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PROJECT
Promote the launch of the Amtrak Borealis train service between St. Paul, Milwaukee, and Chicago. Working as an employee of Ramsey County.
BACKGROUND
Ramsey County, along with several other state and federal partners, worked for years to add a second daily train service between St. Paul, MN and Chicago, IL. Though operated by Amtrak, they do surprisingly little promotion of their services. So the launch day activities wound up as a joint effort coordinated between the various partners. And with the inaugural service starting from Union Depot, a historic Ramsey County facility, we wanted to make sure our residents knew about the launch and could participate in the festivities.
TOOLS
Adobe Lightroom (photos)
Adobe Premiere Pro (videos)
PROCESS
I handled photography and video along with Ann, another team member, who just focused on photography. We also had Pa Na, a third team member, who would handle posting photos and videos from our group chat to our social media channels in real time. In parallel, we also hired an agency video team who would produce a highly-produced video about a month later recapping the event.
My iPhone on a tripod (bottom left corner) is a bit smaller than the rigs for the news crews.
I captured the arrival of the new train the day before the launch, and it made for a great start of the social media campaign. The photo of the train silhouetted by the bright afternoon sun immediately produced higher-than-usual engagement (roughly 10x). It was also a good sign that our workflow went without any hiccups.
RESULTS
“So excited to take it tomorrow to Chicago!!!”
We took a lot of photos on launch day, and our photos of the pristine train interior went viral with over 100x our typical engagement. And it was particularly great to see so many comments where people tagged their friends to say they should ride it together. Those images showing clean comfortable seating connected with people far more than any of the speeches.
Overall, our social media engagement rate outperformed the coverage by all the major news stations in the Twin Cities market. Our organic content even wound up outperforming the video we had outsourced to an agency. Our efforts were recognized by a 2024 MAGC Northern Light Award. And the Borealis service went on to outperform all ridership estimates for its first year of service and remains popular to this day.