Slashdot Mirror
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."
Or so I expect, now. It's good PR, I saw a little segment about the twitterer on some network news program this week.
Reading a public blog and giving free tech support about problems posted in the blog is good.
I'm really upset with my comcast internet. I wish it was much cheaper and even faster.
People say my sig is the best thing about me.
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.
Quit the bandwidth throttling, or conversely, just be straight forward with honest numbers about the service. I live with bandwidth throttling with my pipe, but my ISP was very straight forward with me that if the traffic load spikes they will rebalance accordingly, and that will on occasion throttle my speed in some cases. If Comcast were at least honest about issues, they'd gain a lot of respect.
So many companies are so worried about their image, they actually hurt their image more with the tactics used to keep their noses clean.
I'll be moving in a year or so to an area serviced by Comcast, and am weighing them against the FIOS thing carefully. How Comcast handles their customers will be key to that decision. Comcast used to stand for being a great cable service company, and I would like to see them stand tall again.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Comcast is helping their customers, yes? They are crawling/indexing/filtering blogs that are completely public, yes? So what's the problem? What am I supposed to be outraged about this time?
"It feels like nobody ever really reads my blog," he told the New York Times.
"Nobody has left a comment in months."
Oh, that's the problem. Seriously, this is a lousy post.
As long as they are using public means like blog-monitoring or using search engines and not underhanded means like customer/IP-monitoring/stalking, this is probably a very good thing. If only every company would listen to what their customers say in public and use that information to improve customer service.
The minute they start monitoring me to see what blogs I post to, the minute they start stalking my online activities, or the minute they start using what I say to retaliate against me is the minute they've gone too far.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The story is that it's COMCAST.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'd basically say that if Comcast is using this to supplement its normal customer support channels (rather than replace them entirely), it's a good thing, especially if they beef up the ability of customer support to help the customer out before it gets to the venting on the web stage.
...and then complains because it was read and responded to? I would be bothered if it was a private intended email sent through their email relays, but not to comcast, and they responded to that. But he put it on a public, blog, WOW maybe they are using something like google searching for these negative remarks and OH MY GOSH trying to make the customer happy by suggesting things!!! WOW...OK sarcasm off. Come on, if you don't want anyone to be able to read it, don't post it on the web. Sorry to say but the title should read "dumb blogger shocked when public blog read by someone" OK I admit I'm assuming it's a public blog, but a quick scan of the article didn't indicate it was private/secured in anyway. So unless I missed something, this is a non-issue.
Those who can, do.
somebody else is actually reading my blog? Wow, I never thought I'd see the day my hit counter went to 2.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Comcast is now monitoring blogs as a way of improving its image among customers.
Here is an idea don't throttle P2P connections also, don't block websites, don't keep logs, and stand up for fair use and anonymity on the internet. Do that and you might be more liked. But keep throttling P2P connections and acting as a puppet of congress/MPAA/RIAA and people will hate you for it.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
For every blog that gets read, 100 newspapers (online or printed) get read. So one wonders if this lady will get a call too: http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080726/BUSINESS/807260323 If not, then Comcast is picking off small low-lying fruit instead of dealing with the larger, more widely seen issues. Silly.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Reading your blog is not big brother. The blog is public. They could have a few generic scripts that query Google for combinations of keywords, and when they show up, someone looks at the page. We have several newswatcher scripts set up at work that monitor news articles that mention our company. Nothing sinister here. You can remove the tin foil hat.
So am I. Be afraid.
Don't worry AC, Twitter is just trolling.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
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&%YZ@comcast.net 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.
Comcast had... You know... Some kind of decent customer service or something...
Suggesting that Twitter is trolling is so redundant it's bordering on a tautology.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Go to news.google.com and look up "Comcast Vermont." You'll see articles in every Vermont daily paper about how Comcast has dropped 8 channels from its basic analog service (including MSNBC and Comcast's own cable news station). It's telling people who miss those stations from their $18-a-month plan they can get them back by going to a $58-a-month digital plan. The state may be able to act against this, since Comcast is only allowed one "rate change" a year, and this would be the second, if dropping channels and charging the same price counts as a rate change. Comcast claims it doesn't. In Comcast's eyes, it can drop any plan to a single channel, offer more expensive plans to those who want their channels back, and it hasn't changed rates at all.
Disclaimer: My brother-in-law is a Comcast executive. He's a decent guy.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Not only that, but Comcast is actually addressing its clients' concerns and negative feedback, as opposed to being oblivious to them.
Now, to really score, Comcast would need to fulfill some additional criteria:
Let me tell you something, Comcast. You ruined your own reputation. Now it's going to be real hard for you to erase that. See what happened to Microsoft? (Hey, Sony, stop snickering.)
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
1-800-328-7448
"High Baby ... Thank you for calling. Beautiful girls on a virtual chat line are waiting for you in their sleek little nighties ... "
Please tell me that's the new voice of Comcast Tech Support.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
If they read blogs they are accessing public information. So it is at least not invasion of privacy as it is whenever email is read/filtered.
If the reading of blogs can help to improve the service that essentially means that the ISP in question has an internal problem with their customer satisfaction tracking. But reading blogs can of course provide more meat on the bone that any issue tracking system can't resolve.
More problematic is the cases where ISP:s are reading your web habits and are injecting or replacing information in the web pages you visit. Sometimes resulting in data corruption.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
While your premise is technically correct, I'll provide a counterpoint to your point.
Large companies like Comcast (or Microsoft or most others), with some good aspects and some bad aspects, do indeed tend to be treated as one big monolithic blob --because that's how they're asking to be treated. Comcast is using its name as a brand. That's what it means to be Comcast. So, while it's not surprising that there can be factions within, we will still rate whether Comcast is nice or nasty on an overall scale. The responsibility for this falls on upper management which oversees both the Customer Service Department and the Lie About Unlimited Bandwidth^W^W^W^WMarketing Department. If Customer Support wants to improve its image separate from the rest of Comcast, they can spin off into "Support-A-Tronics -- A Division of Comcast(TM)" and change their logo. Of course, I've heard quite a few not-so-good things on Slashdot about Customer Support itself.
In the same way, I disagree with people who keep saying that "companies aren't evil --just the people within them". As a whole, companies can indeed be evil, greedy, upstanding, etc, just as people can be evil, greedy, etc. even if you can break their actions down into component actions which, by themselves, are not inherently evil etc.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Exactly. It could be summed up as Commcast is listening to what is being said about it in public and trying to improve upon its services based on that.
This is more or less exactly how a good corporation should behave.
I can see him walking around with his sign:
"The end is nigh for M$ shills!"
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
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.
Well they desperately need to do something to improve customer service because as it is I would rather have sharp pens shoved under my finger nails than go back to that nightmarish cavalcade of misery and grief that is Comcast.
It is outrageous for them to waste money combing through blogs to shut up complaints.
You make it sound like they're killing these people. They aren't wasting their money on ads, they're improving their image by providing better service, which is definitely something they're allowed to do.
Nothing sinister here. You can remove the tin foil hat.
What fun would that be? How would /. survive without the tinfoil hat brigades?
You DEFINITELY must be new here.
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
So the way to get Comcast to preform customer service is to make your complaints public, but talking to them directly is a YMMV proposition. This seems almost narcissistic.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds