Over the summer, SnapDragon managed the social media for the introduction of 511 New York, the new telephone and Web service providing real-time traffic, transit, and weather condition information.

Part of that project involved automatically posting traffic and transit event updates from the 511NY site on 21 different Twitter feeds (12 regional ones and 9 for New York City’s subway lines). This initiative got a quite a positive response, even earning coverage in multiple newspapers (in print!).

Last week we improved this deployment further by incorporating shortened URLs that point directly to the page on the 511NY site from which each update came. By leveraging the very useful Bit.ly URL shortening service for this, we’re also able to track click-throughs and get an even better perspective on how people are taking advantage of this information source.

This adds to existing automated features such as sorting updates into categories using keywords to determine which feed information should be posted to, checking new event postings against a log of updates to prevent sending out repeats, and abbreviating commonly used words to fit more information in under Twitter’s 140 character limit.

For more information about this project along with some of our thinking about the direction social media is headed in terms of travel information, take a look at the presentation we gave last month at the 511 ITS conference.