I attended a social media conference recently. It was the #140conf organised by top guy Bernie Mitchell aka @berniejmitchell It was held at the lovely offices of Ablestoke Insurance in Clerkenwell London. Also there were a whole host of top social media peeps including Jeff Pulver aka @jeffpulver who travels the world talking about Twitter….
Anyway, whilst at this event, one of the speakers, JP Rangaswami aka @jobsworth said something, that I wanted to try and develop here in this blog. He spoke about a lot of things, but in particular, mentioned some new ideas in respect of how companies could best utilise Twitter.
So here is the idea
How many times have we all driven to a car park only to find that it has no spaces left. How irritating is that? Sitting at the barrier simply waiting for someone to leave, so that you can occupy their space.
So, I would imagine that each car park, must be able to tell how many cars are in there at any one moment, and surely they must know how many spaces they have.
So, why cant car parks operators such as NCP, or RCP or APCOA, ( 3 that I found on Google) simply set up Twitter accounts, and then tweet which of their car parks, is full, or has spaces, and how many spaces are available. This would need to be in as near to real time as is possible – hence Twitter is perfect…
I am not a fine detail kind of guy, but surely this could be done manually, or perhaps via an automated system. Then all we would have to do is follow that car park, and as we approach it, we would know if it had any spaces available.
Personally I think this is an amazing idea, which is why I have written about it. I would love a national car park operator such as NCP, RCP or APCOA to find this post, and then look at how they could implement it. In terms of marketing it, simple.. Each car that parks in the car park, could have a leaflet put on the windscreen advertising that the car park info can be accessed via Twitter.
Surely this would have the effect of driving peeps to a certain car park, as they would not be wasting their journey, as they would know that it had spaces available…
May be I have this wrong.. maybe, its too simplistc, maybe there are technical issues why it cant be done, or that it is a really bad idea… So lets hear them.. what are your thoughts on this idea… can it work?
It would also be great to hear from one of the major car park operators, to hear what they think…..
Spoke with the guys who run Vinci Park about this idea – its a case of understanding their business, which is fundamentally capacity planning and management. The industry doesn’t want to tell the world that it has a car park that is regularly full. Also, most people will just sit in the queue waiting for a space rather than go look for another car park, so they’d loose out on that business catchment.
Personally I think that they should have a traffic light type system on their websites for each car park, easy enough to feed that out of a database and into twitter.
But alas… crazy thinking that… making your customers experience better…
Agree with first reply – you need to understand the business
They still want you to head there if full as.barrier could open any second
Also when driving to a car park I intend not to be using a mobile device.
Additionally If I knew once I was in a queue that a near by car park had spaces, as driving to that carpark is not instant. Quite possible when get there that will be full.
Think the biggest problem would be that it is illegal to use your phone while driving, so any information gathered before setting out would be useless by the time you arrived at the car park. Agree it would be useful, but anything using the phone answer isn’t the right solution.