511 Contra Costa

When Viral is Good – How Social Media Can Engage Travelers and Boost TDM Effectiveness

The following article originally appeared on pages 21-24 of the TDM Review, Volume XVII, Number 3 (Summer 2010 issue). The TDM review is a quarterly publication published by the Association for Commuter Transportation (ACT).

Click to download a PDF of the TDM Review Summer 2010 Issue.

Is it possible to use social media and social networking to reduce travel demand? At least one regional organization—511 Contra Costa (511CC), a transportation demand management agency serving Northern California’s Contra Costa County—thinks so, and our experience in the field suggests that our success is replicable nationwide.

In many ways, the challenge is daunting. The county’s 19 cities are served by nine different transit agencies, two of which also serve the greater Bay Area – making transit for the first- time user a formidable task. Many parts of the region are poorly served by bus or rail, and—according to data from the Housing and Transportation Affordability Index—the majority of households in Contra Costa County spent over 20% of their income on gas in 2008. Moreover, as Bay Area transit agencies reduce service to meet budget cuts, it becomes even more important to reach out to those who can benefit most from alternative forms of transportation.

Despite these speed bumps, most county residents can, with the right incentives, commute to work by transit or carpool, at least part of the time. In 2007, 511CC aggressively expanded its use of evolving technologies for social media, and has helped a growing percentage of the commuters and employers in Contra Costa County discover that commute alternatives are accessible, affordable, and—with access to the right information—easy to use. Among the sea full of available social media networks and tools, 511CC has chosen to focus the following: Twitter, Facebook, and blogging.

What’s in a Tweet?

If you’re well-versed in the social networking platform called Twitter, you’ll know that a Tweet is a single, 140-character message sent to anyone following you on Twitter’s network. Tweets may also contain a link to a website or another Twitter user’s profile. Our Tweets at 511 Contra Costa stream live at http://twitter.com/511cc, but they can be repackaged and displayed anywhere. You can see our latest updates next to the blue bird on the top-left corner of our website (http://511contracosta.org).

Let’s say we’re feeling particularly nice one Monday morning and want to give away free coffee. We’d turn on the computer and send out the following Tweet:

Anyone following the agency would drop everything, go to the link in the message, and get their free coffee. Pretty simple, right? Well, that’s basically all there is to it—with a few bits of lingo thrown in to make things interesting.

Sick of Traditional Marketing? Go Viral!

Going viral is shorthand for what happens when your messages take on a life of their own.

Getting your promotion out to the community relies on things called mentions and retweets. Mansions and wreaths? No, I said mentions and retweets! When a Twitter user refers to another Twitter user in a tweet, the tweet is known as a “mention”. The format of a mention is the @ symbol followed by a Twitter username. For example, someone may refer to 511CC in a tweet by writing:

This way, people who have used 511CC’s services can easily point their friends to our services.

A retweet (RT) occurs when a Twitter user copies another Twitter user’s Tweet, word-for-word, and posts it as his/her own. Let’s say someone on Twitter named Caffeinated_Commuter saw the free coffee Tweet from before and wants to spread the word. They would then send the following message from their account:

Anyone following Caffeinated_Commuter who didn’t see the original message will become aware of the program. About 300 people now follow 511CC’s feed, and we routinely see tweets like this from our followers:

By monitoring what your followers are saying, you can stay up to date on the latest questions or concerns that your target market may have and interact with those most in need of your knowledge and services. In the case of transportation demand management agencies, this level of interaction with the public is invaluable because it occurs in real time, giving your organization the opportunity to address questions and concerns as they arise.

Speaking of Monitoring…

You might wonder whether someone in your office is supposed to spend the whole day staring at Twitter.com until someone asks a question. Fortunately for the intern’s sanity, this isn’t necessary. There are dozens of applications available that allow you to manage your Twitter account(s) and followers. A few of them include: TweetDeck, HootSuite, Seesmic, and twhirl. TweetDeck allows you to keep track of multiple streams of information, which are organized in columns. For example, every time someone mentions you in a tweet, it will show up in a column containing only @ replies. Direct messages sent to your Twitter account will show up in another column. HootSuite allows you to go one step further, scheduling tweets to post at a future date and time (a feature not available with TweetDeck). Many tools also support posting to multiple platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace from a single interface, facilitating what can be a cumbersome responsibility to reach out to more than one network with the same message.

In addition, many applications support the creation of custom, more advanced filtering systems. These allow your organization to filter all followers’ tweets to just view those containing key words and phrases. For example, 511CC can create a filter showing only tweets that contain the phrase “Contra Costa County.” Every time a follower tweets a message containing “Contra Costa County,” it will show up in the column. Filtered tweets can increase your awareness about which services you provide well, or
which services can be improved. Some fictional examples of tweets that would provide such information are, respectively:

By creating filters with the most meaningful key words and phrases to your organization’s services, you can track what people are saying and when—and sometimes why. The best part about keyword monitoring is that you can respond to each person individually when a question or concern arises, or use it as a platform for encouraging activities such as biking to work or carpooling. As a result, you can begin to function as a dynamic, responsive agency that is both aware and sensitive to the needs of its customers.

To grow its pool of followers, 511CC markets its Twitter account by encouraging mentions and retweets. Every month, new followers, those who RT, or those who mention 511CC have a chance to win a $25 coffee gift card. Usually, when the winner is chosen, 511CC is mentioned in a tweet, which increases our visibility to others. Here is an actual tweet from a recent winner:

Sometimes, fans of the organization mention 511CC in a tweet without any prompting.

There are other, more prominent organizations on Twitter, such as The Contra Costa Times newspaper (@CCTimes) or the State of California (@CAgovernment). These organizations have nearly 2,000 and over 5,000 followers, respectively, and whenever either organization retweets a tweet of 511CC, we are immediately granted access to a wider network of Twitter users, significantly increasing our organization’s reach.

What else do we Tweet about other than free coffee? Mostly, our messages are about promotions and incentives related to alternative transportation, air quality alerts, and news about local transit agencies. Many of our Tweets link to our own website, effectively cross-promoting our two main communication platforms. Other transportation demand agencies interested in a similar program should carefully determine the needs of their constituents to develop a Twitter profile enticing enough to follow.

More than just 140 characters: the 511CC blog (http://511contracosta.org/blog)

Just because it’s been around for longer than Tweeting, blogging is a practice that’s probably familiar to all readers of “TDM Review”. Although it seems like everyone is blogging these days, from politicians to your own teenager, it has yet to really pick up in the public sector, and many agencies that do use blogs fail to keep them updated.

The most important thought to keep in mind about blogging is to keep content fresh and frequent so Webizens will keep coming back to your site. The commenting feature on most blogs can also be a valuable medium through which an agency can answer questions from the community on important issues or discuss the subject matter of the blog post in greater detail. With a static website containing content that is rarely updated, this simply isn’t possible.

In discussions that 511 Contra Costa has held with other transit agencies, the chief concern with the blogging approach to community outreach is that commenters might post complaints or unhelpful comments in a public forum. However, with our experience, negative comments are rare. Even in the case where people are legitimately unhappy, the commenting feature has a flipside: people can see both the original issue AND our amazingly quick, publicly-issued response to their concern.

What you’ll see is that people are generally excited about the free deck of cards we gave away as part of a promotion to encourage alternative commuting. A few people were concerned about how long delivery would take, and we were able to write back right away letting them know the day we sent out their gift.

Why all the content? Wouldn’t it be better just to have a few large web pages and posts rather than a lot of short blog posts?

There’s another (hidden) reason to keep your blog updated with relevant content. Relevant content is the key to making your website visible on Google. The practice of fine-tuning one’s website content to rank higher in search engines is called search engine optimization (SEO). Blogging can add great value to a site’s ability to rank high in search engine results if the blog writer employs effective SEO techniques, and those annoying comments, previously a point of concern, simply create more fodder for search engines to better find your site.

A well-written blog post will be embedded with rich keywords and phrases that are relevant to the organization’s services and goals, which in turn will help bolster the organization’s ranking in search results. 511 Contra Costa has employed such techniques and creates 2-4 blog posts weekly related to biking, air quality, local transit agency information and other TDM subjects. As a result of 511CC’s blogging efforts, two of its top five visited pages are blog posts, that—when combined—account for nearly 15% of the website’s unique page views in the last month.

About a year ago, we wrote a post about the opening of a bicycle/pedestrian path over a local interstate bridge, and received a question about the rule for taking dogs on the path. As comments about this specific query increased, 511CC added more relevant content to the blog post on the bridge’s canine friendliness. If you want to see how this affected the site’s Google search rankings, visit http://lmgtfy.com/?q=benicia+bridge+dogs.

511CC on Facebook

Facebook is another great way to reach a lot of people, because—as we all know—Twitter is not for everyone. By having a personalized landing website within the Facebook network, an organization or individual can display information about who they are and what they do. On a Facebook page, the organization or individual can also post status updates which are similar to tweets. If a Facebook user indicates that they ‘like’ your organization, they have implicitly agreed to receive any status updates you post, and they now have the ability to communicate with your organization by writing a message on your Facebook page.

511 Contra Costa’s Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/511CC) allows fans to interact more with each other and with 511CC than they may be able to on Twitter. Facebook differs from a blog in that Facebook fans can indicate that they like a link posted by 511CC by simply clicking Facebook’s thumbs- up sign. The can also leave a comment for others to see on 511CC’s Facebook wall. Like retweets and mentions on Twitter, when others give your organization’s link, photo, or status update a thumbs up, all of THEIR friends are immediately exposed to your information as well. A Facebook page also allows an organization to have custom-designed tabs that can be used to contain more information. 511CC’s Facebook page currently contains sections for information on air quality, biking, transit, ridesharing, and transit promotions offered by 511CC.

Having a Facebook page allows an organization to have access to what may be a completely different demographic. According to articles published on CNN.com and NPR, Twitter and Facebook users often fall in different social classes. By having a presence on both Twitter and Facebook, 511CC has expanded its reach by more than a simple headcount. For those agencies serving particularly underserved demographics or areas with large minority populations, one alternative to consider is the social media network MySpace, which has higher market penetration in those communities.

Based on user surveys, roughly 30-45% of 511CC promotion participants hear about each of our promotions through Twitter or Facebook. This is a fair number of people who we definitely would not have reached with a traditional marketing campaign and likely would not have found with a website alone. In addition, according to follow-up user surveys of promotion participants, 85% reported a mode shift from single occupant driving to carpooling or using.

Getting Recognition for Our Social Media Efforts

In an article published Monday, March 8, 2010, “Tweeting to Save the Planet: The Role—And Limits—of Social Media in Environmental Solutions”, 511 Contra Costa was mentioned alongside the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD), and Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E) as organizations who effectively use Twitter to spread information and environmental awareness. The article also mentioned 511CC’s iSmog app, a free download that delivers Spare the Air notifications and other Bay Area air quality information to your iPhone.

The Verdict on Social Media

Social media and networking through Twitter and Facebook are demonstrably effective strategies for getting our message out and helping people reduce the amount of time they spend commuting in single occupancy vehicles. Moreover, once the social networking becomes more active, a lot of the hard work is done by enthusiastic fans that retweet our messages, give a thumbs-up to our status updates on Facebook, and comment on our blog. Organizations can attempt to reach their target market through creative communication or offering compelling promotions and incentives, and the more conversations out there about your organization, the better.

Effective use of social media can influence individuals’ decisions to take transit or other more sustainable forms of transportation. By making the information easily accessible via the dynamic and fast-growing medium provided by social networks, public organizations can experience great results through the same social networking tools their constituents are already using on a regular basis.