I’ve mentioned before on this blog that in cyber-space everyone can be an expert, and I’m not going to claim to be an online communications guru. The bad weather in Ireland over Christmas gave an opportunity to businesses and service providers to show off their communication skills. I want to acknowledge a couple of companies who did really well, and shame some others who didn’t rise to the challenge.

During the snowy period, people wanted to know two things. Firstly, how will I get home, and secondly, will I get into work tomorrow? The information which answers those questions changed every minute – roads became blocked, buses were cancelled and points froze. This was a situation where live, real-time data is vital. Essentially, people were asking if all of the transport providers they use were still operational and how long the snow was likely to last.

The Irish Rail twitter feed (@irishrail) rose to the challenge set by their customers and provided vast amounts of information on a live basis about the state of the train, LUAS and DART services in Ireland. As a service provider, Irish Rail get a lot of criticism, and this isn’t the place to debate what’s wrong with rail infrastructure in Ireland, but they’re communication strategy was excellent. They were informative (“The Maynooth line is 40 mins slow because we are defrosting points.”) and reassuring (“Don’t worry. There will be delays, but we will get you home”). In a situation where people are beginning to panic about getting home, they want to be informed and reassured. Irish Rail managed to do both, even though things were changing rapidly. I can only imagine how chaotic head office was. They even tweeted a picture of the vast crowds at Connolly station to illustrate why people should try to travel through other stations. That’s clever.

Re-tweeting information is a powerful communications tool – you read something from someone you follow, and you broadcast it to your followers. Irish Rail served not only as a broadcaster of up to date information on the state of the railways, but as a communicator of information which they thought their followers would find useful – the state of the roads, areas of heavy snow, latest weather forecasts. Communicators shouldn’t try to elbow alternative sources of information out of their way, but use them to support and supplement their own broadcasts. Again, Irish Rail knew they were becoming the people to whom worried commuters were looking for information, and they became the “go-to” people for all transport news.

Weather forecasters (like economists) are notoriously unwilling to admit they were wrong. However, weather patterns change extremely quickly and long-range forecasts quickly become as inaccurate as long-range economic forecasts. In this area, Irish Weather Online (@iweatheronline) also rose to the challenge, giving their forecasts for the minutes and hours ahead sometimes in quite tiny detail, and explaining why their previous forecasts were changing. Irish Weather Online demonstrated incredible use of hashtags (A hashtag is a way of filtering the tweets you receive from the people you follow and everyone else into topics like #economics #weather #sneachta). IWO, like Irish Rail, demonstrated a willingness to communicate the intelligence they had received from others. They followed people who were reporting the weather in their area, and re-tweeted it to others. They realised that, during a crisis, they had to communicate quickly, repeatedly and accurately. When Irish Weather Online tweeted that Dublin Airport may need to close for a few hours on the morning of the 23rd of December that I knew I may not get home for Christmas. Neither RTE weather nor my airline (I name no names) had a mechanism for communicating that sort of detail even though they presumably had the same data as Irish Weather Online. On the 23rd of December, Dublin airport passengers were split into two groups – those with twitter who were following Irish Weather Online and were concerned about their travel plans, and those who were reliant on their airlines and were completely in the dark about what was going on.

Because of their superior communicating, Irish Weather Online had also become my default “go-to” twitter feed for the best, most accurate and most detailed weather information. God alone knows what hours they put in during the bad weather.

Other service providers failed to rise to the challenge, and ended up doing vast damage to their corporate reputations. I’ve written about Dublin Bus and its love of intrigue before (your bus may or may not have left a garage which is located at a place unknown to you an unknown number of minutes ago and may reach you in about 20 minutes after it past the last “stage” which was in turn 20 minutes beyond the previous stage. You’re good at adding up, right? Your fare will depend on how many of our arbitrary “stages” your journey takes, but we’re not going to tell you what a “stage” is. And all of this is irrelevant because we’re not telling you if your bus stops here anyway. Ha!)

Telling your passengers through twitter that their bus may be delayed or cancelled is not really good enough. A delayed bus is a very different beast to a cancelled bus. Allowing your passengers to hear on the grapevine that buses may be halted at 8pm or 5pm for the night also isn’t good enough. In fact, it causes panic. Someone, somewhere in DublinBus makes the decision to cancel a route, or all of the routes. Why didn’t they tell the person who looks after the twitter feed? Do they have a twitter feed? Incredibly, it was left to the users of boards.ie and politics.ie to communicate what they knew about the bus routes in Dublin. In the absence of fact, rumour steps in. This might explain the people in tears at various bus stops in the capital last month. Or the silent hoards of people, slowing trudging home in the snow, mentally composing their letter of complaint.

Twitter is a relatively new communications tool, but it has a very powerful role in crisis communications. Firstly, it keeps people reassured and informed. In a crisis people want to be informed. Secondly, it reduces the number of individuals who contact you and ask for information. When Irish Rail tweeted that the Maynooth line was running 30 minutes slow, it meant hundreds of people didn’t need to contact them and ask one of their operatives for that information. It was provided for them. DublinBus couldn’t do that mass broadcast, so their customers had to go to their website, and so it collapsed. Then they went to boards.ie and complained about them.

Outside of Ireland, Newcastle Airport (@NCLairport) where I intended to arrive on the 23rd of December has an excellent twitter account, even taking the time to respond to individual queries about individual flights. While this is above and beyond the call of duty, receiving a personalised response to a query does really help stressed and worried passengers.

Dublin City Council’s communication strategy has been worse than useless during the snow, but – as ever when there’s a potential election coming up – clever city councillors took over the role of crisis communicators. And fair play to them. My fellow tweeters have mentioned Ray McAdam, the FG councillor for the North Inner City (@RayMcAdam) and Labour’s Aodhán O Riordain (@AodhanORiordain) as people who positioned themselves as their constituents go-to people for information about transport, school closures and water shortages during the bad weather. I’m sure it’ll pay dividends in the ballot box.

During the bad weather, it was clear which corporations had decided they should have a twitter feed but didn’t know how to use it. It was also clear which corporations had put twitter at the centre of their customer communications strategy and gave it the resources it needed. It was also clear which companies really cared about informing and reassuring their customer base as accurately and as fast as possible.

It was, though, extremely telling which companies, when faced with a crisis, still maintain the US military tradition when it comes to communicating with their customers – don’t ask, don’t tell.