For those of you who live in the Boston area, you are probably all too familiar with the MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority) and it’s money woes, distracted drivers, careless accidents and decaying equipment.

This week has been a particularly bad one for the MBTA with three separate incidents that caused rider injuries, property damage and commuter delays.

So, what was the MBTA’s response?

Umm..is that…silence?

How can this be? A major public transportation system in a large metropolitan area has three major problems in one week and neither the Acting General Manager nor the Transportation Secretary say boo?

Not very good PR, boys. Not good at all.

Could it be that the Acting General Manager as well as the Transportation Secretary are basically just a couple of lawyers with some political connections and no real experience in Public Relations or Marketing or Crisis Management? Do they even know what these thing are???

I hope they do, but the PR efforts to date by the MBTA are abysmal at best.

Time to hire a marketing professional who can get the public behind the MBTA mission and convince people that we will all benefit in the long run if we make the transportation throughout the city easy to use, clean, safe, affordable and green.

Does the MBTA management have a plan in place to modernize the system and keep costs down?

I think they do. I hope they do. Unfortunately, they sure aren’t making much of an effort to let the public know what those plans are and if there are effective people managing those projects.

Information and transparency could save the MBTA from customer speculation, frustration, doubt, distrust, confusion and anger.

Keeping your customers at arms length and only allowing a small amount of very controlled information to slowly leak out of the corporate office is a mistake.

A big mistake.

And the MBTA’s methods for communicating with it’s customers are outdated and too slow.

The people stuck on that train yesterday for over an hour wanted information and they wanted it fast. Where’s the MBTA’s Twitter account? Where’s the real-time dialogue?

The people already on the train are your biggest potential advocates. Why? Because they have the power to convince their friends to take the train.

Partner with you customers and value their input.

Don’t underestimate their power.