“It was never about the strike, but the strike became a big issue,” she says. “Back in April was the first station protest in Brighton. Travel was getting really bad around here. Before that was a group of local journalists and commuters getting together and saying ‘what is going on?’ No one was investigating why our train service was so bad, so we decided to do that and then asked questions. This led to a Facebook group which got very big very quickly.”
Stressing its desire to remain apolitical, ABC has tried to keep the issue of accessibility in the spotlight. It feels the issue of passengers who need assistance at stations to board or alight from trains is being lost in the noise of the ongoing industrial dispute.
“A lot of our members have been left behind on platforms,” says Yates. “Although we are a social media community we know each other face to face. The problems have brought us together. A person in a wheelchair is just as much a commuter if they use the train to get to work and for their social life.
“Social media has been such a useful tool. Everyone is commuting, so people have time to be on social media together. We are a very disparate group of people brought together by our feelings and interests. However, what we did was responsive - it was an act of surfing a wave of real-life public opinion, and we added our own research and investigative skills to that.
“It has to have the face-to-face element, too. A lot of people have met through events and protests, and that strengthens the online community. It needs both. Social media is not a substitute.”
As a young organisation, ABC has grown up using the tools available, rather than having to learn to integrate it into established communications processes. The result is a very nimble use of platforms. Physical protests that the group has organised have been shown live using Periscope, another application that allows the user to turn their phone into a live television camera. This means people who can’t be there in person can lend their support online.
By asking supporters to sign up to a ‘thunderclap’, they can share a single message across dozens of Twitter accounts simultaneously, amplifying their voice. Attach a ‘hashtag’ to a tweet and you have a beacon - a catchy slogan that can be searched for by people who are interested in the subject. ABC is associated with the hashtag #southernfail.
The ABC-organised passenger survey in late 2016 suggested a high number of respondents suffered with stress and anxiety through the difficulty of commuting.
“People have been really messed up by this,” says Yates. “The jokes and parodies have been a consolation and given us purpose. Horrible circumstance affected everyone’s lives and you needed to let off steam. As a community, we said let’s get together and help people through this.”
ABC is now seeking a Judicial Review of franchising and accessibility to the railways. Again, it has marshalled its immediate community in a modern way, with a crowd-funding campaign that has raised £26,000.
While the long-term impacts of social media are not yet clear, there is now more data available to be harvested about our daily lives. On one level, many of us will experience targeted advertising when we shop or even simply browse online.
Research institute Transport Systems Catapult in Milton Keynes has developed a series of tools which can analyse our digital lives and use the information to potentially smooth a journey. As TSC’s user researcher Andrea Burris explains: “We’ve developed three demonstrators. They all use information from social media, specifically Twitter, in different ways.”
The first of these is a customer-facing tool - a rail journey health check. It’s a journey time app with added information about past customer sentiment for specific trains. It can give you a rating for a particular train service, whether the sentiment was positive, neutral or negative.
It also gives information about performance of a particular service, the average delay, and how many times it had reached its final destination so that users can get an idea of the reliability of the service. The idea behind it was to give the customer more information about different journey options, so they could make a more informed decision.
The second initiative is a business intelligence tool. It visualises sentiment for the UK rail network. You can search for different companies in the UK and see not only how well their trains are currently running, but also the customer sentiment experienced on that service. It also uses information from the last 30 days, to give you more detail about performance.
The third TSC tool was aimed at the franchisee, and actually provides both train and station sentiment. It filters the sentiment coming through from Twitter into different categories - customer experience indicators. It could be ticketing, parking or cleanliness.
“It would come through to the station staff tablets, and they would be able to see if there were any issues in real time and they would be able to action them to improve the service,” says Burris. “This one could be a really good tool for train operators because it allows them to improve the real-time customer experience.”
All three of the applications are at proof of concept stage, so will require further funding and development before continuing their own journey towards smart phones. It also requires people to continue posting to Twitter and talking about their travel. Burris believes the concept is sound, even if the way the data is gathered changes as social media sites wax and wane.
“The Twitter data that came through was tied to the location, which is how we could harness the sentiment to the journeys. If we used richer data from other social media sites such as Facebook, it would give us a more robust picture of how people are currently feeling - but also, we discussed if this was something openly known.
“Would people tweet more and feed back more about their journeys? Or do we keep it happening in the background? In the future, there might be an easier way of capturing sentiment. The premise of getting information to improve customer experience in a real-time context will continue to move forward, but the way we gather the data might change.”
Nick Wood at Virgin Trains East Coast is also looking to the future of social media to develop and generate business: “No doubt other platforms will come along. It’s about trying to make sure we are on top of what people expect - then do something a little bit different and push ourselves. I compare it to when email arrived. People were probably cynical and said they would stick to using fax machines and writing letters. The same thing applies with social media.”
He says Virgin has found there is still a need to educate people within the business, as well as customers, about the use of social media, why it is useful, and why it is not a “horrible beast” set to trip people up.
“In future, we can build up a profile of people contacting us via social media and realise who the high value customers are,” he says. “We can pre-empt people who have regular needs. It gives us the opportunity to predict those needs and surprise and delight them.”
Some of the tools to do this will already be at the fingertips of those running social media channels, according to Sheffield Hallam University’s Carmel O’Toole.
“From a PR practitioner’s point of view, if we are doing it, we should be able to measure the impact of it. It is not enough to have a chat on Twitter or Facebook,” she says.
“If companies are spending money on PR they want to know what they are getting. These tools are increasingly sophisticated. You learn to pick through those that are on offer, and it is increasingly possible to get rich valuable insight into what customers want to hear and when and how they want to hear it.”
As United Airlines found, stories can unfold much more rapidly than they used to. Gone are the days when statements could be chewed over at length. Reputations can be made and lost in hours. In skilled hands - and from both sides of the table - social media is rewriting the story of our lives.
