People behave badly on public transit. A whopping 96% of riders indicated they’d been impacted by bad etiquette (feet on seats, nail clipping, etc.). But the vast majority said they would dread the idea of asking other passengers to stop this behaviour. To help GO Transit demonstrate their commitment to delivering a comfortable ride for their 250,000+ daily commuters, the social media campaign #EtiquetteFail was launched in 2016. The strategy was to spark social conversation and to invite GO riders to voice the etiquette fails that were bothering them the most. The campaign resulted in a 36% drop in bad behaviour. Complaints to GO’s customer service centre dropped by 80%, by far exceeding the target of 30%.

In 2017, to keep the conversation going with transit riders, Metrolinx and DDB Canada needed to find a way to keep the topic top of mind. On a tiny media budget of $70,000, the main objective was to drive an increase in positive rider sentiment on social media from the existing 42% – and to drive PR pick-up where possible.

The tension remained: People rant online about bad public transit etiquette, but they dread the idea – the awkward moment – of confronting another rider who is making an etiquette fail. And based on past learnings, a new supporting insight emerged: The best way to break this social barrier is to bring it out in the open.

But how could the conversation be brought out in the open in an even bigger way? This sparked the idea: What bigger way than to use the social media conversation from the rider community to literally write a book about the unwritten rules of public transit etiquette?

The initiative was sequenced into phases, orchestrated purely across social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. First, as a true community effort, the team reached out to riders and crowdsourced their most irritating etiquette fails. Based on GO riders venting online using the hashtag #EtiquetteFail and through voting in a series of #EtiquetteFail-related online polls, riders actively provided the content for what turned into a 100-page book. The book was named “Unwritten Rules of Public Transit Etiquette Written Down”. The book was lighthearted in writing style and design. Major #EtiquetteFail examples were whimsically illustrated, and important information was conveyed through charts, lists and infographics.

The campaign was then created in the shape of a regular book release. First, the coming of the new book was teased with the opportunity to pre-order. The team reached out to social media influencers and passionate GO commuters with book material and invited them to share it on their social platforms. The teaser phase built up to a book launch event at Union Station in Toronto with media attendance, where transit riders could be the first to get their hands on this limited edition. The piece of “social literature” was then made available as a free e-book on a campaign microsite. To drive continuous engagement with riders, parts of the book content were used as social media content.

The whole process of writing and publishing the book allowed GO to have a two-way conversation with their riders in real time throughout, while raising awareness that something was being done to improve rider etiquette.

It was clear that the campaign had hit a hot button as it received both national and local news coverage. Twitter Canada announced that it achieved the top Twitter poll of 2017. On the day of the softcover book launch, it sold out in just a few hours. After only three weeks of going live, over 10,000 e-books had been downloaded, exceeding the goal by 50%. Both paid and organic social media content consistently exceeded Engagement Rate benchmarks by 2x, with Twitter averaging an engagement rate of 3.02%. Total Twitter Engagements reached 293,000, the #EtiquetteFail hashtag had 3.5K uses on Twitter which resulted in 3.4 million users reached and 56.2M impressions.

Despite the topic of conversation being riders behaving badly, the campaign had overwhelmingly positive social sentiment at 84%, increasing from 42%, as riders voiced their appreciation of GO making etiquette a priority. That’s a 100% improvement. All for a media spend of less than $70,000.