The Twitter Response to Snow Disruptions by Swedish Train Operator SJ

Seattle.
The final presenter in our panel at AoIR 2011 is Anders Larsson, who shifts our focus to Sweden. Twitter was used by the national Swedish train operator during the extreme winter of 2010/11 to address the disruptions to train services. There is a strong impetus for major businesses and organisations to be on Twitter, of course; SJ (which used to be the state-owned monopoly train company in Sweden) has been online as @SJ_AB for some time now – but only on weekdays between 9:00 and 16:00 (even though their phone service is online for longer hours).

The last winter generated especially extreme amounts of snowfall; this disrupted train travel to a considerable amount, especially during the Christmas travel season. SJ didn’t use Twitter during the entire Christmas holiday, however (given that much of the crisis happened outside regular business hours?).

Anders used yourTwapperkeeper to capture tweets under the #SJ hashtag between 22 December and 15 January, and these patterns are obvious in the data; the daytime nature of the account also leads to a certain backlog of SJ responses each morning. They do respond to most user messages, however. Retweeting activity shows a different picture: @SJ_AB messages are being retweeted, but other accounts also emerge as important sources of information whose messages are being retweeted widely.

So, SJ is on Twitter, but doesn’t really seem to exhibit a true ‘Web 2.0’ mentality – their account follows office hours, even though their trains (and Web activity around them) do not. They also didn’t appear to change their approach to Twitter during the acute crisis event – even in spite of the obvious problems.