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The company in Aberdeen had three different people to maintain the Twitter feed; their organisational roles were as follows: marketing manager, network manager and network operations manager. As the network consists of the routes the buses run on, these managers are responsible for planning the routes and ensuring all of the buses are running to schedule. All three individuals use a single shared outward facing persona called Jen. The network manager updates the account most frequently (around 80% of the tweets). However, this person had no specific training in terms of dealing with the public, so the tone of the messages was more serious and less light-hearted. The range of duties the network manager does in relation to the day-to-day management of the bus services has potential to conflict with the requirements of maintaining the Twitter feed. This resulted in some tweets appearing rather argumentative in response to passenger complaints. The female gender of this persona is perhaps inappropriate as the person answering most of the tweets is in fact male. The decision to use a female persona was taken, as it was believed passengers would be less likely to argue with a female. This account was also chiefly administered using the Twitter web interface running on a desktop computer. Again, the mobile app based version helped the team members to monitor the account but this was mostly used for viewing. Therefore any tweets were composed whilst being situated at the desks in the marketing office. This indicates tweets are purely based on information they are relaying from sources internally rather than first hand experience from on-board the buses.
First South East and Central Scotland had only a single person behind the account as there were fewer resources devoted to it due to the rural setting of the majority of their bus routes; this is consistent with experience elsewhere (Pender et al. 2014). This person had the role of marketing manager for the company and used a Twitter persona called Amy to tweet. As one person was doing all maintenance of the account, the personality projected through the identity did not have as much character in comparison to FirstAberdeen and FirstGlasgow. There is not a predetermined character for that persona so it is based more on the individual operators personality rather than a constructed one. The marketing element of the account was very well executed with timed release of tweets to synchronise with other channels (e.g. the network update page on the company’s website). There was also much greater use of the retweet function for other accounts that have provided travel information relevant to the geographic area. However, the engagement between the operator and the customers was limited to a much more functional relationship with less general chat and more direct answering of queries. This account was maintained using Hootsuite3 web software on a desktop computer alongside a mobile device to post to the account when the operator was elsewhere.
In summary, the strategy for managing the personas in each location is very different. The ownership of the personas is greatly improved if the individual responsible for portraying each one is expressive in how they communicate but also aware of how their messages could be perceived in the public domain. When setting up personas, operators should carefully select the gender of the persona name. While female names may be considered to be less argumentative, operators should be aware of possible loss of trust from passengers if they become aware of a gender mis-match between the persona and person behind it. The identities portrayed through the social media accounts can influence the ways in which passengers engage with this channel of information. The interaction with passengers through the personas, as demonstrated by the good nature of conversations at First Glasgow, helps to facilitate a closer relationship with the travelling public.
CONCLUSION
The social media usage at these three companies has revealed very different strategies related to their use of social media. Although the marketing teams who operate the Twitter feeds do communicate with each other at monthly meetings, their approach to the utilization of social media is widely varied. There are many factors influencing these alternative strategies such as knowledge of the passenger demography including their usage of social media, the geography of each company’s operating area, scale of the service they operate and the experience of good or bad interactions with passengers via this channel.
There is no clearly defined shared practise for using social media across each of these locations. Each company has defined their own strategy through the experience of the staff members and the information needs they have defined for the service. Much of the current approach to using it has been learned through extending marketing knowledge into the social media channel and evolving how it has been used over time. There has been no explicitly organised activity by the company to most effectively utilize social media channels. The evolution in usage has been dependent on individuals learning through their practise within these organisations. This does have challenges, as it is a fast paced and very public platform meaning mistakes are difficult to hide. The speed in which other media outlets can pick-up on an issue and the ability for examples of poor communication to spread around the web require a cautious approach.
Our findings indicate that other transport operators using social media as a real-time information channel should factor in the three key themes this paper has highlighted when defining their strategy for deployment on this channel. These were persistent conversation, provision of real-time information and identity management.
The persistent conversation is the communication occurring between passengers and a set of personas through Twitter. This means that a relationship can be built up with their customers over an extended period of time than is otherwise possible with the bus drivers providing their service. This relationship construction reflects an important role that social media can play as it helps reintroduce a social element of customer engagement that is otherwise lacking from the service.
The provision of real-time information relates to the ways in which information on an unplanned disruption is communicated through this channel. The alternative strategies for doing this were described in terms of being proactive or reactive when disseminating such information to passengers. The scale of the bus network and proximity to the bus network managers are major influences on deciding which approach is adopted.
The identity management relates to the ways in which personas are used to communicate with passengers, and their configurations are largely dependent on the resources available within the organisation. The ability for the transport operators to build a meaningful relationship with their customers can be influenced by the ownership the Twitter operators hold of these identities.
Further work is necessary to explore with passengers the impact their usage of Twitter has on the travel experience. The assertions made about passengers throughout the paper have been based either on the second hand accounts during interviews with the marketing team or a reading of material available through Twitter. There has not been any direct participation of passengers with this study in order to gain their perspective and confirm or deny such assertions. More activity to address this would further evaluate the notions of social involving dialogue, information and identity described in this paper. Additional activity within the three companies would involve a workshop to explore the themes that have been highlighted through this study and help articulate a shared strategy for best practise.
Paul Gault is Research Fellow at the dot.rural Digital Economy Research Hub at the University of Aberdeen, UK. His research focuses on developing methods for distributing consumer experience research across groups of non-specialists in large organizations. He received his PhD in Design Ethnography from the University of Dundee, UK. p.gault@abdn.ac.uk
David Corsar is a Research Fellow in Intelligent Information Infrastructures at the dot.rural Digital Economy Research Hub. His research focuses on knowledge engineering, semantic web, provenance, and quality assessment in systems that integrate humans with artificial intelligence algorithms and big data. He received his PhD in Computing Science from the University of Aberdeen, UK. dcorsar@abdn.ac.uk
Peter Edwards is Professor of Computing Science and Director of the dot.rural Digital Economy Hub. His current research interests are focused around intelligent information infrastructures, with particular emphasis on provenance, information quality, and trust; these are explored in the context of applications built using linked (open) data. p.edwards@abdn.ac.uk
John Nelson is Professor of Transport Studies, Director of the Centre for Transport Research and leader for Intelligent Mobility in dot.rural. His research interests include: user requirements of both passengers and public transport operators and evaluating the impact of an enhanced information ecosystem on trip planning, activity patterns and longer-term behaviour change. j.d.nelson@abdn.ac.uk
Caitlin D Cottrill is Lecturer in the department of Geography & Environment at the University of Aberdeen, UK. Her primary research focuses on the use of data and technology in encouraging active and public transport modes, and in the protection of personally identifying spatiotemporal data via policy and design. c.cottrill@abdn.ac.uk
2014 Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings, ISSN 1559-8918. © American Anthropological Association and Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, some rights reserved.
NOTES
Acknowledgments – The authors would like to extend thanks to FirstGroup and the participants who took part in the interviews described in this paper. The research described here is supported by the award made by the RCUK Digital Economy programme to the dot.rural Digital Economy Research Hub; award reference: EP/G066051/1.
1 An ‘@mention’ is a public tweet directed at a specific account.
2 API – Application Programming Interface used to directly access and record data from the server that has not been preformatted for viewing as a web page.
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