Two weeks on, Eurostar fails to learn from its lesson in social media engagement

Regular readers of my blog will be well aware of the recent Eurostar incident and the big lesson the company learnt about the role of social media in modern business.

Chaos hit the network when five trains heading for London from Paris broke down. Customers and others affected quickly turned to social networks like Twitter. The company and its social media agency We Are Social were slow to act but eventually they responded and a day or so after the problems first hit, the company's @little_break Twitter feed, originally created for a purely marketing role, was being used to update passengers on delays, cancellations and refunds. Good stuff.

But on 29th December it all went silence. Admittedly it was Christmas but the country is back at work now and most companies have picked up their social media presence. I tweeted at Eurostar today and asked them why they've been so silent. This was the reply:

No questions? I beg to differ. Both these tweets were posted today:

Finding the above tweets took me a matter of seconds. All I did was type 'Eurostar' into the Twitter search engine. Not exactly difficult.

Social media is not just about crisis management; it's a full time operation. The company had the perfect opportunity to turn a negative into a massive positive but it seems to have failed to recognise that. If you have a presence on sites like Twitter you must acknowledge that people are talking about you and be constantly monitoring what they're saying.

It's possible that Eurostar will change and start doing that. However, if the @little_break tweet above is anything to go by, I won't be holding my breath.