Bay Area native studying abroad in london. Aspiring visual story/social media producer.

Mar 1, 2016

The good and bad of TFL’s social media policy

After infamously tweeting at a irritated customer that he should “leave early” for work if he didn’t want to be late, has TFL since improved?

TFL is home to London’s largest public transportation services.

While studying abroad in London, U.K. last semester, I heavily relied on Transport For London’s services, buying a weekly tube pass almost every week that I was there. According to a 2012 workforce report, Transport for London, also known as TFL, employs approximately 22,000 employees for its underground, bus, and train transportation services. These employees support one of the most used services in a city of 8.5 million citizens. On the underground alone, TFL has served up to 4.8 million customers in one single day.

While I did not personally interact with TFL’s social media accounts on either Twitter or Facebook, I did rely on TFL’s Twitter accounts to keep up to date on possible delays on the lines. Specifically, I rode the Central Line to and from class four out of seven days a week so I made sure to frequently check in with that Twitter account in particular.

An example of a tweet that I would have been interested in while I was studying abroad.

This account also serves as a branch of customer service.

It also occasionally offers tips and tricks for making the most out of its services.

In my social media course, one of our textbook readings, Social Media: How to Engage, Share, and Connect by Regina Luttrell explains the guidelines that companies should create their social media policies by. Since I had a real-world experience in dealing with a company’s social media presence over the course of an entire semester, I decided to apply these guidelines on to the current existing social media policy of TFL and offer my personal thoughts and critique on the policy.

As a whole, I am supportive of TFL’s social media policies as they are in line with most of Luttrell’s guidelines although I do find problems in their social media policies in areas regarding risk management.

Luttrell’s Guidelines

Luttrell’s social media guidelines are relatively straightforward and easy to understand. To best explain them, I have offerred a bulleted list of what I believe to be the key points of Luttrell’s discussion of social media guidelines:

Foster transparency: Encourage employee participation and interaction with customers, establish trust with employees and investing them with agency, allow open communication and avoid zero tolerance, allow feedback on policy from employees
Thoughtful and proactive approach: Create a fluid, jargon-free, sensible and friendly social media policy, values-driven (ie: trust, respect)
Minimize risks or damage to reputation: Change policy when social media platforms make change, consistent with clear consequences including outlining terminable offences

How does TFL shape up?

To begin with, TFL demonstrates Luttrell’s advocacy of an overall thoughtful, proactive, fluid, sensible, friendly, value-driven approach by creating two separate jargon-free social media policies. The first social media policy is for their own employees which breaks down what constitutes as social media, why it matters to TFL, and includes a practice guide on how social media should be used. The second social media policy outlines the expectations that TFL has for its users, going in to general house rules as well as policies specifically followed for Twitter versus Facebook.

FOSTERING TRANSPARENCY: A tweet from the official TFL account about ongoing construction work.

VALUES DRIVEN: A recent competition that TFL’s LGBT acceptance campaign team ran on Twitter.

I felt that the two policies and these two tweets demonstrated TFL’s respect to being thoughtful and proactive about social media. By clearly separating the two policies, it makes it easy for both employees and users to find what they need in an easy and straightforward manner. In addition, they seem to be following the guidelines of their own policy and putting their policy into practice as seen from these tweets.

However, I found what made the two social policies vastly different was that one of the policies had clear delineation of consequences while the other policy did not. In the general user social media policy, TFL explained that it was possible that they “may ask users to stop sending tweets and remove or report posts or comments that break these rules … [or] report patterns of disruptive activity or block users where we deem it necessary”. On the other hand, for their employees they only advised them to bring negative posts “to the attention of a senior manager immediately and do not feel the need to respond personally”.

The original complaint was taken down but this was TFL’s response to a customer complaint. Outlining terminable offences could have prevented this controversial tweet from occurring.

It’s not clear what disciplinary actions would be taken if a similar controversial incident such as this were to occur again. Following Luttrell’s social media guidelines of outlining terminable offences would make this a lot clearer. In addition, the employee’s social media policy does not encourage employee participation and interaction with customers. This may be because they have devoted certain staff members to their social media presences but it’s important to realize that every TFL employee is a representative of the brand and should be respected as such in the world of social media.

Even though TFL manages to hit most of the important aspects of creating a sound social media policy, they still have a way to go in terms of minimizing their risks or social media damage to their reputation. In fact, TFL has just reached an agreement with their worker union over night tube pay and working conditions so now may be the most optimal time to change their focus to minimizing social media risks.