Twitter.com/Metlink

So late last year I had this awesome idea… I would start a Twitter account named twitter.com/Metlink to help promote the ease of access to service updates on Melbourne Public Transport.

The first thing I did was a run a search out of Tweetdeck for any body talking about ‘Connex Melbourne’, ‘Trams’ or Melbourne in general (at that stage, Melbourne didn’t have a big rep on Twitter so anybody who had a connection with it was good enough to follow). The only thing people ever said about Connex were bad things, and I don’t blame them based on the years of consistently late peak hour trains.

After many months my new Twitter account was ranked 98.5 on the Twitter Grader and much to my delight, the website ranked around 11th out of over 250,000 other sites when I Googled “Metlink”, in fact, this site ranked higher than Metlinks own contact/complaints form! Then, I discovered an email from someone at Metlink, they asked me to remove any use of the Metlink trademark on the site, I happily obliged and due to a number of circumstances I eventually ended up deleting the account. This made me sad…

I, as a member of the public was trying to instigate some accountability on our public transport system, I even offered this site to Metlink with over 2600 people interacting with it (Followers & Followed) to use to promote their service details. They weren’t interested. To me, this highlights another government organisation that is out of touch with the community.
WHEN WILL YOU LEARN? People are already in these social spaces, work with them in these spaces, don’t ask them to come to a completely new space, your wasting your money and time!!!!

Sometimes I think that they just need to get a 14 year old into these offices and show them how much faster things spread on viral networks. We all have Facebook and more and more of us use Twitter, I would have loved to be able to quickly check my iPhone (if I had one) to see where and when trains were running late…

…In regards to Metlink, you should have realised, this was about managing peoples expectations. Twitter would have let you manage what people were expecting when they arrived at their station. Lets relive that poorly managed day where trains broke down from leaving the races, imagine if people knew 10 mins, 30 mins or even an hour before… Quickly they would tell their mates and they in turn would tell strangers next to them and so on… Suddenly, Metlink or Connex are no longer in a position where people will be annoyingly surprised when they arrive at the station (if any even bother going there)… No doubt, some would leave earlier, some would stay longer and others would walk to trams, hell, YOU COULD EVEN TWITTER “Don’t use trains, lines shut down. Extra express trams waiting on such and such rd”…

If I was coming in to Flinders St and had two options, Train A and Train B, which were both leaving two minutes after I arrived and I knew that train B had been cancelled, I wouldn’t be angry, I had been told before I got to the station and made my decision to go to Train A instead.
If anyone ever needs help trying to understand how to make these social sites work for them, email me! I want to help you and I will….

Leave some comments below in the hope that one day a bureaucrat stumbles across this little dark corner of the web that is full of so many great ideas and starts to use them…

Will

P.S. I noticed that someone else has already registered the domain www.twitter.com/Metlink . Let me know what you do with it “Stephen Franklin”…

Related Posts

• Most Recent
• Most Popular

Speaking Engagements

Follow me