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Comcast, Twitter And The Chicken (trust me, I have a point)

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Saved by 13 people (-1 private), first by anonymouse user on 2008-04-07


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But a bigger issue is that the Internet was down in the house starting late Friday night, so I haven’t been online much. On Saturday I called Comcast, my service provider, and a recorded system said it would be back up in 30 minutes. That never happened.

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36 hours of down time

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And then I lost my cool, tearing into Comcast on Twitter. Jeff Jarvis and others picked up the story and blogged about it.

And this brings me to the point of this post. Within 20 minutes of my first Twitter message I got a call from a Comcast executive in Philadelphia who wanted to know how he could help. He said he monitors Twitter and blogs to get an understanding of what people are saying about Comcast, and so he saw the discussion break out around my messages.

Twitter As An Early Stage Warning System For Brands And Companies

So Comcast sent a team out to fix my connection and apologized profusely, which is great for me but doesn’t help the other customers who don’t think to complain publicly about the company. Nor does it address the fact that Comcast and other cable providers have little incentive to invest in infrastructure or customer service since they have geographic monopolies on their service.

But wow, they’re doing at least one thing right. Well before most people they have identified blogs, and particularly Twitter, as an excellent early warning system to flag possible brand implosions. This may help them avoid situations like what Dell went through with Jeff Jarvis in 2005.

It’s trivially easy to do a brand search on Tweetscan and create a feed for any new postings. Whether you join in the conversation directly or reach out to aggrieved customers is up to you. But Twitter is the place where conversations are exploding well before they even make it to mainstream blogs. With the information just sitting there, it’s surprising that more brands aren’t watching the tweetosphere.

Highlighted by rohitaggarwal

And then I lost my cool, tearing into Comcast on Twitter. Jeff Jarvis and others picked up the story and blogged about it.

Highlighted by mmarlatt

And this brings me to the point of this post. Within 20 minutes of my first Twitter message I got a call from a Comcast executive in Philadelphia who wanted to know how he could help. He said he monitors Twitter and blogs to get an understanding of what people are saying about Comcast, and so he saw the discussion break out around my messages.

Highlighted by mmarlatt

Website: twitter.com
Location: San Francisco, California, United States
Founded: March 1, 2006
Funding: $20.4M

Founded in July 2006, Twitter is social networking and micro-blogging site that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through… Learn More

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