I have a hate/loathe relationship with the MBTA.

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post that talked about how the MBTA is living in a strange world where investing in an AM radio frequency somehow makes financial sense. But really, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

If you read my Twitter stream, you’ll see me complain about the MBTA and how it is run. I figure, rather than blindly yell into the darkness about it, I should put together a list of things to change. No point in being anything but constructive, right? Here’s what I came up with:

1. FIX YOUR PRODUCT

This is a blog about marketing and communications. You, MBTA employees who are reading this, have lots of problems with marketing and communications. But those problems aside, your product stinks. Trains break down, avoidable delays are a near-daily occurrence, train interiors are frequently unclean and in disrepair, stations are filthy and poorly lit, train intercoms are poor quality at best and non-functional at worst, bad attitudes seem to be a job requirement for bus drivers, and on and on and on. You know all of this. So fix it. If your product sucks, there’s no kind of communication in the world that can save you.

2. LISTEN TO YOUR CUSTOMERS

I know what you’re going to say here. You’re going to say that you DO listen. You have “customer lunches,” you send your executives to terminal stations to talk with people, etc. But we rarely have time to stop and talk with you on our way to work or home to our families. Listen to us where we are trying to get your attention: Twitter, Facebook, blogs like this one, community forums, and so on. Invest in good social listening software like Radian6 or Sysomos‘s suite of tools. Learn how to use them. And make sure that when your social media manager hears about a problem, EVERYONE hears about it. Immediately.

3. BE ALWAYS-ON

I know whoever monitors your Twitter account checks out at about 6:00. I wouldn’t mind that so much if your product was something that was generally used during business hours. But it isn’t. By definition, the opposite is true. So why only monitor social media between 8 and 6? Why not create an empowered community management team that works in shifts to address problems whenever they occur? What, exactly, is the downside to this approach?

4. GET BETTER AT COMMUNICATING

I will say this for you, MBTA: you’ve taken the first step toward social greatness by understanding the need to apologize when people complain, and say thank you when people say nice things about you. (You could be better at both of these things, but it’s a start.) The next step on this path is taking customer service issues and turning them into public, real-time service tickets. When someone complains about a long wait for a train on Twitter, for example, this is what your Twitter stream should look like:

@johndoe Hmm… Let me look into that for you.

@johndoe Sorry about the delay. Looks like there was a small electrical problem. We’re fixing it now. Next train should be there in 5 minutes.

@johndoe Train should have just arrived. Anything else I can help with?

All of this communication should happen in public. It should be one person’s (or team’s) job to have these conversations — and it should be his (their) ONLY job.

5. EMPOWER YOUR COMMUNITY MANAGERS

You know what sucked? Dealing with all the delays on the commuter rail this winter and getting one lousy round trip ticket and a gosh-we’re-sorry letter as compensation. That sucked a lot. You need to get better at giving back to your customers, dissatisfied or otherwise, and you need to empower your community managers to do the giving.

So if someone complains that the terrible wi-fi is making their Pandora playlist skip, send them a $5 iTunes gift card. If someone complains that standing on a crowded train is making their feet hurt, give them a $5 gift card to Sports Authority toward the purchase of some comfortable shoes. And no, you don’t have to do this for everyone; your customers don’t expect it. But that’s the point: it’s the kind of thing that shows that you care about your customers.

6. MAKE THE DATA FLOW

I said before that as soon as the community manager knows about something, EVERYONE should know about it. That means everyone in marketing should know about it, everyone in PR/communications should know about it, everyone in operations should know about it, everyone in sales and finance and legal should know about it. And every CUSTOMER should know about it. (We pay your bills, after all.) This information is important — it’s a status update on how your business interfaces with your customers, and it’s a health check not just for your social presence, but your ability to run a profitable company that consistently provides a valuable product.

And in case it was still unclear, you are failing at this task.

I Can Help You.

I don’t want to blow my own horn here. There are few things in this world that I claim any kind of expertise in, but this is one of them. I want you to read the backlogs of this blog. I want you to read other blogs, too — start with the AdAge Power 150, and follow links to other upstart blogs of note. And if you still have questions, I want you to contact me. I can’t promise that I’ll have a comprehensive solution for you, but I can definitely put you on the right path when I have spare time. Like on my train ride home, for example.

Provided the wi-fi is working, of course. (See #1.)

Image Credit: bradlee9119

The future of social media is un-sexy.

And not in the librarian-who-might-be-kind-of-hot-without-glasses kind of way.

I was fortunate enough to attend the Social Media 2011 Conference hosted by Radian6 earlier this year. Among the many fantastic speakers (Mitch Joel blew me away) was a young lady named Amber Naslund (@ambercadabra), who happens to be a higher-up at Radian6.

Amber talked about a bunch of really cool stuff. In fact, she’s been doing it for years. And if you want to invest 8 minutes wisely, you’ll watch this video:

Down to brass tacks:

Now, what Amber is talking about here is the necessity for people within an institution to communicate with each other. What she’s talking about is collaboration, open access, and a holistic (God I hate that word) communications strategy built (or rebuilt) from the ground up.

She’s talking about the kinds of things that will never win you any awards. They won’t get you any Twitter followers. They won’t dazzle fans of your Facebook page.

But it WILL make your business operate more efficiently. It WILL save you time and money. Your right hand WILL know what the left hand is doing, because open lines of communication will be woven throughout your organization. Hell, those lines will be the things SUPPORTING your organization.

The fork in the road:

In 12 months, everyone will be an expert in how to use social media to communicate with people external to an organization. That’s easy stuff; and it’s what is happening in social media RIGHT NOW. But the FUTURE of social media is a completely different animal. And there are two ways to think about it.

The first is thinking about the technology behind social media. Right now, the only limits to social media are A) our willingness to take risks, B) our imagination, and C) the technology that turns that imagination into reality. Best practices are well established at this point. The future is in the ways we enact them.

The second way of thinking about the future of social is remarkably un-sexy. It’s about aligning internal communications structures. It’s about mining data to create new operational efficiencies. It’s about reducing the costs associated with outdated forms of communication by leveraging new platforms and applications that let us — shock and amaze! — talk to each other.

I know sexy. That ain’t sexy.

But it’s absolutely necessary. Absolutely. (I don’t use that word lightly, and I’m about to use it a third time.) ABSOLUTELY necessary.

Why? Because the one thing you can say about the evolution of technology since, well… its inception is that it has always gotten faster. And with technology, so go our expectations. Technology moves fast, so buying groceries should move fast. (Self-checkout lines emerge.) Technology moves fast, so banking should move fast. (Love those ATMs that count your cash for you.) Technology moves fast, so travel should move fast. (Automated self-service kiosks at check-in.)

Now what about customer service? Technology moves fast, so when I have a question about your product or service, your response should be — you got it — fast.

Every response. Every time. Are you set up to do that?

This is a fail.

The scrolling marquis at Westborough train station (and many others, I suspect) loops through a series of messages as you wait for your train. Some of these are simple welcome messages, others tell you how long until your train arrives. This one tells you where to go for more information about the commuter rail. Or, rather, where you should have gone in 1987.

Here’s the problem.

I don’t carry an AM radio with me. I don’t know anyone who does. In fact, the only time I might even consider listening to AM radio is if there was a Red Sox game on, and I found myself in a place without TV, Internet, or cell phone reception. (Which, to be fair, describes a fair chunk of Central and Western Massachusetts.)

And even in that case, I’d need to be in my car. I play CDs from my laptop when the mood to listen to a CD strikes, and otherwise I’m listening to Pandora. The only place that I could feasibly tune to 1630 AM would be from the cockpit of my Jeep — where I plug my iPhone into my stereo and run through my collection of Stevie Ray Vaughan live sets, and prefer not to be disturbed.

Oh, and I don’t take my Jeep with me on the train. Just so that’s clear.

The Location-Based Disconnect

In order to follow the MBTA’s call to action, I would have to arrive at the platform, read the Marquis, leave the platform, walk back to my Jeep, figure out how to tune to an AM radio station, and then navigate to 1630. In the mean time, I would have missed my train.

That is, of course, provided I can remember the AM frequency on which these undoubtedly very useful tidbits of information are broadcast. Most days I can’t even remember where I parked my car.

Where is the Value?

And what about this information? I can’t imagine that the MBTA has enough material to fill a week’s worth of airtime. What would these updates consist of? “We have received complaints of rabid pigeons in Back Bay station. We are addressing this situation and will notify the public once the issue has been resolved.” (Okay, fine. I might actually listen if that’s the kind of thing they broadcast.)

And why couldn’t they broadcast that kind of thing over the Marquis? Is doing so insensitive to the illiterate or something? I’m not trying to be a jerk, I honestly want to know. What was the justification for creating a broadcast station for MBTA updates?

“Hey boss, I’ve got a great idea. You know how we’re having problems communicating with riders about all the various glitches and malfunctions we’ve been having? And you know how people are flocking to social media to gripe about how terrible our service is? Well I’ve got just the thing to fix that. An AM radio station.”

Okay, now I am being a jerk.

But the point, I think, is a good one. The MBTA doesn’t have any kind of responsive presence on Twitter that I know of. Their Facebook page is abysmal. The only time I’ve really ever seen the MBTA address a PR issue is through TV media. It’s not fighting the PR battle on the field on which the battle is happening. This is very much a knife-to-a-gun-fight kind of issue. We complain using the full weight of social media, and you respond with… AM radio?

Seriously?

Look, maybe AM radio is a good idea. Maybe it actually does reach a significant portion of commuter rail riders. But if so, wouldn’t the place to advertise this station be where riders are in their cars? Wouldn’t FM radio ad spots be more effective? Billboards on the roads leading to train stations? Signs in the parking lots where early birds read their papers and sip coffee before heading to the platform? Aren’t all of those better than advertising on the platform where you can be 99.9% sure that no one has or is in close proximity to an AM radio?

Couldn’t your DJs monitor Twitter? Just sayin’.

Social interaction online is Utopian. It’s how we would design interpersonal interaction if we were allowed to design it from scratch today.

Think about this: you’re at a farmer’s market with your friend. You come to a peach stand. You say hello to the farmer who is selling the peaches, a pleasantly wrinkled old lady. You pick up a peach. You turn to your friend and say, “Hey, I’m thinking about buying some peaches. Have you ever bought peaches from this farm?” Your friend looks at you, still within earshot of the kindly old lady selling the peaches, and says, “Oh hell no. You don’t want them peaches. They got bugs ‘n shit all up in ‘em. You want them peaches over there. Them’s some good peaches.”

If this scenario played out in real life, your friend might have just given the nice old lady an aneurysm. It’s not that the information your friend gave was incorrect; it’s that the presentation of that information didn’t take into account social norms. You might buy peaches from the old lady, even despite the bad review from your friend — in fact, it would be as a result of that bad review.

But online, it’s a different story. This scenario plays out all the time, and we think nothing of it. In fact, we expect this kind of dialogue. You can say what you want about the anonymity of the internet and its ability to embolden us, but we should all know by now that fewer and fewer of us actually want to be anonymous on the internet. That’s a dumb argument these days. No, our boldness is a result of something deeper, something more rudimentary.

Old folks will tell you that there is a disturbing trend among young people these days. They’ll tell you that we’ve lost all sense of morality and ethics. What were once considered basic manners are now anachronistic. You don’t take your hat off indoors anymore. You don’t open the car door for your girlfriend. You don’t wear a suit to church, if you even go to church anymore. Today, people won’t think anything of a weak handshake. We curse and spit on the sidewalks. We talk in public about sex (which is different than talking about sex in public — though we do that, too). We emulate the basest examples of pop culture. We are entirely without the God-fearing rigor that embodied generations before us.

But that rigor was based on a code of propriety that existed before we knew what it was like to be able to say mean things about Britney Spears without anyone knowing we were the ones talking. Expressing our opinions feels good. And why shouldn’t it? We are built to communicate, to send and receive complex information, and that information is best, to our minds, in its most raw form. It’s why we love watching Cops: fear and panic and carnal desires all wrapped up  neatly into a one-hour package and delivered to our prefrontal cortexes in a more-or-less continuous stream. Raw emotion on demand.

In our quotidian lives, the closest we can come to this (apart from building a meth lab and actually ending up on Cops) is to vent the information we have gathered about people, products and services and spew forth in a raw and unfiltered manner. And it used to be that the internet provided us with a “safe” place to do this without violating rules of propriety. But in the decade or so that we’ve been using it in earnest, the internet has become less anonymous and more an extension of ourselves. We don’t sign into chat rooms with clever pseudonyms — we log into sites with our Facebook info, which displays our actual names. So why are we still spewing forth and leaving the social rules at the door?

Because that’s what we want to do. And we can do whatever we want on the internet.

That’s amazing, isn’t it? The internet has given us the opportunity to see what it’s like to communicate without rules. And because we have that experience, we are beginning to realize that the rules were all pretty silly to begin with. And that doesn’t just go for communication. It goes for everything. When was the last time you talked to a bank teller? Or went to a record store? Or took the kids to an arcade? When was the last time you took off your hat when you walked into a building? Do you remember the days when these things were required of us? What would you think if your friend asked you, “Hey, do you know any good record stores around here?” Would you think something along the lines of, “Record store? Who goes to a record store anymore?” I know I would. I would because we killed the rule that said that if you want music, you have to go to a record store.

We’re also killing timidity. We’re killing that part of us that says, “Don’t talk back. Play nice. If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything.” We’re killing the part of us that feels bad for the kindly old lady with the rotten peaches. We’re building new rules, rules that operate on the assumption that if you don’t have a thick skin, you’re not long for this world. It’s digital Darwinism. And it’s wonderful.

So here’s my question to you: If you had the opportunity to rewrite the rules for social interaction, what would your rules be? I’m going to come up with a wish list of my own. Share yours below, and we’ll compare notes later this week.