Over the past few days, the Twittersphere has been abuzz after George Robitaille, a Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) ticket taker, was photographed sleeping on the job.
The photograph, which quickly went viral after being shared on Twitter via TwitPic, has become a symbol of the TTC’s problems with customer service at a time when fares have increased.
To get a better idea of how “The Case of the Sleeping Ticket Taker” has been treated within the social media landscape, we use our flagship MAP monitoring and analytics service to do a search for “TTC” and “sleeping”. Perhaps the most surprising is that sentiment was 68% positive or neutral, while only 32% of the conversations were neutral.
It seems that while many people don’t like that Robitaille was asleep on the job, the uproar doesn’t appear to be widespread. Robitaille put it best when he told the Toronto Star that “When you knock Haiti off the front page you know something’s wrong”.
While nearly two-thirds of the conversations happened in Canada, there was also a lot of chatter in the U.S., U.K. and Germany. The most active keyword within the conversations was McCowan, the station in which Robitaille was working. The strongest link was with “Giambrone” – city councillor Adam Giambrone, who is also chair of the TTC.
For more on the Sleeping Ticket Taker, check out Mashable, which points out that the flurry of media coverage didn’t happen until it started to attract a lot of attention on Twitter and blogs.
Tags: george robitaille, sleeping, toronto, TTC
