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Archive for December, 2009
Eurostar chaos as seen in social media
I confess I have been a fan of Eurostar for 5-6 years. No longer the traipse through Brussels airport and pathetic short flight to London that somehow takes 5 hours from door to door. Eurostar changed all that for me, Leisure Select is lovely and sometimes when the price is right Attentio would pay for me to take that ticket. Two bottles of wine later and normally an interesting chat with fellow passengers and I’d be back in Brussels with a smile on my face.
But they have struggled lately with a number of issues, some acts of God, some maintenance problems but now the worst of all, a disastrous PR fiasco, with hundreds trapped under the tunnel for hours, thousands more delayed, trains cancelled and a stressed CEO getting on TV and via Wearesocial his first taste of social media.
I feel for the Eurostar team, but I also see that they act like a defacto monopoly sometimes. Their loyalty scheme is an after thought (it isn’t really a loyalty scheme) and their prices are rarely “competitive”. Still the criticism they face now is largely unfair, the snow was terrible and the simple nature of a “under tunnel” service, is they maybe stuck in a tunnel. OK they seem to be back in control.
Social media is important for them, but as I wrote to an agency contact recently, most of their work is not about social media. First they need to fix the trains and network. The CEO’s job of communication will have to be on TV and via their web site. The social piece is useful but frankly much of the twitter buzz is from social media types who are not yet full representative of the Eurostar customer base (this will change).
Social media does however provide a useful listening opportunity and as the video below demonstrates the chat is quite representative of their brand today. Many of the conversations are about “chaos”. How this changes and what next month’s hot topics are, will be clearly visible by watching the tweets, listening to blogs and responding to certain types of conversations. But lets watch this space and see how their online reputation evolves and if they do start to listen?