Comcast rants fill a vacuum

One of the insights that came from the recent podcast interview by GM was their finding that the comments on their blogs were being used by customers as forums to vent their frustrations about what GM were doing. In particular, a somewhat self-congratulatory posting about GM’s fuel economy triggered a number of “oh no you’re not”-style comments, which was feedback of a kind that GM would never otherwise hear about.

Then today I came across a rant from a dissatisfied customer of Comcast (is there any other kind of Comcast customer?) - who just happens to run a high-traffic blog with great Google juice. The net result is that her post was picked up and commented on by another blog (more Google juice), now I’m doing the same (yet more…) and so the process goes on. Comcast’s good name is being comprehensively slandered and there’s nothing that they can do about it.

It just feels so good knowing that with a single diatribe, I can inform potentially thousands of potential Comcast customers that they’d be better off finding an alternative for their cable TV service.

I find it fascinating that companies are still burying their heads in the digital sand over this. There’s an old saying that “nature abhors a vacuum”, and it’s never more true than online. It seems that if you’re not being proactive about managing your reputation - whether you’re employing a Robert Scoble or running GM-style blogs - then your dissatisfied customers are going to be doing it for you.