The advent of social media has given companies and organizations one more way of keeping track of what their customers or clients are saying about them. They monitor and use sites such as Twitter as a way of enhancing and protecting their brands. A number of companies have created positions solely to monitor social media and to respond when it is important to do so. They also use social media as a source of business intelligence that enables them to modify a product or service so that it better meets the expectations of its customers.

The reason monitoring sites like Twitter is so important is that tweets and retweets are the modern-day equivalent of corporate gossip. You tell your neighbour about your positive or negative experience with a particular company and that neighbour tells a friend, that friend tells a friend and so on.

In today’s market, brand is everything. A favourable perception of a brand is money in the bank. It leads people to buy the brand rather than the product.

Imagine for a moment that you are a transit company. What would you want your brand image and brand promise to be? I think most of us would say that we want people to think of our transit service as being well run, responsive to customers and that the brand promise would include being safe and timely.

Now imagine that you are the brand manager for Edmonton Transit. What is it that you would want your customers to say about the service you offer?

A visit to the Twitter feed at #yegtransit would yield a lot of bad news, I’m afraid. Every day people post their concerns about service on the site. Most tweets deal with the lateness of buses and LRT trains, aggressive drivers, smelly buses and the like. To be fair, once in a while they also have some nice things to say. But the negatives easily outweigh the positives by a ratio of 10 to one.

One would think that Edmonton Transit would monitor the site and respond to their customers’ concerns from time to time. As near as I can tell, this never happens. Maybe because there is no competition, Edmonton Transit just doesn’t worry about these things. But if we are going to wean people away from their cars, somebody is going to have to start worrying. And the sooner the better.