crisis communications
social media branding
design self-service
Published in May 2021.
Guy Sablon is the Social Media Coordinator and Spokesperson at STIB-MIVB — Brussels’ local public transport operator and Belgium’s largest urban public transport company. His role includes managing the social media content team.
Guy’s main goal for social media is to be there for customers during any kind of crisis, big or small — from city-wide strikes and storms, to local roadworks and delayed buses. He does this by being transparent and keeping passengers informed as quickly as possible. At times, this means dozens of social media updates in a single day across STIB-MIVB’s platforms.
Normally, STIB-MIVB’s team of designers were in charge of creating social media visuals. However, they were often overbooked. “For social media, we often came with last-minute requests. But these were not possible, because the design planning was full,” says Guy.
So Guy’s team took things into their own hands. They started creating content themselves, using Canva. But they now faced different challenges. With numerous transport lines that needed to be included in a single visual, Canva was a lot of manual work. They also had to manually export the images, and reupload them to each social media platform.
Not only was it not easy to use and time-consuming, there were also issues with alignment, design quality and brand consistency. “If you want to respect your brand guidelines, and you want people to recognize your brand, with Canva this was difficult.”
Learn more about the differences between Canva and Content Stadium.
Guy’s biggest requirement was to be able to create and share branded crisis update visuals as quickly and accurately as possible. These let passengers easily see which tram, bus and metro lines are running, and which are not.
“Being ready for a crisis is the most important thing for us. Because it’s the moment that our customers need us the most. If we are absent from social media when the network is completely down, that is inexcusable.”
To meet this need, we created a smart template which Guy can access via our Content Stadium CREATE platform to create on-brand social media crisis images. See how it works:
This crisis template includes:
In addition to their crisis template, we also created a text-based template, as well as a YouTube video thumbnail template. These templates empower Guy’s team to create more variety of content themselves, while always staying on-brand.
🔴 Grève nationale : 6h00
— STIB-MIVB (@STIBMIVB) March 29, 2021
Les lignes suivantes ROULENT:
🚇 METRO 1 entre Gare de l'Ouest et Montgomery
Les autres lignes de métro ne rouleront pas aujourd'hui.
🚋 TRAM 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 82 et 92
🚌 BUS 36, 46, 53, 58, 59, 65, 71, 87#stib pic.twitter.com/v9JqMnYqxI
🚧 Onderbreking Hunderenveld - Groot-Bijgaarden 🚋 Tram 19 📅 Van maandag 19 april tot en met zondag 22 augustus 2021 Het...
Posted by MIVB on Saturday, 17 April 2021
Guy and his team started using Content Stadium in January 2021. He now uses the platform almost daily, and enjoys the following benefits:
How have other departments reacted?
STIB-MIVB’s designers are enjoying a little relief from the reduced workload. While the brand management team is reassured knowing that Guy’s team is using the correct brand guidelines. Guy even uses his text-based template to create social media visuals for his HR team, who also often struggle with tight turnarounds and no time to wait for designers.
Learn more about our template and content creation platform.
