TRANSPORT

How STIB-MIVB keeps passengers informed quickly with Content Stadium

STIB-MIVB logo
STIB-MIVB social media templates in the Content Stadium platform
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Quicker

crisis communications

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Consistent

social media branding

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Easy

design self-service

Published in May 2021.

Meet Guy

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.

Guy Sablon, Social Media Coordinator and Spokesperson at STIB-MIVB
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We can now easily produce a lot of social media visuals in a short space of time, while respecting our brand guidelines. It’s been a game-changer for us when it comes to crisis communications and keeping customers informed about what’s happening on the network.

Guy Sablon | Social Media Coordinator and Spokesperson at STIB-MIVB

Before Content Stadium

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.

Our solution

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:

  • A handy data pop-up where Guy’s team can select and automatically import the required metro, bus and tram lines. No manual work needed.
  • A one-click language switch between Dutch, French and English, to cater to all passengers the operator services.
  • Preset brand colors, fonts, logo and other design elements to ensure visuals are always on-brand and recognizable. No matter who’s on duty.
  • A direct connection to their social media accounts so the team can publish their visuals direct from the platform. Increasing speed of communication.
  • One-click size duplication to change the dimensions of a visual for different social media platforms, without the need to recreate the content.

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.

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The results

Guy and his team started using Content Stadium in January 2021. He now uses the platform almost daily, and enjoys the following benefits:

  • Increase in speed of crisis communications: “Our crisis template is a huge time saver. We click on one line, and it’s automatically added, placed correctly, and meets our brand guidelines. Being able to publish content to social media directly from the Content Stadium platform has also been a huge bonus in increasing speed.”
  • Easy self-service: “If we decide that we want a visual now, it’s there in 5 minutes. For us, it makes things really easy. It’s a game-changer for our comfort as a team.”
  • Consistent branding:
    “Respecting brand guidelines, and building a recognizable brand and visual communication strategy is very easy with Content Stadium.”
  • Flexible template: “Even though you’re in a template, it’s still flexible. It’s rare not to find a solution to a problem within our templates.”

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.

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What I really appreciate about Content Stadium is the process of defining our templates. They don’t offer standard templates and you have to fit into that. They are completely flexible. We come with our needs and requests, and they adapt and customize the templates to find a solution to our needs. It’s very customer-oriented.
Guy Sablon | Social Media Coordinator and Spokesperson at STIB-MIVB

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