Transport for London react online to protect reputation

Transport for London (TfL) has been suffering a wave of negative online publicity about the behaviour of a member of staff at Holborn Tube station. The incident was caught on camera, uploaded to YouTube and stories of the clip have spread online.

Although the clip itself has been seen so far by only a fairly modest number of people (328 views at time of writing), the audience for the story is significantly larger as online references will have been read by people who do not go on to view the clip. In particular, people viewing the internet at work often do not watch clips but do read stories about them. The blog post explaining the clip already has 196 comments, which suggests a large readership of that post alone.

Credit though to Transport for London who have responded with a comment to the YouTube clip:

Comment from Transport for London:

We are appalled by the scene captured in this video and will investigate thoroughly and urgently what took place and what? led to it. We do not tolerate members of the public being abusive to our staff but neither will we tolerate members of our staff abusing members of the public.

It looks like the username was created today [update – but the @TFLofficial1 account has since gone] specially to respond. The final test of course will be how TfL investigates the issue and then acts. but so far TfL has thought about the story, reacted, got on to YouTube and posted a response all within a few hours. Given the speed at which many large organisations work, that is pretty impressive.