Social Media Uses by the Catalan Road Service

The next speaker at ECREA 2012 is Sonia González Molina, whose interest is in the use of social media by the Catalan Road Service, the main source of official road information in Catalunya. She interviewed the responsible communication officers and analysed the organisation's Twitter and YouTube accounts as well as corporate documents.

Digital technology was introduced to the organisation in the 1990s, in order to enhance public communicate and develop new information services. This represents a process of convergence, and specifically enabled a greater amount of dialogue communication which – ideally – connects the organisation and its audiences, enables it to provide useful information, generates return visits to its spaces, improves interaction, and increases visitor loyalty.

New products and services offered by the organisation include Twitter accounts which are used by journalists and the general public to access current information – in fact, there now are 35 accounts, which automatically tweet the latest status of each major road in the region. There are also general transit administration accounts on Twitter and YouTube, which combine such information with road safety and awareness campaign materials and other information.

This is a matter both of content cloning (i.e. reposting) and of cross-promotion between these different accounts. Additionally, the people behind these accounts improve their multi-platform communication skills; this is true only for the manually-operated accounts, however, not for the automated Twitter accounts (which goes against the underlying dialogic nature of the platform) or for YouTube (where comments are not usually activated). Uses of such platforms by the organisation remain limited, therefore.