Eurostar Crisis: Why You Need to Claim Your Name

A great lesson unfolded over the weekend deep under the English Channel where five Eurostar trains were trapped because of some form of malfunction. More than 2,000 people were trapped for as much as 16 hours. Many of those trapped had no food, water or light.

While Eurostar has a Twitter account, its handle is little_break, which is linked to a marketing promotion for the company. According to the Brand Republic Blog, the Twitter handles eurostar and eurostar_uk are not related to the company.  The eurostar handle is based out of Shanghai and the eurostar_uk handle doesn't exist according to Twitter.

People looking for updates on the crisis who weren't familiar with the promotion would have been mystified searching for Eurostar and discovering that it doesn't "exist."

Eurostar's Social Media agency is London-based We Are Social, which has a detailed explanation of the hows and whys of this crisis. I like the openness of their post. It is exactly what an organization should do when they find themselves in a crisis. This post will matter for perspective clients and current clients in case they would doubt the agency's competence since their involvement with Eurostar is widely known.

We Are Social claims they urged Eurostar to claim its name, but that was pushed onto the 2010 to-do list. I can hear a client saying that. Clients always tend to move cautiously; with Social Media even more so.

So what's the takeaway here?

Claim your name!

Do it right now.

Bill Salvin