London Underground - A Net Strategy

I came across this yesterday at Ming's place.

Transport of London sucks
A while ago I mentioned a site that was showing an assortment of variations of the London tube map, using anagrams, and a bunch of other funny things. The original site was taken down, and is still down, because Transport of London's lawyers contacted the owner of the site, and forced him to take it down because the Tube logo and the map is their "intellectual property". Which is rather ridiculous for a public institution like that to spend money on lawyers to threaten people who love the tube, and who spend their time getting creative with its symbols.

So, being the curious sort, I followed the link to Geofftech's blog. To find that yes, the original was still down. So I wandered back to his home page to find that, despite being barrelled by London Underground, the guy is a genuine public transport geek. To this extent:

   

World Record Holders - Myself and my friend Neil are the official world record holders for traveling to all London Underground stations in the shortest time : 18 hours, 35 minutes and 43 seconds.   

It was on the seventh attempt at trying, back on the 5th May 2005 that we set this new record time. We since did it twice more for charity, including a mass-participant event, with over 60 people taking part for the official relief charity in the wake of the 7th July terrorist attacks on London.

Now its easy to blow smoke and pontificate and yes, LU's PR people genuinely do suck, but then I started thinking, OK, wiseguy, if it was you in their place, what would YOU do? Here goes.

1. Contact Geoff and thank him for his interest and dedication to things Underground
   
2. Offer him the choice of a couple of grand or free lifetime travel on the underground in exchange for selling his idea to the company.
   
3. Create and online tool a la Chevy Tahoe that enables people to create their own LU maps using any of the data in the LU database, feeds from their train management systems, fares search tools, plus GoogleMaps, upload photos, videos, podcasts, whatever and link them to the maps, stations, lines etc. and some extensions that allow users to customise them and make them interactive.
   
4. Create a whole bunch of categories like Tourism, Commuting, Historical, Silly, etc.
   
5. Create a feed that allows anyone who wants to host a portal to the online tools.
   
6. Offer a prize of another grand to the most popular map in each category as measured by interactions with the map over 6 months.
   
7. Plus another award to any of the maps that LU decides to adopt as part of its own official website.
   
8. Mount a poster campaign throughout the network, on station and external walls, inside the trains, leaflets, the lot, using the different versions of the maps, crediting their designers, with photos and blog URL's
   
9. Publish txt numbers that let me download a map to my cellphone or buy a silly one for my bedroom, toilet (the station toilets one for example) or garden shed.

The London Underground map is a cultural icon, its schema has been used in cities around the world because it works so well, but it is also now practically invisible because it is so utterly familiar. Its owners should be finding ways to get it back into the conscious minds of its potential and actual customers; creating many different versions of it, each with their own purpose or perspective on the system would be great, it would disrupt, it would be (hang on, I'll say it in a minute) INNOVATIVE.

The cost of the whole thing might come to 25,000 quid (a little more for the tools - although they could be the source of a programming competition in their own right - here are the API's, what can you do with them?) They could infest the blogosphere and the net generally (think of travel agents, organisations whose locations are identified on some version of the map.)

Oh, look, a version that restaurants can advertise on and that sends txt map subscribers electronic discount vouchers based on their current station - whatever.    

Hang on, there's another one for visitors that creates a printable pdf of the family in London with instructions for travel between them and local street maps from the station to their house.

Right now we could be talking about what a clever bunch the London Underground people are, how they have figured out a way not only to refresh their brand but to engage with a new generation of tube users. Whoa, imagine what they could do with YouTube?

Instead of which, we are updating our lexicons with a new definition of dork.

There is so much talk in management circles about flexible, flattened, agile businesses rapidly adapting to the new opportunities offered by new technologies, Innovation and disruption being espoused and championed till their legs fall off. But when it comes down to it, this is how most of them behave.

And just to update, Ming's mirror of the offending site is now 404.