Go North East, Facebook and IID

For 10 days now Facebook and Go North East have together forged a revolution in real time transport company information management in a crisis. Archiving this revolution is not easy.

Here is a significant post and an entry point:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/notes/go-north-east/go-north-easts-policy-on-moderating-facebook-posts-and-twitter-messages/458638036183

Go North East’s Policy on Moderating Facebook Posts and Twitter messages by Go North East on Monday, 06 December 2010 at 11:04

Go North East’s Facebook and Twitter pages are for the purposes of keeping customers informed and receiving customers’ feedback. It is largely un-moderated as we welcome feedback from all customers and want to hear all points of view including criticism of how we are doing if we don’t get something right in our service to customers. We will, however, remove posts that contain foul or abusive language, or which for other reasons are considered seriously inappropriate. This would include hoax incident reports for example.



During severe weather conditions or during other major incidents, Facebook and Twitter are proving an extremely valuable way of keeping customers informed. Our team works flat out to keep the information up to date, and we ask all Facebook and Twitter users not to waste their time and the time of other customers with mischievous or abusive posts. Our team can provide customers with a much better service if they are able to concentrate on providing service updates and answering as many genuine customer questions as possible.



We reserve the right to block Facebook accounts that are sources of abusive language or other inappropriate posts, and to report the account holder to Facebook. Such posts will be removed as quickly as possible by our team.
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And here are some insider comments from a day or so back
"Facebook up to 27.5k "likes" and 2.5 million (yes million)"views" according to their stats. Ran a short piece on the people behind it in 'discussion topics' which has produced some very nice feedback. It's very rewarding hearing how much of a difference it is genuinely making for people.

An ad agency (we are not a client, don't know them), called mhdpartnership today tweeted: Looks like @gonortheast is king of the bus service updates."

There are risks. GNE have run a very open house which exposes them to a degree of counter productive posts. Not everyone is responsible in using their freedom.

Where might GNE see this all landing? Here at The International Institute for Information Design


http://iiid.net/

and you will immediately see
6th IIID Expert Forum
Traffic & Transport Information Systems
Traffic, Transport and Social Media
How transport providers and mobility enablers can use social media to better communicate with their customers
8 - 9 September 2011, Wien/Vienna, Austria

An excellent case study methinks?