I'm Ben. 20. @BennSt
BA Media & Communication at Birmingham City University. I make websites and design for print, produce and present radio as well as take photos. Among other things.
Hear me every Wednesday 2-4pm on Scratch Radio.
More? benstones.net
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Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Bham #trainFAIL - Evaluation
This time last week we were on the eve of the epic advancement in awareness of Birmingham’s humongous train fails. Tasked with starting an online activist campaign in the three hours of #mc539 last Tuesday, we launched the Bham #trainFAIL project.
The first post on the Posterous blog explains the key objectives of the campaign and our reasons for venting our anger at Birmingham’s cross-city train service provider. I took a leading role in the group, starting with development of ideas through to conception of our online platforms, communications and ideas. My main role initially was to lead the group to the project objectives and then to work alongside and manage the group to achieve our objectives.
The Bham #trainFAIL campaign played on an already existing activist movement on Twitter - we decided to focus primarily on Twitter rather than other social networking platforms as most commuters would be more statistically contained within the Twitter user demographic. Utilising the pre-existing hashtag meant that we could follow and tweet aggrieved Twitterers to ask them to “get on board” with the project.
The success of this was measured by the rapid response gained on both the Twitter and blog almost instantly - within the three hours we had already had two posts submitted from consumers, some exclusive, inside information and a number of tweets, retweets and comments.
For this campaign to have done better, it would have been essential to carry on the legacy of the blog and hashtag. Whilst having the continuous attention of multiple people over the three hours meant the campaign could progress rapidly, as soon as the lesson ended so did the campaign it seemed. The framework for it’s continuation was there - as was the interest in the topic - but unfortunately we did not persue the project. The campaign does however have a legacy, it can be picked back up at any point.
Overall everyone needs to keep tweeting #trainFAIL and tag @LondonMidland in all your angry train-related tweets. Their cold, calculated replies might be callous, but the more people tweet them the more aware they are going to be that their service is poorly managed and run… I’m not bitter at all.
