"I'm Laurel. And I Tweet It."

Social media has become an important vehicle to reach our customers. From rider alerts to service change announcements, we strive to provide exceptional service and foster great relationships with our passengers. From first thing in the morning until late at night, Laurel, from our Agency Communications department, monitors our social media to ensure our customers stay informed.

Laurel spent fourteen years marketing online financial services where she thrived on responding to rapid technological changes. Part of these changes included incorporating social media as a method for outreach and customer service. Laurel brought her passion for social media to Community Transit three years ago, "It was nice to be able to usher in Twitter and nurture our audience there. Social media has an immediacy to it that is unique. It gives us the opportunity to respond right away to customers, to tell them we hear them and we're listening."

Laurel monitors @MyCommTrans regularly, especially early in the morning just before our commutes are at their peak, responding to any questions or concerns. By coordinating efforts with our Customer Service and Dispatch departments, Laurel utilizes social media to connect with our riders. "When people are frustrated, listening and responding goes a long way. It helps when you feel like someone hears you. We may not have the answer right at that moment, but we'll work hard to get the answer you need."

In addition to Twitter, Community Transit also has a Facebook page and can be found on YouTube and LinkedIn. "Every social media platform is different, but the interactions I have with customers, whether it's a 140 character tweet about service or a 'Like' on a photo I've posted to Facebook, make my job challenging and fun. To be able to answer a question and get feedback in such an immediate way makes social media a great fit for public transportation."

Thanks, Laurel, for your commitment to service, for being the friendly voice our customers see on their Twitter feed, and for being an active listener and problem solver. When you "Tweet It", you make a difference in how we help bring our customers home.

Reality Check - Changes Coming!

Community Transit staff have been out at park & rides and on board buses reminding riders that a major service change will take place on Feb. 20. Many people are aware of this, and many have gone online or read the Guide to Service Change to see how their travel will be impacted. But there are still quite a few people out there who think these changes are negotiable and may not realize they are going to happen, soon!

To date, we have spoken to more than 1,700 riders about the upcoming service change. We get that number by adding the number of conversations we've had to the number of people on buses that we hop on and make an announcement. In some cases, we may have a five- or 10-minute conversation with someone waiting for their bus; in others there is a 25-second announcement that the changes are coming Feb. 20 and all the details are in the Guide to Service Change and on our website.

Given that we have about 40,000 boardings a day on our buses, that comes down to just south of 20,000 actual daily riders. We hope to speak to maybe 3-4,000 in person before the service change, and those people may talk to others. Through this blog, our electronic alerts (13,000+ subscribers), our website and our Facebook page, we hope the word is getting out to more. And, of course, everyone who rides the bus has a chance to see the materials on board.

But again, not everyone pays attention or realizes the urgency. Even on these pages we see commentors suggesting alternatives to the changes. It's always great to get feedback, but the public comment period for these changes took place last summer; these changes are final.

Maybe that fact will sink in when the printed Bus Plus schedule books arrive on buses later this week.

The changes are not perfect. Service cuts never make people happy. But nearly everyone should be able to still use our service with some adjustments. And we'll be making adjustments later this year. If a connection just is not working out, or trip times need to change, we can do that. For now, we are trying to make people aware that changes are coming, soon.

We'll be out by the Albertson's in Mukilteo, at the Ash Way Park & Ride and the Lynnwood Transit Center this week, and at Mariner Park & Ride, Boeing and Everett Station next week. What question will you be asking?

Join the Conversation

As I’ve mentioned in past posts, public transportation is social. I’ve known bus riders who celebrated birthdays (with cake) on board, who met and fell in love, who seemingly share their life stories or simply a small part of their day with each other.

So it’s only right that Community Transit jumped on the social media band wagon early, launching our Facebook page in fall 2008. Government pages don’t have “friends,” but more than 850 people “like” us. Actually, we know many more of you like us, so check out our page! We have some interesting discussions there, with hot topics including service changes and Double Talls, the replacement fleet of double decker buses.

Facebook community pages confuse Community Transit community. Confused?

Fans of our page on Facebook may have noticed other Community Transit-ish pages pop up within the past couple of months. It's not just Community Transit -- businesses from Coca-Cola to colleges face these new doppelgangers on the social networking site.

Back in April, Facebook launched a new "community page" structure. Now, when a user's info section lists an employer, a favorite band, or even a general activity like hiking, these listings link to separate community pages for each topic. These community pages draw their information from Wikipedia, as well as what other Facebook users are saying about that specific topic. So in addition to our official Facebook page, there are now two of these community pages listed for Community Transit. We didn't create and don't operate these other pages, which causes some confusion for our audience.

We created our Facebook page in October 2008, to connect with our customers and share information with them. Unfortunately, these new community pages don't offer any interaction opportunities for the brands they appear to represent. Just like here on our blog, our official Facebook page has a comment policy to ensure that posts follow basic civility. But many posts that show up on these community pages don't fit our official page's please-keep-it-nice policy, and we can't moderate because we don't own these pages.

Other organizations are experiencing the same frustration over community pages diluting their presence on Facebook and confusing their fans. Facebook indicates that their eventual goal is to merge these community pages with "official" pages, but to date we haven't seen that happen with ours. As of July 2, Facebook finally added some fine print to the bottom of the community pages that reads "Community Pages are not affiliated with, or endorsed by, anyone associated with the topic."

What we'd like you to know:

If you're interested in connecting with us on Facebook, we're featured at www.facebook.com/communitytransit. If you're not sure which page you're on, check the URL or look for our info box on the left side that welcomes you to the official Community Transit page on Facebook.

Community Transit doesn't endorse or operate any other pages on Facebook.

Just a tip on personal Facebook use: take a minute to review your privacy settings -- allowing "everyone" to see your status updates and wall posts means that what you post on your own profile (or to your friends) could be featured on any community page without your knowledge. If you don't want that to happen, keep your settings on "friends only," at a minimum.

Open Government 2.0

Warning: This blog post is about technology. That means: it is way over my head, and maybe yours, too. But really, we’re 10 years into the 21st Century. Guess we gotta go techie sometimes.

I spent two days last week in Seattle at a conference called “Open Government 2.0.” The concept is that governments at all levels have all sorts of data and information that the public could use to participate in, influence and understand government. Beyond that, idealists in the room hope that technology might help create a whole new way of governing in the 21st Century.

The West Coast has many leaders in this effort. For city government trying to make data available, see Seattle's data port. Portland just launched an “apps contest” so local developers can help put city data to use. Check out their new iPhone app, which helped increase reports of graffiti from 10 to 228.. British Columbia officials are still excited about the success of their Facebook “You Gotta Be Here” campaign for the Olympics.

Like many conferences, the real value was in meeting and speaking with the people in attendance. Mukilteo City Councilwoman Jennifer Greggerson was there, and took Community Transit service to the event. See her Tweets about the conference (with link to her blog), here.

As is often the case, the lawyer in the room was a bit of a wet blanket – no offense to the very informative Ramsey Ramerman, Everett’s assistant city attorney. He pointed out that social media can create important public records and even public meeting issues that must be considered by governments and elected officials.

For those of you who know enough to be fans of One Bus Away – which provides access to King County Metro (and now Pierce Transit) bus information, you’ll be jealous to hear that I met the mastermind himself, Brian Ferris. Even though Community Transit doesn’t have real-time bus information (yet), he’d like us in the fold.

But everything is complicated when your data is not standardized. That was a big message of the conference, and one that drives home the value of Google Transit – not the application itself, but the fact that it uses standardized schedule data (General Transit Feed Specification) which can be reused in so many ways, by so many people. Michael Keating of the Open Planning Project is working to use GFTS data and open source programming to create an “open trip planner” for transit. Not surprisingly, one of his partners in that effort is the trailblazing Bibiana McHugh and Portland TriMet (which worked with Google to develop the GTFS).

I also talked to Linda Thielke of King County Metro. She seemed a little disappointed not to have any snow events this winter after Metro developed all sorts of new communication plans to improve on last year’s efforts. They have an “Eye on Your Metro Commute” blog to post peak-hour rider information. They also added an email/text alerts system similar to what we have had at Community Transit for almost three years.

My take-away from the conference is this: Technology is a powerful tool, but not an end in itself. Both are important to remember.