Milda Manomaityte Editor airrail NEWS

Airport Rail Links can be very exciting topic to talk about with your friends, family or even strangers. The question is whether your project will be discussed with cheers or swears?

Recent two openings of light rail systems in Vancouver and Dubai proved that Social Media sites can be a great tool to bring the ‘Christmas’ feeling in to the opening day.

Both projects received significant amount of tweets on the opening day and Dubai Metro was one of the most popular tweets among the millions of twitter users. Even the day after opening, Dubai Metro was still the second most popular tweet after Beatles.

So how does an airport rail project achieve the popularity of a rock star? We will be answering this question on the ‘Customer growth and retention strategies on Airport Rail Links’ conference on 18 March 2010, in Edinburgh, but for now, lets have a look at the success and failure stories on how to/not to befriend the social networking sites.

Twitter – many professionals don’t really know how to behave with this uncontrollable flow of information. We already had a glimpse of how twitter can help bringing the ‘life’ feeling to the opening day. You would never have news like this from an official media source: “My son Aiden is the first baby to ride the first trip of Dubai Metro (6:30am) on its public opening from Rashidiya to Nakheel station”

“This morning I experienced Dubai metro, took me almost 40 min from Deira city center to Nakheel harbor. Great experience.”

“Just commuted to work by Dubai Metro. Economy class was less busy than the first class!”

Even after few weeks of Canada Line opening the novelty is still not wearing off among the Vancouver commuters:

“Sometime this week I will try the Canada Line to see what's so interesting about it. Coming & going to airport is getting better & better” “Vancouver has its new Skytrain to the airport now. Yay for the new Canada Line!!” Or even some first insight into customer experience: “Given how insanely busy the Canada line is during rush hour, it seems short-sighted to not have built for 4-car trains like the Expo line.”

This is great, you might say, but how can the projects that are still under construction ease the public complaints about closed streets, chaotic traffic and other inconveniences?

My favorite example is Gautrain. With some 800 followers they are using twitter to inform commuters about construction updates and promote future services and facilities at the stations. They are using twitter to spread the happy word and since the opposition is not present or not loud enough, it’s a great propaganda tool.

Surely this is something that Edinburgh Trams could look up to. They do have an official twitter account with some 200 followers and they do tweet occasionally, but are they doing it right? Knowing that Edinburgh Tram project receives quite a lot of bad press, they need to throw in some positive and exciting news. At the moment it feels quite apologetic and, I’m sure, this is not what public actually wants.

RideUTA, Utah Transit Authority building the Airport TRAX line sends their construction updates via email. They do have official twitter account, but with just some 20 followers and only 7 tweets, they are surely missing the point. The latest tweet about planned quiet zones could be a good start.

And how about the existing Airport Expresses? Did they unlock the secret of twitter?

UK’s dedicated airport rail links Gatwick Express, Heathrow Express and Stansted Express use this tool to inform their commuters about traffic updates. KLIA Ekspres promotes the customer service improvements and campaigns like the ‘go-loco’, encouraging people to live green and thus use KLIA Ekspres service to the airport instead of car. Flytoget, Norwegian Oslo airport express created the twitter account but with zero tweets they managed to attract only 13 followers.

As you can see there are not many Airport Rail Links on twitter, but those who do it right, are enjoying the benefits of happy tweets all around the world.

Next week we will have a look at Airport Rail Links on Facebook and LinkedIn. And if you want to learn how to ‘employ’ social networking sites for your benefit, please visit our ‘Customer growth and retention strategies on Airport Rail Links’ conference on 18th March 2010, Edinburgh, UK.

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