And it don’t stop.
Let’s say you’re Brian Finkelstein of “Snakes on a Blog” fame. A good portion of your newfound notoriety, nascent viral-marketing-guru status and LA-non-famous-dude-of-the-year credibility hinges on your ability to bring the online magic. But you chose Comcast as your service provider for high-speed access. And now you can’t get online. Days pass. Finally, a technician shows up. But he can’t fix the problem. So he calls the 800 number where he is put on hold for some 90 minutes. During this time, the bored tech falls asleep on your couch. Now, a lot of us know the joy that comes from four-hour service windows, mystery outages, interminable phone calls and useless technicians (I’ve heard at least one angry call from my cube in the past week), but who among us has had a technician sleepover? As the absurdity sets in, you realize that you still have your mastery of free media and publicity generation. So you whip out that digicam and start rolling, secure in the knowledge that—sweet mother of God!—you will get your revenge on YouTube faster than you can say “Comcastic!”
Once somebody answers the phone, wakes this dude up and helps him restore your connection anyway.
Daniel Turman
(Shout out to David Lewis for the tip.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvVp7b5gzqU
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Connections
Great minds think alike.
Had a similar theme for this post:
http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2006/06/power_consumer_.html
I used the other recent example of the AOL debacle to make the point. The consumer will never be the same…
Thanks David. I freely admit that I stole the idea for this post from you! The AOL example was more satisfying in some ways, because the curtain was raised on a particularly egregious misuse of power and relationship. Oddly enough though, I found myself feeling sorry for the AOL phone jockey. Why? Because he’s the one who’s ALWAYS being recorded. His job, annoying though it is, consists of doing precisely what the recording captured him doing. And if he doesn’t do it, he probably gets a good talking to in the principal’s office.
I don’t blame the AOL rep, but AOL itself—they need to be taken to task for this “business practice”. And with a simple blog and recorder, that is exactly what Vincent did. BTW, apparently AOL is notorious for this.
It’s the classic tale of David + Goliath. And something tells me that this type of “consumer power” is going to be the norm moving forward.
…And that can only be a good thing for us customers.
Amen. Perhaps the only thing that remains is to start the Wikipedia of customer complaint, where all of the cautionary audio and video could live. Hmm. Where did I put that VC guy’s business card…
Not only this, but they took TechTV off Comcast Cable, to lower its value, so they could merge G4TV to it, and eventually take it down, lay off all TechTV/ZDTV employees, and offer only one option to stay in show biz; Either find another job, or get paid less than 25% of what you made @ TechTV. Most took the first option, including Leo Laporte, and eventually went on to host internet broad/podcasts. Those who took the other option, have never been seen the same way again.