Balancing the budget by generating more riders through word-of-mouth
This book review and discussion of The Anatomy of Buzz appears in the latest issue of More Riders Magazine, along with the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit interview. Here are some good, simple ideas for tapping into riders as a marketing force. Online social media, if used well, may be an effective tool to support some of these strategies.
Transit agencies should run word-of-mouth ridership campaigns based largely off of Emanuel Rosen’s book The Anatomy of Buzz.
He offers a roadmap on how successful companies and causes have embraced buzz – person-to-person communications about a product or service – to generate more customers. In this article, I’ll apply these powerful principles to public transportation agencies facing the need to generate more ridership (particularly off-peak riders) to generate more revenue. My hope is that leaders of agencies will devote existing staff and resources towards the simple (and often free) steps to affirmatively generate buzz among riders and supporters that will lead to increased ridership (and increased farebox revenue).
Public transportation enjoys several attributes that make it particularly well-suited for generating buzz. It is communal in nature: people ride together. It is a visceral experience unlike, say, choosing a browser or a credit card. And agencies’ status as a government agency with regular board meetings make it very easy to generate earned media (something most private corporations very much envy).
With all these inherent advantages over private corporations in generating word-of-mouth among customers, why do so few public transportation agency leaders use buzz-generating tactics to build more riders?
Perhaps for some leaders, earning more riders is not a goal. They would prefer to manage whatever riders happen to show up and do the best job with the resources they have been provided. Hopefully you – as a reader of More Riders – have a different philosophy for public transportation based on perpetual growth instead of stagnation. For you and those like you who believe in increasing ridership, successfully employing buzz-generation tactics is likely one of the easiest and cheapest ways you can earn more riders.
I’ll share a few of the most compelling tools from the book.
First, it’s important to recognize that word-of-mouth happens about public transportation. People talk about it. Some people promote your service. Some people recommend to their friends to avoid it. These person-to-person comments – what Rosen defines as “buzz” — is one of the most powerful forces to either get a potential rider on the bus or keep them away. So how can we influence the buzz about your bus?
Maximize the number of positive comments. According to Rosen, research shows that positive comments from people who have experienced the service are most likely to bring in sales. How to do it? Ask for it! Ask your customers to tell their friends to ride with them. Explain to them that they can help strengthen public transportation by recruiting a friend of two to ride. And ask them to ride more often.
Tell Our Story. At the CTA’s Armitage stop, the mural is filled with stories of riders. Encourage your riders to share their stories with you. But even better: tell our story. Tell our story of how transit makes our city grow, how we are breaking our nation’s addiction to foreign oil, how we are improving the environment, so that every single time someone chooses to ride instead of drive, she can feel good about joining that story. And she can tell someone else and encourage him to ride instead of drive.
Inject suprise into the ride. Recruit a local celebrity (a newscaster or professional athlete) to help promote transit. And have him or her show up on the bus one day to pass out a free bus pass to everyone on that ride. Everyone on the bus will talk about that experience to almost everyone they know. And some of the people they talk to will decide to ride.
Ask for participation. Every business and institution along every route has an interest in promoting their route. Give them the tools and permission to develop their own route map that promotes their business (the timetable and your standard route map) and when some of them do develop their own route map, watch how aggressively they distribute their own route map and share what they have created.
Think of every rider as a potential salesperson for recruiting another customer, and the rest of the buzz-generating campaign will fall into place.
The Anatomy of Buzz Revisted by Emanuel Rosen is published by Doubleday.
What do your passengers want most? A web-based survey gives answers.
In fall of 2008, SEPTA, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, surveyed web-visitors in anticipation of their website revamp.
The results are worth noticing. Here’s one question (and averaged responses).
Google Transit and interactive maps came it at the top of the list, along with real time bus information. In other words a lot of SEPTA’s customers, and customers of other agencies, are hoping for Google Transit.
Kudos to SEPTA for conducting the web-based survey. This kind of inexpensive outreach helps to deliver the services customers want, and, importantly builds relationships that will create active public transit advocates.
CalACT conference attendees can travel Earth-friendly, easily, with Google Transit
I’m planning to attend the March conference of the California Association for Coordinated Transportation in San Diego. When I was making my travel plans, I used Google Transit to figure out how to travel between the airport and conference location by public transportation, and to see which downtown hotel I could stay at and still conveniently access the conference and airport.
As I was doing this, I noticed that CalACT’s otherwise fine website and conference information page seemed to be missing something: a mention of public transit availability at Lindberg Field, San Diego’s airport. So, I created a transit trip planner form and sent it to the conference organizers to be included as part of the website. The form gives convenient transit directions from any point in San Diego (the airport is the default) to the conference hotel. The date/time values are set to midday the day before the conference, but they can be changed according to when someone’s flight arrives.
The result is shown to the right. You can see the implemented version of this trip planner form on the CalACT conference website.
I hope this helps attendees save a few bucks on travel to the hotel, reduce their carbon footprint, and add a little bit to San Diego MTS’s farebox revenue. And, who knows… maybe a few transit agency managers and staff will be inspired to implement Google Transit for their agency, and/or leverage Google Transit with strategies like transit trip planner forms in their local online events calendar or features to help webmasters link to transit with badges and simple transit directions forms.
This is powerful transit markeing — not only does an event-specific trip planner form suggest transit at the time when someone is thinking about making a trip, but provides all the tools and information to plan that trip in about 10 seconds.
Google travel directions gadget puts public transit directions everywhere… oh, wait, they don’t include transit?
From Google Maps Mania:
The Google Maps team have released a handy ‘Travelling Directions’ gadget in time for the holiday period. A lot of people will be doing a lot of travelling over the next two weeks. Now with the new directions gadget, you can bring driving and walking directions to your home page or even to your own website.
By copying and pasting a single line of code, any website can offer customized door-to-door directions to their users. Users can then print the directions with a single click. Websites can even change the default destination to an address of their own by visiting the gadget creation page. This is a great option for businesses who can embed the gadget on their websites so that their customers can quickly get directions to the business.
More at Google LatLong: “The Gift of Gadgets“.
At first I hopefully expected that transit directions were included as part of the travel gadget. It would be a more elegant and easier way for websites to incorporate transit directions into their content than, for example, what I worked out for the North Coast Journal event calendar. Read more
Thoughts on “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of organizing without organizations”
By now most people know about Wikipedia, the collaboratively-written encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Isn’t that great and impressive that millions of people who don’t know each other can create such a useful and comprehensive resource? There are many other powerful examples of online collaboration, and sometimes it seems as if there is an equal number of books on the shelves that promise to explain the collaborative production revolution.
Can you tell from my tone that I’ve become cynical about the collection — sometimes it seems like a genre — of books that surround this subject? Well, there’s at least one that I can say is well worth reading — Here Comes Everybody.
Here Comes Everybody is full of examples of internet tools being used for social movements, and collaborative production, including examples that lots of people have heard of (Wikipedia and Linux), and other less-commonly known or discussed examples like political flash mobs in Belarus, citizen journalists in the 2004 southeast Asian tsunami, or the effort to get one woman’s mobile phone back in New York City. Some of the most interesting examples are those which failed, and Shirky discussed what was missing from them — whether it lacked a plausible promise, an acceptable bargain, or just used the wrong technology.
Recently, I returned to some of the ideas and examples in Here Comes Everybody to think about what they may mean for public transit agencies and transit advocates. Read more
Rider-powered customer service for transit
Less than a year ago, I saw a presentation on GetSatisfaction.com, a site that hosts user-powered customer service forums. To me, the site offers an inspiring, slightly provocative, and savvy approach to customer interaction.
You can browse some of their (beautiful and interesting) slide decks online. One presentation is Customer Service is the New Marketing. The other is Be Like the Internet – 8 steps to success in a post 2.0 world. It’s not a presentation, but I also recommend checking out their very charming Company-Customer Pact.
One of their points is that customers have so many venues to vent, rant, and communicate in the networked world that their voices are going to be heard and trumpeted all over the internet regardless of whether a company sets up a forum at GetSatisfaction.com. Wouldn’t you rather this happen in a forum where customers feel like they are heard, where the campany cares, and where people remind each other they are dealing with human beings?
They boil this idea down to a few suggestions:
- Reduce your sphere of control to increase your sphere of influence
- The way for a business to thrive in the networked world is to adapt to the network (get used to it being out of your control)
- Most of what matters to your business is happening outside your business
Looking forward to speaking on favorite topics — Google Transit and transit information — in Monterey
On Thursday, November 6, I’ll be speaking on two panels at the first joint California Transit Association and California Association for Coordinated Transportation conference in Monterey.
The first panel I’ll be on is “Making Connections with Google Transit.” I’ll be outlining approaches for smaller, mid-sized and rural agencies, and steps to get the most out of a Google Transit launch for ridership gains.
Also on the panel will be Mike Wiley, the General Manager/CEO of Sacramento RT, which has done a fantastic job of not only publishing their schedule information, but helping transit providers they connect with do the same. Gregg Albright, the Deputy Director for Planning and Modal Programs at Caltrans will join us. Caltrans says they are excited about Google Transit, and I am looking forward to their participation in our conversation. Finally, Jessica Wei, of Google, will be with us. Should be a good one!
The second panel of the day is “New Media for New Markets.” One of the themes I’ll be bringing up is sharing data electronically to be used in various forms of mobile, digital, and “old” media, using TriMet and BART as examples. And I’ll show how pervasive “new media” enables new partnership opportunities (see posts on community-based marketing and transit for events). Read more
Route-specific marketing: an online community-based approach
I am proud to share Trillium’s work in an innovative route-specific marketing initiative for the Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District (CUMTD) launched in October.
CUMTD increased service frequency on one of their core routes, the Green Route. To get the word out, they engaged business and community partners who distributed information about how easy it is to ride the Green Route to their customers and employees.
As part of the bargain, “Go Green Every 15″ partners were featured on the campaign’s website, www.green15.org. Below, a screenshot showing the route map superimposed with partner locations.
The campaign appears to have contributed to the success of the service expansion, with CUMTD reporting strong ridership increases on the Green Route.
Help new riders discover transit for events
People are busy. We can’t expect them to consider every option, including transit, each time they make a trip. If you’re someone who is accustomed to driving, then you’ll probably just hop in the car and go.
But, when we put new options in front of people, this can widen the range of considerations, and maybe change behavior. The idea put simply: Put the transit option in front of people when they’re planning to make a trip, and make it as easy as possible to figure out how to ride.
On May 28, my local news and events weekly, the North Coast Journal announced and launched their new website and events calendar. At the launch, they offered convenient driving instructions to venues in the calendar. That made me think, “Why not transit?”
