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The Comcast Twitter attack

Published on 08/04/08
by ryan

Earlier this week, prominent blogger Michael Arrington lashed out on Comcast after his service went down. Then something happened that I’ve never seen before.

Michael posted his frustrations on Twitter, a microblogging service that does what it sounds like it should do–enables blogging–but is limited to 140 characters and can be posted to via the web and SMS message. Twitter is commonly used to share quips and aha moments, especially those in the web’s public eye (like Arrington). He twittered:

Then, after 36 frustrating hours of downtime, many calls to Comcast’s customer service, who had kept him on hold for 30 minutes at a time and misinformed him that they were experiencing a California-wide outage (he had visited a nearby friend’s home whose Comcast service was functioning perfectly), he received a call. On the other end was a Comcast executive in Philadelphia who, claiming that the company monitors Twitter and blogs, sent a team out to his home to immediately fix his service.

In just a matter of minutes, a wildfire had erupted and been extinguished, thanks to Comcast’s reactive efforts.

The fire burning:


And finally:

In his follow up post on TechCrunch, Arrington then declares Twitter “an early stage warning system for brands and companies” and instructs readers to “skip the hold time on their customer service line and go on the attack at Twitter instead.” But Arrington is dead wrong, Twitter and the blogosphere are late stage warning systems. Sure, by following Twitter, Comcast was able to intervene before Arrington and his angry mob had followed through on their threats. But had Comcast proactively engaged in a dialog with its consumers, its failure to meet customer service expectations would have been made clear years ago (check out this YouTube video for one story).

It is natural to assume that someone with as powerful a voice as Arrington would expect companies to monitor and respond to his rants, but for the rest of us without 700,000 RSS subscribers and 12,000 Twitter followers? Reactive communication is not the answer.

Update: Comcast is actively participating in conversations with consumers via Twitter. This definitely doesn’t scale but is very interesting to watch unfold.

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