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Twitter turns into hard work for Eurostar

Posted by Kupr in Online Tools, media

Many brands and businesses have jumped on the Twitter band wagon during 2009 using their allotted 140 characters to inform their followers about the latest promotions/offers and general on goings.  So far Twitter appears to just have been another alternative to RSS feeds and email marketing, and has been a great communication channel for soft messages to customers.  Some brands have made mistakes with Twitter as they develop strategies for this new channel, for example Habitat, whilst others such as Dell have got their strategy spot on and have reportedly made $2m from Twitter.

Eurostar left out in the cold

(Photo by slimmer_jimmer on Flickr)

However, last week Eurostar suddenly found themselves on the harsh end of everything that is good about Twitter, and instead of pushing fluffy sales content to followers they had to reassure customers and protect their brand whilst passenger trains were stuck in the Eurotunnel for hours, leaving concerned passengers on board, and angry passengers at the terminals.

There are a couple of Eurostar Twitter branded accounts that are not acutally anything to do with the firm, but Eurostar do have a Twitter account under the handle @little_break which Eurostar uses to promote holiday offers.  But that changed over the weekend with this account being used to send information to frustrated, angry and upset customers. Twitter, and Facebook were awash with comments from customers, which were far from complimentary about the Eurostar service and their perceived poor handling of the overall situation.  Indeed the timing of Google’s new indexing of social networking sites and ‘live’ search results, has not been beneficial for Eurostar, who are currently getting a royal pasting across the web.

Oh, and haven’t the Eurostar staff also been talking about striking!?