Southern Rail, an embattled train operator in southern England, has not been having a great time recently.
It is embroiled in a long-running dispute with its drivers’ union that frequently ends in strikes and cancellations, and recently ranked at the bottom in a nationwide satisfaction survey.
The job of Southern’s social media team is usually to soak up the anger and frustration of the thousands of commuters left stranded and raging at the company’s management.
So its social media team’s decision to put Eddie, a 15-year-old student in for work experience, in charge of its Twitter feed looked like a car crash in the making.
https://twitter.com/SouthernRailUK/status/884769193366867968https://twitter.com/OliverCooper/status/884770525062606848
And, sure enough, Eddie was soon confronted with complaints about service, depictions of his bosses as the dark lord Sauron, and enthusiastic predictions that Britain's railways will soon be nationalised, a policy backed by Jeremy Corbyn.
https://twitter.com/brownbare/status/884780831981674497https://twitter.com/ollieington/status/884780956812533761https://twitter.com/SouthernRailUK/status/884779088048795648
Some NSFW messages prompted this response from Eddie's supervisor:
But ultimately, the experience of having somebody young and pretty innocent-seeming cooled the temperature drastically in a usually very heated social media space, and ended up in friendly chit-chat between Eddie and a host of well-wishers, many under the #AskEddie hashtag.
https://twitter.com/SouthernRailUK/status/884783784062832641https://twitter.com/SouthernRailUK/status/884781591150592001https://twitter.com/SouthernRailUK/status/884778865272422400https://twitter.com/SouthernRailUK/status/884781343699337220https://twitter.com/SouthernRailUK/status/884781072906690561https://twitter.com/SouthernRailUK/status/884778405228576769
Eddie even managed to answer the occasional train question and post a service update:
https://twitter.com/SouthernRailUK/status/884782664842170369https://twitter.com/SouthernRailUK/status/884788791403315200
The unusual exchange shows that perhaps the space where Twitter and brands meet doesn't have to be an unending spiral of awfulness, especially if you have some very chill teens to sort everything out.
And if the tweet from ScotRail shown below is any indication, this may not be the end of Eddie's career in train PR.