Friday, April 11, 2014

A 2W4W Editorial


A note to our dear readers:
Yesterday, many of you may have seen a post from us showing a sneak peek of some amazing new technology that SMART has in beta test mode. We were contacted by SMART directly and asked to remove that post due to the fact that we weren’t authorized to share that information (which we, for the record, understood we were). We have a good relationship with many folks at SMART, and out of respect for them, we took the post down. We did note that the post reached over 330 people, who, we presume, were really excited about the technology advancements, so we wanted to write this editorial to give our readers that background, and some other thoughts.
To us, it highlights a bigger question for SMART. How do they respond to positive press? When we posted a link to the blog directly on their Facebook page yesterday morning, we noticed that the 2 immediate previous posts on their page said:
1. I HATE YOU
2. A story about a bus driver flicking off a driver
Literally. You cannot make this up.
So. SMART is in the news a lot (think: route cuts) and on social media a LOT (see above or many posts on their Facebook page) in a negative light. We aren’t saying that our post needs to be the post they embrace, and they are welcome to share their technology news in the way they see fit. But in a way - isn’t creating a positive buzz kind of a good thing in today’s media world of Facebook shares and re-tweets and god knows what other social media the kids are using these days? Especially given the sea of negativity that SMART currently swims in. In our eyes, our post created excitement about SMART for 330 people. Given our current transit system and its challenges, that’s priceless.

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