Every man, woman and goat working in the communications space has been analysing the Eurostar incident this weekend, and just two days after the event (over a weekend no less!) – the news seems a tad old hat already.

If you’ve been offline (or actually, away from any form of human contact) of late, here’s a quick re-cap. On Friday evening, five Eurostar trains broke down in the channel tunnel, leaving passengers stuck on trains in very unpleasant conditions. Since then, more services have been cancelled, causing further disruption.

You can read several accounts of the lack of communication between staff and those on board – as well as on Twitter – via Techcrunch and on We Are Social’s blog (the agency that handles the brand’s social media strategy).

Blog posts started to appear on Saturday night, and without wanting to add to the echo chamber, there is one more point to be made. Sometimes, over-analysing situations such as this takes attention away from the real issue. And sometimes, this makes brands frightened of social media, when in fact, there’s a greater customer care at the heart of the problem all along. It’s simply amplified.

The real mistake is as straightforward as not getting the people out quick enough, and not communicating with those actually on the train. However, in terms of telling people externally what was going on, the events that unfolded are similar to many others that Eurostar could have learned from.

JetBlue is the most obvious, as almost the same situation played out on one of its planes in 2007. It seems that in its response, Eurostar did indeed recognise that a video from a senior exec would sit well. But the fact that the airline found itself needing to apologise for not communicating in the first place should have been enough to sway the railway operator into investing in setting up some kind of fast response channel to direct families and passengers to. A bit like a snow line really.

Though it’s understandable that such a large company as Eurostar has been slow to pick up on suggestions to implement something proactive, we know what happened to Motrin when they dropped a new advert onto YouTube on a Friday night and didn’t look back. It’s a different situation, and there’s no comparison in terms of response, but it’s proof that disaster can strike at any time. In Eurostar’s defense, they got the video apology up within 24 hours, which is pretty impressive – but with the previous step in place, real-time updates could have continued throughout Friday night and into the weekend.

Finally, it’s important to understand that though Eurostar defends its lack of communication from the @little_break feed (set up to tweet special offers for tickets), a consumer doesn’t really know the difference between a profile created for marketing and one it can interact with. British Airways started off in this way, broadcasting reduced rates and flights – but it just didn’t work, so they turned things around and integrated some customer care into the feed.

The use of social media just can’t be campaign-led, forcing a message on to customers in place of talking about what they want to discuss, or seek information on. See also @monopolyatmcd, which like Eurostar, tried to segment one campaign onto a feed without a corporate equivalent.

Quite apart from the fact that getting personal about the way an agency has handled a situation isn’t that productive, this is about not learning from mistakes that have already been made. It’s unlikely that this will permanently damage Eurostar’s reputation; they have the market sewn up in terms of getting to the continent easily and quickly (in most cases).  But if it happens, Dell turned the now infamous ‘Dell Sucks’ campaign into $6.5 million profit using Twitter, so anything’s possible.