Best Practices for Transportation Agency Use of Social Media

Timely updates, increased citizen engagement, and more effective marketing are just a few of the reasons transportation agencies have already started to adopt social media networking tools. Best Practices for Transportation Agency Use of Social Media offers real-world advice for planning and implementing social media from leading government practitioners, academic researchers, and industry experts.

The book provides an overview of the various social media platforms and tools, with examples of how transportation organizations use each platform. It contains a series of interviews that illustrate what creative agencies are doing to improve service, provide real-time updates, garner valuable information from their customers, and better serve their communities. It reveals powerful lessons learned from various transportation agencies, including a regional airport, city and state departments of transportation, and municipal transit agencies.

Filled with examples from transportation organizations, the text provides ideas that can apply to all modes of transportation including mass transit, highways, aviation, ferries, bicycling, and walking. It describes how to measure the impact of your social media presence and also examines advanced uses of social media for obtaining information by involving customers and analyzing their social media use.

The book outlines all the resources you will need to maintain a social media presence and describes how to use social media analytical tools to assess service strengths and weaknesses and customer sentiment. Explaining how to overcome the digital divide, language barriers, and accessibility challenges for patrons with disabilities, it provides you with the understanding of the various social media technologies along with the knowhow to determine which one is best for a specific situation and purpose.

Susan Bregman has more than 25 years of experience as a transportation researcher and policy analyst. She is the principal and founder of Oak Square Resources, LLC, a Boston-based consulting firm that provides research, policy, and communication services to the public transportation industry. She has particular expertise in the field of social media and was the principal investigator for TCRP Synthesis 99, Uses of Social Media in Public Transportation, published by the Transportation Research Board in 2012.

Since 2008, Susan has been editor of The Transit Wire, a daily blog about transit technology that covers everything from mobile applications and social media to contactless fare collection. Before joining the consulting world, she worked for the city of Boston and the U.S. Department of Transportation. She started her professional life as a writer and editor for a trade association and a community newspaper.

Susan earned a master of city and regional planning degree from the Harvard Kennedy School and an undergraduate degree from Brown University with a specialization in linguistics. She is also an award-winning photographer and her work may be found at www.rednickel.com. Follow her on Twitter @OakSquareSusan.

Kari Edison Watkins, PE, PhD, is an assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering at Georgia Tech. After trying out the Northeast as a consultant for a decade and the Pacific Northwest to earn a PhD at the University of Washington (UW), she decided it was time to return to her undergraduate alma mater and the City of Atlanta to help it become a more transit-friendly, bikeable place.

In her research and teaching, Kari uses technology to improve, understand, and influence travel mode choice and multi-modal transportation planning. At UW, she co-created the OneBusAway program to provide real-time transit information tools and assess their impacts on riders in greater Seattle–Tacoma. She continues to work on ways to improve traveler information, but has also begun to examine opportunities to crowdsource cycling infrastructure and amenity data through the Cycle Atlanta program. Check out her research lab, UTIL, at http://watkins.ce.gatech.edu or follow her on Twitter @transitmom.