant finding the appropriate tone and language to use. Wood encourages his team to strip away corporate speak when posting on social media, and to let their personalities come through.
There has also been the chance to innovate. The line-up of four trains just north of York in April 2017 was broadcast live to the world through social media. At Christmas, a Facebook Live stream (essentially a live video feed with which people can interact) featured East Coast and West Coast social media teams joining up for an event hosted first at King’s Cross and then Birmingham New Street. People were invited down to the respective stations for the chance to win prizes.
More famously, when Flying Scotsman returned to the East Coast Main Line in February 2016, an enthusiast’s long-awaited snap was “photobombed” (the term of the moment for an unexpected or unwanted intrusion into a photograph) by a Virgin train that simultaneously passed and blocked the view. Following a tweet from the photographer, the company responded by offering him a flight to America.
“No amount of planning can prepare you for that,” admits Wood. “It was reactive and good fun. As I left the office, on the TV in reception Richard Branson was being asked about it. It was picked up by websites and national publications. It was gold - a good example of the value of being in the moment and part of a bigger group.”
Employees can also play a part in corporate promotion through their own Twitter accounts. Between St Pancras and Sheffield, Train Manager Matt Dawson engages directly with East Midlands Trains passengers on Twitter. During his on-train announcements he encourages them to share where they are travelling and why.
Even if the industry were ignoring these new forms of communication, its passengers aren’t. As Virgin’s Nick Wood says, it’s easy to pick up a device and give vent to frustration. And when that isn’t enough, social media has become a way to organise and campaign.
The Association of British Commuters (ABC) began as an online community, quickly evolving into a pressure group and support network. Now, with a grant from the Foundation for Integrated Transport, it has become a non-profit company - all in the space of a year.
ABC’s website outlines its campaign aims. It wants to promote a safe, affordable, accessible and reliable transport system across the UK, and ensure the commuter’s voice is heard in the national press and Parliament.
Its roots are in the South, and as its lifespan broadly coincides with the continuing dispute between Southern Rail and the RMT over the introduction of Driver Only Operation, it is tempting to imagine it is a reaction to it. But ABC campaigner Emily Yates says the issues run deeper than that.
