An up-to-date version of the presentation, given by me at MARCOM 2012. This presentation includes information about our social media strategy, how to build your own strategy, as well as how to calculate social media ROI and prepare for various real-world or social media crises. The audio from this presentation will also be available at richardmarginson.com after the presentation.

1. A Tale of Two Crises - May 15, 2012
Social Media Strategy at VIA Rail

2. What we’ll cover today
• Establishing your social media strategy
»Creating a governance structure
»Training and tools
»How to engage
»Setting up your social media policy
»Tracking and measuring your results
• Crisis communications
»Examples from VIA Rail
»Strategies and tactics
»Examples from other leading organizations
This presentation is also available at slideshare.net/rickyinmotion
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3. About VIA Rail
• An independent Crown Corporation established in 1977, VIA Rail Canada operates the national
passenger rail service on behalf of the Government of Canada.
• Operates up to 497 trains weekly on 12,500 kilometres of track, and serves 450 communities
across the country, from coast to coast and north to Hudson Bay.
• VIA carried over 4 million passengers in 2010.
• Infrastructure includes:
–396 passenger cars;
–78 active locomotives;
–159 railway stations;
–4 modern maintenance facilities,
• VIA employs some 3,000 people.
• 2010 operating deficit of over 260 million dollars.
• Since 2007, VIA has received $923 million – the biggest capital investment in VIA Rail’s history.
• Changes to trains, tracks and stations – the renaissance of passenger rail service in Canada.
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4. Social Media Strategy at VIA Rail
How to setup your social media
strategy:
• Design a governance structure
• Train employees twitter.com/via_rail
• Engage
• Measure
facebook.com/viarailcanada
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5. The Early Days
• Twitter used to push sales, travel info and company news.
• Facebook presence through a personal profile (before corporate pages).
• No engagement, monitoring or response.
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6. The Start of Something Special
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7. Learning the Basics
http://youtu.be/0eUeL3n7fDs
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8. Training Regimen
• Editorial Committee
» Refresh existing content
» Create an editorial calendar
• Champions Committee
» Tone and manner
» Response evaluation workflow
» Social Media Monitoring
and Response tool
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9. Tools of the Trade
• Freemium
(free or inexpensive)
» HootSuite (Premium
account includes team
collaboration features)
» Tweet Reports
» Tweet Reach
» Native web clients for
each network
• Premium
» Sysomos
» Radian6
Start with the free services and manual searches to familiarize yourself
with social media and the interface your stakeholders will use.
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10. The Nitty Gritty
• Monitoring and Responding
• Community Manager engages on a day-to-day basis
• If needed, agency can provide support outside of business hours
• Manage your customers’ expectations
OR
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11. The New Policy on the Block
The Social Media Policy
• Manage personal and professional social
media activity
• Encourage the use of social media by
setting rules and guidelines
• Restrict access to corporate accounts
• For reference, database of policies
available at http://bit.ly/SMGovernance,
including VIA’s policy
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12. How Do You Measure Success?
Basic Measurement
• How many mentions per day?
• Are they positive, negative, or
neutral?
• What are the trends?
Campaign Measurement
• Decide on the purpose
• Establish benchmarks
• Compare results
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13. A Case Study in Social Media Measurement
• Social Media Week (SMW) is an international conference that took
place across 12 cities worldwide between February 13th and 17th, 2012.
• SMW allows anyone (businesses or individuals) to organize and host an
event related to social media and provides assistance with planning and
promoting.
• VIA wanted to:
– engage with and learn from social media influencers while sharing
our own strategy
– hear from the new generation of industry thought leaders, and;
– create a business case for the value of social media, including
benchmarks to measure future campaigns against.
• Three major activities:
– Social Media Week Toronto train between Montreal and Toronto,
via Ottawa;
– “Social Media R.O.I.: Myth or Reality?” event, hosted by VIA Rail
with the Fairmont Royal York Hotel;
– Sponsorship of Social Media Week Toronto, in-kind contribution to
bring speakers and media to Toronto.
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14. What’s the R.O.I.?
What’s the R.O.I. on Blogging?
• VIA hosted an group of 13 bloggers and social media influencers (from Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa
and Kingston) on a private train car between Montreal and Toronto
•VIA used a unique hashtag on Twitter (#SMWTOroi) to track the conversation with the invited
influencers before the Toronto event started:
▪ 169 messages (100 broadcast tweets, 36 @ replies, 33 retweets);
▪ 1 million impressions;
▪ 214,000 people reached.
• Traditional media value of 1M impressions: $7,500-$15,000
• Traditional production value for print, radio and TV: $5,000-$200,000
• There was no out-of-pocket cost to VIA Rail
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15. What’s the R.O.I.?
What’s the R.O.I. on Event Tweeting?
• The hashtag (#SMWTOroi) was used for the event “Social Media ROI: Myth or Reality?”, hosted by VIA
and the Fairmont Royal York hotel in Toronto. The hashtag generated the following results during and
following the event:
 1,402 messages (575 broadcast tweets, 549 @ replies and 278 retweets);
 6.5 million impressions;
 506,000 people reached.
• Traditional media value of 6.5 million impressions: $50,000-$100,000
• Traditional production value for print, radio and TV : $5,000-$200,000
• Event cost to VIA: $11,000
• Incremental event tweeting cost to VIA: $0
• On the day of the event (February 13th, 2012), the hashtag made the trending topics for Toronto and
Montreal, then for all of Canada, and finally the worldwide trending topics. This means that, across the
world, #SMWTOroi was one of the most talked about topics on Twitter.
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16. What’s the R.O.I.?
What’s the R.O.I. from the overall festival sponsorship and
participation?
• Total results for the hashtag #SMWTOroi
 1,571 messages (675 broadcast tweets, 585 @ replies
and 311 retweets);
 7.5 million impressions;
 506,000 people reached.
• Traditional media value of 7.5 million impressions: $57,500-
$115,000
• Traditional production value for print, radio and TV : $5,000-
$200,000
• Total cost of participation to VIA: $11,000
• VIA had the highest had the highest impressions for the
duration of the festival, tripling that of other sponsorship reach.
• In addition, VIA was the top ranked festival sponsor for
number of engagements. This meant that VIA had the highest
over-all festival digital experience.
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17. The Framework
• Create a governance structure
• Consider a consultant or agency for additional assistance
• Evaluate your internal resources
• Create the necessary working committees
• Train for social media basics and implementation
• Develop a set of internal rules or policies, including a Social Media Policy and
a crisis communications plan
• Measure and analyze your activity
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18. What’s Next? Becoming a “Social Organization”
 Internalize informal feedback – Using social data collected from our fans and followers to create an
internal “feedback loop”, executing product and service changes.
 Procure an advanced social media management tool – Increasing our ability to monitor, measure
and report.
 Establish our crisis management policies and procedures.
 Create an executive blog – VIA executives share their views on the company, our products and
services, and the travel and tourism industry.
• Employee engagement and empowerment – Basic social media training to advance the knowledge
of all employees, demonstrating how they can use social media personally and professionally.
• Crowdsourcing – Asking for suggestions from our community members, using open-ended questions.
• Trendspotting – Looking for opportunities and threats using the social data VIA collects daily.
• Network expansions – Strategies for and increased use of Foursquare, YouTube and Google Plus.
• Create an external wiki and internal social network.
• Tweetups – Organized meetups with our online communities.
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19. VIA Rail’s 2012 Case Studies
and other examples of crisis management
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20. Crisis Management
Safety and Emergency Response at VIA Rail
• VIA is a recognized leader in safety – therefore, VIA is always actively
looking to improve safety and emergency response procedures
communications.
• The use of social media has spread across the company. Now, social
media is also a requirement for emergency response.
• Along with social media emergency response procedures, post-crisis
communication strategies are always top of mind at VIA.
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21. The derailment - Start
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22. Middle
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23. Middle
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24. Lessons from the derailment
Between February 26th and March 6th, we monitored 4,878 mentions or messages
on Twitter about the derailment. In that same time, we sent out 154 messages, 90
of which were sent on the 26th proper. Our level of response on Facebook was
similar. A blog post was published on March 1st at viaevolution.ca.
Things that went well:
» Quick responses, even when we didn’t have all of the information
» Personalized responses when possible.
» Sign-off message at the end of the day let customers know that we were no
longer monitoring, and provided them with alternate methods of contacting us.
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25. Lessons from Jann Arden
Between March 11th and March 15th, we monitored 1,476 mentions or messages on Twitter
about VIA Rail, Jann Arden and the pet policy. In that same time, we sent out 17 messages
about the incident, only 4 of which were sent on the 11th proper. A blog post was published
on April 5th at viaevolution.ca (after full policy review).
» March 11: 345 negative, 244 neutral, 28 positive
» March 12-13: 171 negative, 481 neutral, 171 positive
Negatives include any mentions or retweets against VIA to @JannArden, or comments about the situation
against VIA Rail when retweeting media mentions with negative titles or messages.
Things that went well:
» Immediate response to Jann Arden. Provided information about the policy, committed to
reviewing it immediately.
» Again, personalized responses during the week regarding our policy.
» The existing community stepped up, supporting the brand, even if they didn’t agree with
the policy itself.
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26. Prepare For a Crisis Before It Happens
• Ensure that you have the right training, policies, work processes and
procedures
• Include social media in all areas of communication across the organization
• Nurture relationships with your brand advocates
• Build up trust with the community before you need it
• Be adaptive and flexible
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27. Post-Crisis Communication is Key
Establish a communication strategy for real-world and online crises.
• Always provide an equal and proportionate response.
• Don’t rely on just one platform.
• Be proactive with your approach.
• Don’t over-moderate the comments.
• Rely on your advocates.
• Act fast.
• Be clear about your limitations.
• Not all crises can be solved using social media.
Based on research from http://bit.ly/SparkMinute
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28. The History of the Press Release
Atlantic City train accident – October 30th, 1906. Ivy Lee puts out a press
release, printed verbatim by the New York Times
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29. Post-Crisis Strategies
Always provide an equal and proportionate response
Example:
Domino’s employees do disgusting things to food, and upload the videos to YouTube.
The president of Domino’s responds using his own video. According to Trendspotting, it
was the use of the “unconventional media channels […], the same channels in which the
crisis found its way” to the public that allowed Domino’s to control the crisis and repair
their brand image.
From http://slidesha.re/DominosCase
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30. Post-Crisis Strategies
Don’t rely on just one platform
Example:
JetBlue employee quits by yelling over the public address system, then jumping out of the
plane using the emergency slide while still on the tarmac in August 2010.
JetBlue posts a blog in response (“Sometimes, the weird news is about us”), and answers
all questions on Twitter and Facebook.
Marty St. George, SVP of Marketing at JetBlue, explains the approach: “It wasn’t just a
channel choice. That’s where our customers are. Our customers are younger, they’re
more affluent and they’re significantly more active in the digital space and we want to be
where the customers are.”
From http://on.mash.to/JetBlueInterview
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31. Post-Crisis Strategies
Be proactive with your approach
Example:
In early 2010, Toyota recalled a number of vehicles due to an
issue with the accelerator pedal.
Social Media in a Crisis: Toyota Case Study from the
University of Strathclyde, Scotland:
“Toyota created a micro-site for recall information, which
included sharing features and a corporate blog RSS feed. The
site also included a live update counter to emphasize the
speed at which it was fixing the pedals. All social media
channels directed customers to the micro-site page. This
allowed Toyota to review the information and act accordingly.”
From Section 3.1.2 Post Recall Social Media Strategy
http://slidesha.re/ToyotaCaseStudy
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32. Post-Crisis Strategies
Don’t over-moderate the comments
Example:
Nestlé’s Facebook page was the target of “social
warfare” from Greenpeace in March of 2010.
According to a case study by Olivier Blanchard of
Brand Builder Marketing and blog:
“Nestle’s Facebook team responds to criticism on
their wall by threatening to delete comments left by
individuals using modified versions of their
corporate logo as avatars, which only adds fuel to
the fire.”
“Make a point to welcome the comments. Invite
them. Keep it up.”
From http://bit.ly/NestlePart1 and http://bit.ly/NestlePart2
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33. Post-Crisis Strategies
Rely on your advocates
Example:
Advocates frequent your social
media properties regularly,
without the pull of new content.
For VIA, our advocates (N. and
S. in this example) will monitor
and respond on our behalf on a
variety of issues.
David Spark:
“Allow the people that were there
during the good times to have
their say. Create and foster a
community of brand advocates.”
From http://bit.ly/SparkMinute
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34. Post-Crisis Strategies
Act Fast
Example:
Plan your social media strategy, policies and procedures around quick response time and the
dissemination of information internally:
- VIA has an internal policy to respond to questions and comments within 24 hours; usually
much sooner.
- Social Media Champions (Subject Matter Experts) are a team of 11 tasked with monitoring
and responding online, managed by a dedicated Community Manager.
- Community Manager meets with Social Media Champions bi-weekly to ensure procedures are
up-to-date and trends, opportunities and threats are being identified.
- Daily distribution of social media activity reports to senior management keeps the
organization informed.
David Spark:
“Be ready to respond as soon as possible, and at least within 24 hours. Speed to response is
critical – even if you don’t have the answer, acknowledging and showing that you’re there and
that you’re listening can do a lot to quell the anger.”
From http://bit.ly/SparkMinute
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35. Post-Crisis Strategies
Be clear about your limitations
Example:
JetBlue grounds a plane during a snowstorm. They
leave passengers on board for over 7 hours on
October 30th, 2011.
JetBlue answers all questions posed in social media
channels. The communications team notes that they
were limited by the airport’s capacity, availability of
gates and stairs to access the plane. They refer
customers to their “Customer Bill of Rights”, instituted
after a similar crisis is February 2007.
Taken November 1st, 2011 @ 3PM EST
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36. Post-Crisis Strategies
Not all crises can be solved using social media
Example: BP Global oil spill in May, 2010.
BP's CEO Tony Hayward to the Guardian on May 14th, 2010:
“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and
dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume."
David Spark:
“If you really screw things up (e.g., the BP oil crisis) no matter how much social
media you do, the disaster will always outweigh your communications. A real
disaster is a real disaster.”
From http://bit.ly/SparkMinute
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37. Thank You
Questions? In 140 characters or less, please.
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