Transcomm Awards Competition10a: Social Media—Best Use of Single Social Media Platform

VDOT Northern Virginia (@vadotnova)Live-Tweeting as a Practice

• 2.2 million residents in Northern Virginia District (25% of state population) Agency work is varied: maintenance such as snow plowing, potholing, pipe replacement; operations incidents such as interstate closures, HAZMAT, electrical

• Goal to show agency has personality and message can carry across all platforms• Compelling and fun look behind the scenes and into crews’ lives

OVERVIEW

• Major primary road needed to be closed for an entire weekend• Showcase crews: work was being performed by VDOT crews only, no contractors• Instill confidence with skill level and specialty equipment• Promote “Rockstar” crews

EMERGENCY STORMWATER PIPE REPLACEMENT

• First live-tweeted traffic incident• Capital Beltway closed for 13 hours; interstate has daily traffic of 239,000 vehicles• Opportunity to showcase Incident Management Coordinators• Multi-jurisdictional HazMat: Overturned tanker with 8,500 gallons of fuel

INTERSTATE CLOSURE: OVERTURNED TANKER CRASH

• Behind the scenes of making “#brinelines” road pretreatment ahead of snow• Focus on two crew members in two different roles• Was rear ended in trailing safety vehicle; timely to discuss work zone safety

SNOW PRETREATMENT

• Agency is most known for plowing snow• Captive audience with drivers staying off the roads• Able to get to know an individual crew member in-depth due to time

SNOW PLOWING

• Everyone loves snow. Except when they don’t.• Meteorologists and school kids engage with us• Opportunity to show long hours and hard work of crews

SNOW PLOWING

• Able to show crews proactively mitigating potential issues• Involved residents of neighboring states• Simple humanitarian tweet was most popular ever

HURRICANE PREPARATIONS

• 484 @vadotnova tweets from live-tweeting events• Impressions: 1,785,227• Likes: 7,158• Retweets: 1,433• Twitter Moments of live-tweeted events: https://twitter.com/VaDOTNOVA/moments

RESULTS

TWITTER LOVE