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Also to give translink updates on conditions enroute to school etc!

I’ve been using Hootsuite (both desktop and iphone) to keep track of all my twitter followers/followings.

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Bear in mind that this is directed to Translink, not you personally.

That being said, I’m very disappointed in the response, since you really are wasting our time. Your attitude of saving time like that is just passing on the wasted time to people who shouldn’t have to deal with it. There are applications out there that allow a person to post in 2 accounts. You could have 2 different web browsers, for example.

As for me, Twitter literally sends the message to me via SMS. All of this app stuff is irrelevant to me. I deliberately turned off your @replies, because your customer service has worn out its welcome. Your useful messages have probably dropped down to less than 50%. That’s shameful. I have really tried to hard to hold on to the account, but I find myself skimming through your messages, and giving up. I refuse to waste so much time, and typing this has convinced me that Translink doesn’t care enough about my time and attention span.

You mention email. Well, how is that supposed to work, when some phones can’t receive email?

If Translink doesn’t like typing out to 2 accounts, then think about how troublesome it is for us to read 2 messages, just to get to the meat. This is so evil. Time is the only thing that some us have, and you are forcing it out of our hands just to get good transit information.

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There was a time when I had a handful of “important” users’ tweets sent to my phone as text messages, but not so much recently (@translink wouldn’t be a candidate for that in its current style).

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- Can you tell us HOW you receive your twitter alerts from @translink? Are you using the web interface, or a third-party service, or Twitter on a mobile phone app, etc? This will hopefully help us figure out what you’re seeing/not seeing in our stream, as the API can show the tweets differently if you’re using a third-party app.

- Perhaps a way to ask this more generally is: do you see all the RTs made by the @translink account, and all the @replies to customers when you view the TransLink twitter stream? Or do you just see the messages that we broadcast publicly?

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While we take steps to look at this situation, I do want to offer a bit of context from what we see going on in the Twittersphere so far.

- While indeed the “fluff” tweets are a key issue for you guys (which of course makes it important for us to address!), so far this hasn’t arisen as an overwhelming organic complaint from everyone following our account. Some “fluff” items even receive a great many retweets, indicating that there is some value there and others want to redistribute those messages! So while we are going to definitely try to pull back on the fluff, there will obviously still need to be a bit of a balance struck: it probably won’t be as much fluff as you see now, but there will still likely be some non-service tweets as reminders etc. As well, when we have our own promotional items that need to be shared (service changes, public consultations, etc), that will occupy some space as needed. Hopefully that can be understood.

- At the moment we’re loath to move everyone to separate Twitter accounts for service/non-service tweets, if only to simplify the workflow for staff and ensure that one consolidated audience is being reached. Obviously as we fine-tune the level of fluff tweets going out we can see how this evolves though.

- Eugene: as far as I know, no one has been telling us that they are being overcharged for incoming text messages coming from the TransLink account! Hopefully people are managing their text-message plans accordingly and avoiding large charges if they want @translink updates delivered to their phones. (The other option is to use our subscription alerts service that sends to e-mail instead, which could be a solution for those with smartphones on the go.)

That’s what I have for you so far—I just wanted to offer the situation we’re in right now while we are working on dialing back the fluff! :D

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How would customer service feel, if I kept sending them a copy of each tweet that they send us, using the form on the web site? After all, they might not know about all the information available. Maybe they could benefit knowing that Miss604 exists. Maybe they could benefit from the knowledge that they close at 11:30p [or was it 11:00p? who cares?]. Would customer service like me to send them a message, every time I see a woman in a funny hat?

The understanding is that that form is to be used for only certain things. Yes, go ahead and voice our opinions, but it’s not as if we are only limited to using 1 Twitter account, so there is absolutely no need to shove all this unnecessary information down the pipe.

I’m not trying to be rude. I’m just eager to see this discussion over and done with.

–
Eugene

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