The Green Tracks

I found this Web site on a friend’s MySpace page, and thought you might be able to leverage the Impact Counter through your green message campaigns. The site is for a company that not only blocks junk mail but plants trees in their customers’ names. Their Impact Counter quantifies the people helped, catalogs stopped, trees saved/planted, and pounds of junk mail stopped.

If you track your ridership, you could have an Impact Counter for trips taken, gallons of gasoline saved, GHG emissions avoided, etc… And if it’s not an idea you can use for your transit system, I think it would make a great gift idea for an eco-savvy friend!

- Jacque Brown, Booz Allen Hamilton

How did we do?

I’ve had a blast hosting the 2008 APTA Marketing and Communications Workshop Blog, and I want to thank all of you for making the effort such a tremendous success! Please take a few minutes to fill out this survey and let us know how we did. It should only take 5-8 minutes!

- Jacque Brown, Booz Allen Hamilton

Lunch and Learn - Budget Survey

During last week’s Lunch and Learn session, the topic of how marketing budgets compare from agency to agency was discussed in the large systems group.  A few years back (FY05), the marketing and communications committee conducted a budget survey to help transit systems compare how their marketing budget stacks up to other systems.  View the links below for more information on the survey.

 Survey Documents:

• Summary Points
• APTA Survey
• APTA Unlinked Stacked Bar Chart
• Minimum/Maximum Non-Labor Budget by Annual Unlinked Trips

- Jack Gonzales, APTA

4-3-2-1 Blog Wrap-up

Well, hopefully you are all back in your offices thinking about ways to leverage some of the amazing ideas you heard at the 2008 APTA Marketing and Communications Workshop. I want to thank Jack Gonzalez and the rest of the APTA staff as well as the Marketing and Communications Committee for putting on such an amazing event. I also wanted to leave you with a few insights from transit’s newest blogger.

FOUR… Web 2.0 applications that you can begin using immediately:

1. BLOGS! Hopefully this workshop demonstrated the amazing potential in the transit blogosphere. You can use a blog to start a genuine and transparent conversation about your transit system, engage current and potential riders, and provide customers with information about your services. There is no cost to initiate a blog, so why not start one today?
2. Flickr. I hate to be cliche, but a picture IS worth a thousand words. Invite your customers to send pictures of themselves riding the train, of things in need of repair, or of graffiti on your vehicles or in your stations. Give them the option to send the photos via text message, e-mail them, or upload them to their own flickr site using a unique tag (i.e., DCMetro). You will be able to access all of the public photos with your tag, and you can link to them from you system’s Web site.
3. YouTube. At a minimum, you can use YouTube to increase the reach of your existing video products. If you have just finished a commercial, why not upload it to YouTube, post it on various Social Networking sites, and link to it from your Web site? YouTube stretches your marketing dollars at no additional cost to taxpayers or transit riders.
4. Social Networking Sites. Xanthi Pinkerton and her team offered an amazing presentation on “The Green Message” at the workshop. Why not leverage the green movement to reach “greenies” on the Web? Most networks already have local environmental groups. You can send them a message inviting them to view your profile or join a group of your own.

THREE… tips for success:

• DO what works for you! I know that may sound simple, but the truth is there are no best practices for Web 2.0 efforts. The Web 2.0 “culture” is continuously evolving, so copy the things that you like, ignore the things that you don’t, and develop your own ideas to make Web 2.0 applications work for YOUR needs.
• DON’T forget about communications basics. Web 2.0 may be much less formal than traditional media, but the way the audience reads and comprehends information remains the same. Structure your products, use simple language, and cater your message to your target audience.
• DO make your Web 2.0 products dynamic. Also known as Social Media, Web 2.0 is all about building a network of people and information. Link out to e-mail addresses and Web sites, try to get the link to your site/profile incorporated into other media, and incorporate fresh information as often as possible.

TWO… lessons learned from a first-time blogger:

• Engage your audience early. My goal was to have more of a two-way conversation on the blog, but I didn’t incorporate requests for comments until after we got to Orlando. By then, I had already set the tone as a one-way conversation. Another way to engage the participants would have been to incorporate the use of mobile devices during the workshop.
• Understand your limitations. You may have noticed that I started out with in-depth summaries about the presentations, then slowly cut back to key highlights. Trying to provide meaningful notes, upload 6-8 presentations every few hours, take and upload pictures, and provide links to e-mail addresses, Web sites, and other resources turned out to be quite overwhelming. A couple of things I might have done differently…
  - Develop a draft post for each session BEFORE the event.
  - Take a team of 2-3 bloggers to attend multiple sessions simultaneously.
  - Have a separate computer to display the blog.

ONE… challenge for everyone at the workshop and those reading this blog.

Try out a new Web 2.0 application TODAY. Whether it’s a personal profile on LinkedIn, a blog on WordPress or Blogger, or a bookmarks page on del.icio.us, get out there and take a trip on the Web 2.0 train.

Once again, I’d like to say how much I enjoyed getting to know everyone at the conference. Although the blog provides presentations, pictures, and videos from the workshop, the Internet will never replace face-to-face interaction with your colleagues and friends.

Take care,
Jacque Brown

Check it out…

Dan Johnson-Weinberger, president of Permanent Campaigns Consulting, gave kudos to the 2008 APTA Marketing and Communications Workshop in his blog.

Social Networking Demographics

Many of you may be considering Social Networking sites to supplement your next campaign, and as with any medium, it’s important to choose the right outlet. The following links provide some insight on Social Networking Demographics.

• Rapleaf gathered some statistics on five top social networking sites. This post on Read/Write Web provides demographic information about the users from different networks.
• OpenSocial is a Google-led effort to allow users to access widgets across multiple social networks. This post on Compete.com provides information about where Facebook and OpenSocial overlap.
• Social networking is more than Facebook and MySpace, or even LinkedIn. This post lists the Top 20 sites in June 2007.

- Jacque Brown, Booz Allen Hamilton

Post your pictures on APTA’s flickr account

Okay everyone. I know I wasn’t the only one at the conference taking pictures, and to be honest I’m a pretty horrible photographer. If you have any working pictures that you are willing to share with the rest of us, you can upload them to the APTA Marketing and Communications Workshop flickr site by following a few easy steps:

1. Resize your photos to make downloading easier
   - Open your photo in Microsoft Office Picture Manager
   - Click “Edit Pictures” then “Resize”
   - Under “Predefined width x height” choose Web large and save
2. Go to flickr.com and click “Sign In” (top right corner)
3. Username: aptamarketing
   Password: Tr4nsitRock$
4. Click “Upload Photos” then “Choose Photos”
5. Select the photos you wish to upload (control click for more than one selection) and click “Open”
6. Click “Upload Photos”
7. Congratulations, you have uploaded your photos to flickr! If you would like to add titles, descriptions, or tags, just follow the directions on the screen.

Thanks everyone! I look forward to seeing your pictures.

- Jacque Brown, Booz Allen Hamilton

Big Ideas, Small Budgets

Speakers:

• Susan B. Richards, president, SR Concepts, Charleston, SC
• Douglas C. Holcomb, planning and service development officer, Greater Bridgeport Transit Authority, Bridgeport, CT
• Bill Morris, senior research associate, Center for Urban Transportation Research, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL
• Kelly Robertson, account manager, Kidd Group Communication Design, Tallahassee, FL
• Gina Douthat, director of communications & development, Transit Authority of Northern Kentucky, Ft. Wright, KY

Presentations:

• Colossal Coffee Contest
• Greater Bridgeport Transit

New Media

Speakers:

• Alice Wiggins-Tolbert, senior manager, customer and community relations, Parsons Brinckerhoff, Los Angeles, CA
• Steve Radick, associate, Booz Allen Hamilton, McLean, VA
• Janna Snider, manager of marketing, Community Transit, Everett, WA
• James Allison, multimedia managing producer, San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District, Oakland, CA

Presentations:

• New Media
• Community Transit MySpace Campaign
• Bits, Bytes, and BART

Podcast: Watch the New Media intro as well as Steve, Janna, and Jim’s presentations on YouTube.

Customer Service at its Best

The Puppet Video

The Songs Video

The Trailer Video

- Videos by Producer Glen