Back to 'reality'after our holiday and weekend off. Well the kind of reality where we get invited to meet the General Manager of the Metro Manila Development Agency in a room that looks more suited to a meeting of the UN. And a brass band meets us at the front door with some Katy Perry covers and Gangnam Style.
The scope of the MMDA (not to be confused with MDMA as this caused much amusement last night with my host family) is quite wide and includes seven key areas or mandates. However over all these areas the most interesting aspect for me is the use of social media. Here the matrix signs point motorists to a Twitter account for traffic updates and in a briefing on their work social media is discussed as a mainstream tool.
Like at Bolton at Home the comms strategy focuses in part on sharing the good work done by staff at the agency and communicating the key issues in a variety of ways to meet the needs of the younger audience As part of the drive to encourage good driver behaviour viral videos of road rage and bad driving are posted onto social media to show the public the kinds of situations the MMDA deal with every day.
In the control room a member of staff sits alongside the camera operators in the navigation sections to tweet congestion updates and suggest alternative routes in a truly integrated way of working. Response time is impressive with my thankyou tweet responded to within the hour and favourited shortly afterwards.
There is a lot of talk in housing about the need for management 'buy in' when implementing a social media strategy and this is more than evident here. During our briefing with some fairly high level operational staff social media was often raised as being key to their communication. Not only raised but discussed in the way that 'experts' do in the UK showing awareness of listening to customers and responding, engaging and responding promptly, creating conversations and trust and most of all having a sense of humour. If Bolton at Home directors could speak like this in a years time I'd be happy to have achieved something in my time there.
An example of the trust placed in the account is people tweeting crime and emergencies. Rather than telling the enquirer to go elsewhere their enquiry is instead passed to the relevant agency. This means they are seen as an authoritative source of information and raises their levels of repeat interactions. Perhaps something Bolton at Home could be looking at for their contact centre?
Not having had access to people anywhere near this high up in strategic development at home I guess I don't have a lot to compare the conversation to but it seemed that in this agency, as with others here in Manila, common sense ideas were implemented to provide cost effective solutions to the problems they face.
Their coding system for traffic is a great example. Faced with massively over populated and congested roads a solution is to ban 20% of the cars on each working day. So on Monday licence plates numbered 1 and 2 are not allowed to travel, on Tuesday 3 and 4 and so on. On Thursday the roads are particularly light as the Chinese population favour the plates with 7 and 8 on as lucky. This leads to increased demand for these and less traffic. (They estimate this is a 4% increase over the normal 20%)
I do have to say that almost every household I've stayed in has had a number of cars with different coding to avoid the ban. And many people I spoke to had ignored the ban and driven anyway. A great example of their Twitter skills though was given to me by my current host's daughter Reggie. Her friend had driven to work on a banned day and tweeted how happy she was to have made it through. MMDA replied saying they were glad she'd got to work on time but warning her she could be caught if she did it again.
Among other fascinating work one idea really stood out; the training of normal people in disaster response. We've already seen in communities children being taught to be first aid responders but this training extends further to cover how to deal with flooding, fire and earthquakes among other things. In a perfect example of the joined up thinking displayed here people who violate minor rules such as jay walking and cannot pay the fine are sent on this training instead.
As has been pointed out to me so many times we are lucky in the UK. We know we can call 999 and help will come. We know someone will be there to help if there is an emergency. But as we face further cuts to services maybe we should be looking further afield for how we can respond to this. Great initiatives such as this allow people to help themselves and their community and would work just as well in heavy snow or a power cut as they would in an earthquake.
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