Great Western Coffee Shop

From The BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43781281)

At a time when so much rail enquiry / discussion has moved to Facebook and Twitter ...


Is there a case for some companies in the rail industry to reduce or even remove their social media presence and revert to "the real job of serving customers"?  Would a specific interactive web site function better than Facebook or Twitter for Great Western Help?

Good to see a company finally see that Social media does little to enhance their business.

I think the giveaway is in the name...'Social' media.

I think people should be careful before ignorantly accepting the reasoning they have given, especially given the timing (just after the Facebook blowout and links between the leave campaign, which Tim Martin was of course involved in, and Cambridge Analytica). I suspect there is more to it here than Tim Martin just thinking people use social media too much!

This, I suspect, is 99% of the reason in the case of Weatherspoons. However, that doesn't mean it might not be an idea worth thinking about for rail.

Having posted a £10 budget sponsored ad last year for a friends business, it generated £500 business in the week that ad was running. The ad was targeted to people logged on within a 10 mile area, and only viewable to those not already liking our page.

However we are comparing a small little known  sole trader business against a large well known national company. It certainly has its benefits for small businesses.
Larger companies are regularly targeted by internet trolls.

I wouldn't suggest GWR stop using Twitter as it's a good way for their passengers to get info at times of disruption. But drop Facebook as every time they run a Famous Five promotion it just fills up with negative comments about the service.

I don’t think it’s anything for the rail industry to consider.

In the case of weatherspoons any advertising is done on premise with the magazines or promotions at the bar. If you have an issue it can be resolved by staff there and then generally.

For the rail industry it’s a different ball game. You could be on a train, at a station, needing a quick answer before starting a journey and social media, such as twitter, can be effective for that.

Joking aside, I don't think we need to know if at 4pm today the tap serving "Brew Dog" at The Hatchet in Newbury will be serviceable, but we do need to know whether a GWR departure 30 mins later is cancelled or not.

Just trying to make the point that the capability of Social Media to deliver urgently-required info to Customers is more useful to a train operator than it is to a pub chain.

However if they wanted to could turn off commenting to prevent trolling

You need to learn the difference between "trolling" which is frequently a subjective judgement & customers expressing legitimate dissatisfaction with poor service and dismissing the latter as the former.

The twee, condescending nature of the "Famous Five" campaign which has now launched 1000 parodies is one of the factors which provokes angry responses, especially at a time when the service is so woeful.

Traditionally "trolling" meant "deliberately making comments which appear to be in good faith, but are actually intended to cause an argument". It's the same term as in fishing - slowly moving a line of bait through the water to see who rises to it. Hence the phrase "Please do not feed the trolls", i.e. don't rise to the bait. More recently it's become a word for anyone who uses the Internet for abuse, which we just used to call a "griefer".

But yes - I would agree that one way to stop abuse aimed at the poor quality of your product is to improve the product, whether that be a pub chain or a TOC.

I don’t need to learn anything so don’t be so rude telling me I need to do something. I’m fully aware what trolling is, and there is loads of it across GWR, wetherspoons and several other national companies.
The Wetherspoons chief has cited trolls as one of the reasons he’s shutting down.

Whatever it's called or not called, there is an issue with some of the responses added to posts on public pages on Facebook ... way off topic, incorrect, negative, inflammatory ... and reading some of these comments on a post you've promoted can make you wonder if you're doing more harm than good in the promotion.   Carefully used, some (but not all) such responses can be used as hooks to explain things on  ;D

Wetherspoons' business model of "Drink! Cheap! And food!" hardly needs Saatchi and Saatchi to spread the word. I have used the interweb to find the location of the nearest one in a town where I am a stranger, but never beyond that so far as interaction with Spoonies is concerned. I don't need a minute-by-minute report of what is on offer - in the unlikely event that they don't have a decent ale for two quid a pint, I can always drink wine. If it costs them money to run, there could be savings to be made without the risk of reducing the Friday evening scrum to manageable proportions. And, as WelshBluebird points out, there may be very good reasons to ditch Facebook before anyone starts asking potentially awkward questions about how you use the data you can harvest.

With GWR, I find twitter a bit useful, even if I hardly ever use it for anything else. It can add meat to the bones of RTT when things are not going well, but normally says nothing that isn't in Journey Check. But if GWR's Facebook page was supposed to be a vehicle for doting passengers to offer paeans of great praise for the magnificent service received, it has missed the mark. It has instead offered the opportunity for public expressions of dissatisfaction, very few of which would have made it into a green-ink letter to the company. The unfortunate timing of the latest campaign hasn't helped. There is plenty to grumble about with justification right now, meaning that we won't need "Five go Internet Trolling" as an offering.

I've noticed that increasing numbers of people are using twitter to get things like timetable information or when they can use their super advance off peak mega ticket. In the past you would have to use a timetable or go to the website. For me that looks like additional cost to GWR. A website is relatively cheap and users can pull information off it without a human interaction. Moving to Twitter and you're back with real people having to push the information out.

I'd don't really use Twitter but to me that feels like increased costs.

I've seen a few people use Twitter to make cycle reservations. I can understand that - much easier than spending five minutes on the phone wading your way through a byzantine series of "press 1 for this, press 2 for that".

Sorry but most of this woeful services is around London & Bristol, i.e the busiest bits of the network.  Devon has a fairly decent services, with occasional 2 or 3 minute delays (some people seem to go mad in Reading if its that late). The other week, I went from Devon to Reading, down to Oxford, back home again via Reading, and the only delay I had was the train from Reading back to Devon. To me thats good considering how many trains run during the day.