Getting Social with the Media Martin Munguia Public Information Officer Good morning. I’m Martin Munguia. I work for Community Transit, a mid-sized transit agency in Snohomish County, Washington, just north of Seattle. We operate vanpool and paratransit service, and both rural and urban fixed-route buses, including commuter service into Seattle. We are known for our Double Tall buses…

The Double Tall We have 23 double deckers, and may soon be ordering more. Our riders love them! Our drivers love them! They really help set us apart from other agencies in the region, and they are very efficient for commuter service, carrying more than 100 passengers on some trips with the expense of only one bus and one driver. And, of course, our Marketing department loves them because we can have prominent ads that rise above traffic, in this case, promoting our social media channels… with some really big QR codes.

communitytransit.org Community Transit has had a very good website for a number of years. We redesigned it in 2008 and have taken a team approach to managing content, with Marketing and Communications the primary leads, but we have input from Customer Service, IT, HR and Procurement. You can see we also promote our social media on every page of our site with the three bugs on the left side. We talked about going social for awhile before really taking the plunge. Although, there was a short-lived MySpace page that was part of a youth campaign, but that didn’t really live beyond that one campaign. It took us a year to write a social media policy and implementation plan and get it approved by our executives. Finally, late in 2009 we launched our Facebook page.

facebook.com/communitytransit We initially envisioned this as a marketing tool to help us promote events and other agency initiatives. We attracted a good number of fans in the beginning, then those turned to likes. Over the last couple of years a good chunk of the administration effort on this page was just keeping up with the changes Facebook made to its organization pages. What we found after we launched this channel was that users would decide how our Facebook page was going to be used, not us. Despite what we posted, the comments we tended to get were along the lines of “What’s your policy on turning on the heat? Why won’t some of the drivers turn it on?” Our Marketing staff would respond to these questions, but it wasn’t really what they got into this for. Lesson learned: you have to be flexible with social media, and be wiling to go where your audience takes you.

communitytransit.blogspot.com/ On the Communications side of our agency, we launched the agency blog in early 2010. We wanted to tell little stories about the agency that weren’t the big announcements that we typically make in news releases. We had initially planned to launch the blog and Facebook at the same time, but I had an unexpected staffing change, so the blog took an extra couple of months to get ready. As fate would have it, the time we launched the blog coincided with the public comment period for the first of two service cuts we ended up making during the recession. We hadn’t cut service in a decade, so our riders were surprised, they were hurt, they were angry… and they had a new tool to tell us how they felt! As you might be able to see, this post on our proposed service change got 55 comments. Guess how many of them were positive?

Blog Post: Service Cut Decision In fact, the comments on the blog were so overwhelmingly negative that our executives wanted us to shut the blog down. It was a very sensitive time for the agency. We were getting hundreds of people at our public meetings on the service cuts, and management’s skin was very thin regarding the response we were receiving. The way they saw the blog was that here was a channel we could control, and we should control, yet there were people out here saying bad things about us. Thankfully, we had a couple of allies on the Executive Team, but it took a lot of convincing to keep the blog up and running. However, then the execs turned their wrath on our policy of letting people comment anonymously. We had created that policy because we knew it would encourage people to post and participate. And it did; most people were commenting anonymously. What really got the execs mad was that it was obvious some of these anonymous commentors were employees, based on the information in some of their comments. As you can imagine, if directors had thin skin about us being criticized at all, they really weren’t happy knowing that employees were criticizing us anonymously and getting away with it. This was the worst nightmare that our execs had about social media. The agency was sponsoring a forum for people to rage against us publicly. We did our due diligence in rebutting incorrect information, and continued to put our message out there and, as we knew would happen, other commentors came to our defense. So, in the end we were able to keep the anonymous feature. I want to point out that not every post generated a lot of interest. We had some that would get no comments and maybe only 40 or 50 views. But we found that the topic matters. This post summarizing the board action on the service cuts got more than 1,000 views.

Blog Post: ORCA Milestone This is when I came to realize that the blog was a really good tool to get information out. The traditional media coverage of our service decision had some of the factual information, but it didn’t focus on what we felt were the most important points. At that time, I still had a media relations person aside from myself. In fact, I had two staff in communications besides myself. But as we prepared for our second service cut, both those staff fell victims to our layoffs. We cut 206 out of 700 employees in three years, along with a 37 percent cut in bus service. So I didn’t really complain about losing staff, but it did prompt me to take a different approach to doing my work. I reached out to some of my more regular reporters and asked them to check out our blog more often. I said that I would likely be sending out fewer news releases, and would be sending out more news via the blog.

Blog Posts Despite that media relations revelation, I do still try to blog about stuff that our riders want to know, and that the media probably won’t care about. This one here is about new stops that we had battled with one of the cities in our service area over. It was the best location for customers, but the city felt that it would cause traffic backups. It took a year of negotiations but the city finally relented, so this was big news to our riders in that area. Not really a Seattle Times story. Perfect for the blog.

youtube.com/communitytransit I do want to mention that we have several other social media channels. We have a YouTube channel where we put up videos to support our messages, like this one of our CEO talking about the financial challengers. We decided that instead of sending viewers to YouTube, we wanted to keep them on our page and create a look consistent with the rest of our page. So we created a Videos page on our site that is powered by YouTube. Right now, our Marketers are in the midst of producing Instructional Video Shorts that tell you how to do this or that on our service in under two minutes. They’re great and our riders really like them.

Linkedin.com/communitytransit We also have a LinkedIn page that I discovered about a month ago. Turns out one of our HR employees wanted to post a job on LinkedIn and it inadvertently created an organizational page for us. So we went in, got administrator rights, put up an appropriate photo and wrote up an agency description and here we are! We’ll be working on how to use this page soon. Not the model for starting a social media channel.

Ning: A social network for CTR This is really exciting. We have a Ning site that is used for our Commute Trip Reduction program, where we work with large employers under a state law to reduce drive-alone trips. There are Employee Transportation Coordinators at these workplaces that we talk with and provide information to, and this closed social network provides a lot of the tools we need to help facilitate that communication. It’s got its own blog, a way for users to post questions, a calendar for our training events. We’re evaluating this to see if Ning or a similar tool might be good for a new company intranet.

Flickr We also a Flickr photo sharing page. Right now our Design team uses this internally to manage official agency photos, but we are drawing up plans to take that social site public in the future.

A final word. As I said, I lost all my communications staff due to our layoffs, but my CEO promised that we would rebuild again. This year I was able to add a position and when I looked at all our communications needs I decided the position that would best help our agency moving forward was an Online Content Specialist, someone dedicated to our web content and social media. When I look at our many audiences: riders, the general public, media, community leaders… I think the best bang for our buck to communicate with all these audiences is through online tools. Thank you.