Head of corporate communications on keeping the organization's message on track

On March 4, the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), had a large media event planned to showcase how serious it was about safety training. Unfortunately, the morning began with the city buzzing about a video of an empty, driverless TTC bus drifting into a parked truck. Hard to make that kind of stuff up, but it’s just part of the job for Brad Ross, head of corporate communications for the TTC. “I just put my head in my hand and then I got on with the day,” he says.

Ross has become a familiar name and face to most Torontonians. Every time there is a TTC story in the news—which is a lot—Ross is often the guy front and centre fielding questions and explaining why the day’s commute took so long. Though he believes his challenges aren’t that different than those faced by PR and communications professionals at other public transit operations, in the last few years Ross has demonstrated a knack for skilfully handling those challenges and keeping the TTC message on track.

Aside from his always composed, articulate presence in front of the TV news cameras, Ross—as head of the eight-person communications team—has helped present a more personable, relatable TTC presence on Twitter (@bradTTC) by being all-business when he needs to be, but injecting a little personality and having a little fun whenever he can.

What do you think makes your job unique from a communications point of view?

Public transit is an issue in the City of Toronto. Anybody who lives here or has paid attention to the politics in this city knows just how important an issue it has been and continues to be politically. And that we are in the news, and public transit certainly is in the news, literally every single day. Even when something happens in the system that isn’t our fault, it becomes a challenge to provide the context about what has happened and what we’re doing about it versus blaming. We don’t want to blame anybody for anything because that doesn’t solve anybody’s problem.

Do you think the large media contingent in Toronto makes the job tougher?

I think the news cycle will be as frequent as it is. Last Wednesday was a pretty bad day for us. The night before a video emerged of [TTC] officers engaged in a fairly concerning [scene] around an arrest that was made at Union Station.

There was a lot of interest in hearing from us about that, understandably. And so that morning we put out a statement at around 10:30, and said that we’d do a news conference at 11:30. And so we did that. [TTC CEO Andy Byford] answered questions for 40 minutes. Then around 1:30, 2:00 I popped outside just to get some air and all of the [media] trucks are parked out there because they’re all doing the story that night, so they wanted to catch me. They need to fill airtime, they need something fresh and new to say. I get that. But there are times when I do say no.

I mean at what point do we continue —and it’s something that I often ask myself — to feed the beast? I don’t think we have any choice in the matter in terms of accountability and openness and transparency—we can’t shy away from these issues that come before us.

But at the same time there comes a point where we can and do say no… we’re not going to continue to talk about something that we talked about all day already.

You’ve been on the job now about seven years. How has the job changed in that time?

You’ll always know when something is happening in the system because people have told us in the past, you need to communicate. You need to tell us what’s happening. And it’s a bit of a double-edged sword because it leaves one with the impression that holy cow, there’s a lot of problems in the subway when the truth of the matter is that there really aren’t that many more than there were 10, 15, 20 years ago. You’re hearing about them more now because we’re communicating much, much more.

How has Twitter become important for you?

Twitter is a tool that’s really allowed us to do a lot of things we have never been able to do in the past in terms of having that direct one-on-one customer engagement, the ability to put a face to this organization.

The beauty of this tool is that it is so immediate, it is so direct that when things are happening in the system, people want to know immediately. And so we can do that.

Last week, with the leak at College [subway station], I put out some photos of what was happening. We went in and shot a little video and we tweeted that.

Were you taking those photos?

Yeah, the first batch that I sent, it was from my Blackberry. They took me down there and they showed me what was happening. So I took a couple of pictures and then I came back to the platform where we have wifi, and I sent a couple of tweets and then our unit—we have a photo/video unit —went down to shoot some video and they took some pictures. They cut [the video] together and we got that out just around 2:30, 3:00.

It accomplished what I wanted to accomplish, and that was kind of show and tell, right? Here’s what’s happening. Here’s why the subway’s been down so long. And people really understood. When you’re able to show them what you’re dealing with, they get it.

If the TTC is running 20 hours a day, seven days a week, do you have to be constantly connected to the Blackberry?

As a member of the Executive [team], I am reachable at all times. On a day-to-day basis, I have a team‎ who share on-call duties to deal with issues as they arise, though major issues are brought to my attention. I will engage on Twitter during off-hours to mitigate a problem or assist a customer if I can.

In some ways you’ve become the face of the TTC, both on TV, on news and on Twitter. Was that a conscious, strategic decision?

Well it wasn’t a conscious decision to be that face. My boss, Andy Byford, is the chief spokesperson of course who delegates that to me a lot. We make decisions together, and strategically about when it’s appropriate for him to be in front and if it’s something that I can deal with or when I can delegate it to somebody.

I have made a bit of a conscious effort, certainly on Twitter, to try to have a little bit of fun where appropriate, to you know, humanize the organization…That’s what makes for good social media. If I were simply just tweeting mundane bureaucratic key messages or something like that, I don’t think I would be very effective.