Comcast Is Reading Your Blog

Paolo writes "A Washington student got a bit of a shock when he received an email from internet service provider Comcast about comments he had made on his blog. Brandon Dilbeck, a student at the University of Washington, writes a blog and used it to complain about the service he was getting from Comcast. Shortly afterwards he got an email message from Comcast apologizing for the problems and suggesting he might look at a guide it had posted on its web site. Lyza Gardner, a vice president at a Web development company in Portland used Twitter to complain about the company and was surprised to be contacted directly. Comcast is now monitoring blogs as a way of improving its image among customers. The company was ranked at the bottom of the most recent American Customer Satisfaction Index."

Comcast is reading your Slashdot too

[ptudor]

Or so I expect, now. It's good PR, I saw a little segment about the twitterer on some network news program this week.

Actions versus words

[Dachannien]

Contacting people on teh Intarweb directly and offering them platitudes to make them change their weblog posts is easy.

Actually making improvements to your services to improve your customers' experience when regional cable monopolies ensure that you're the only game in town? That's hard.

Re:Comcast is reading your Slashdot too

[Naughty Bob]

Not just good PR- If I ran such an unpopular company, and was serious about turning it around, I'd be looking everywhere humans go to vent, or make criticism. Then, I'd try to solve the problems I found. Where's the story?

Re:Actions versus words

[tatermonkey]

I agree and to start they can actually run service to my house. When my work has cable internet 1200 feet away. They refuse to run it because I have a long driveway and it would cost them an amplifier at the pole roadside. My wife was at work when a comcast rep came in and asked her if she had their service and she said " I used to be happy with it until I moved and now you wont run it to our house". She said he was speechless.

What means and methods?

[TheRedSeven]

Everyone so far seems to have been skirting the issue here. If Comcast now has a staff of people tasked with surfing teh interwebs and responding to comments about their service in blog postings, that's fine. Perhaps a misguided use of resources (how about some actual customer service instead of lip service responses to people you've already lost as customers?), but that's their choice.

If Comcast is using some sort of automatic filtering on their users' accounts that indicate whenever a user types the word "Comcast", and then responds with an email to that person's X&[e-mail] address, then there's an issue.

What we don't know, and what the article doesn't say, and what we have no way of knowing, is which of these two methods Comcast is using. A lack of transparency regarding what you pay for what you get, and a lack of transparency regarding service is already a PR issue (nightmare) for Comcast. This simply compounds that issue.

Re:Good for them!

[garcia]

Well, in my case I whined about SAS via Twitter [twitter.com] and got a response the next day from their VP of R&D. I was so impressed I mentioned SAS' response to my friends (and again via Twitter) and Aaron Landry [s4xton.com] used it as an example in his Web 2.0 101 presentation [s4xton.com] about how company interactions are changing the face of customer service.

While I still think Comcast sucks, the close monitoring ofsocial networks, blogs, etc is a big step.

Re:Not JUST that it's Comcast...

[Kneo24]

You bring up an interesting point. A lot of companies worry so much about their image that will go on PR campaigns and other stupid bullshit that probably costs them more money in the long run, and is considerably harder.

I could be wrong here, but wouldn't the easiest and most cost effective way of improving your image to be doing what you had described? Service improvements. Better pricing structures. Better policies.

I've never understood the corporate mentality like that. Is it really better for the companies bottom line to do PR stunts instead of making their service better?

Did you whine about SAS to SAS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just curious...

I'm not sure I'm a fan of this trend where people think that a company should just scour the interwebs looking for any and all complaints (including so-called 'open letters' which are no more than a blog post that don't actually get -sent- to the recipient) and address them there.

Most companies do have a support site, hotline, whatever.. and more and more it seems people are ignoring those and instead griping on the internet.. the griping some more if apparently the company failed to be Web 2.0 social up the wazoo and find the blog post + react to it there in an official capacity.

I can understand that people get frustrated when the support line is dysmal (long waits, long flowchart q&a back-and-forths, etc.) and then take to the internet, but imho it's the second station - not the first.

Especially if you're a smaller company that can't exactly hire somebody to scour the web several hours per day, let alone hire them to respond to those posts, it's rather frustrating when encountering such behavior while eyeing the - say - tech support forum being rather quiet, no post from the person there; and -not- for lack of attention/quality of replies/etc. but simply because the userbase thinks the company -will- be scouring the web.