Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

While it’s easy to give We Are Social (WAS) a right good pasting over their handling of the Eurostar debacle over the weekend – let’s put things into perspective.

For starters: less than 24hrs after the whole thing started playing out, there was a video response from the Eurostar CEO himself, Richard Brown. This is not something to be sniffed at kids.

A video apology, delivered via YouTube, to the LittleBreak website in the form of a blog post. In this day, that is a feat in itself.

How many other CEOs of train operators could you name who would consider doing that (outside of a BBC interview)?  Seriously?

Please do not think for one second that I’m making light of all those people trapped on the train/in the tunnel/in folkestone for God knows how many hours – I’m not.

But look at it like this – if the CEO had put that video up within, say four hours of the incident taking place, how easy would it have been to cry:

“OMG! What is he doing wasting time posting on a blog? He should be out there dedicating his time to getting those people out!”

WAS were originally (I assume), hired to create sales and conversation around ‘little breaks’ – facilitated, naturally, by Eurostar. Note: This would mean working with Eurostar’s Marketing and PR team, not their Customer Care dept. Whether or not the addition of a reactive care stream to We Are Social’s (now ongoing?) brief is the mark of a bad agency remains to be seen.

What isn’t necessary – in my opinion at least – is playing the blame game when it comes to addressing ‘twitter concerns’.

Remember – this happened on a Friday night and played out over the midnight hours. Come Saturday morning, the problem was still going on. I know I (at least try to) take weekends off sometimes, I’m pretty sure others do too. But, when the call came in, the WAS guys got themselves over to Eurostar HQ pronto and were camped out there from midday onwards.

By the end of play, they had that video up.

If care was part of the package then someone SHOULD have been online.
It wasn’t, so there wasn’t.

The end.