Mike Arrington discovered something this weekend that just fascinates me: Comcast's PR people follow Twitter. It fascinates me because Comcast is not necessarily known for being on the cutting-edge of managing public perception (the company's P2P throttling nightmare was arguably caused by initial media stonewalling) and doesn't seem to use other tools of 21st-century communications such as blogging.
But when Arrington suffered a Comcast Internet service outage this weekend and began to complain loudly about it on Twitter, a Comcast "executive" got in touch with him toute de suite to see how he could help. A technician was dispatched and Arrington's problems were solved.
It's possible that Comcast actually follows Arrington on Twitter or maybe, as Mike suggests, Comcast uses a Twitter-related scanning tool such as Tweet Scan. Mike recommends that if you have a Comcast problem, just turn to Twitter
But The Houston Chroncle's Dwight Silverman quite rightly speculates that Comcast doesn't pay attention to just anyone on Twitter. Arrington's supernova uber-blogger status warrants action, but ordinary schlubs will just have to stay on hold when calling Comcast's customer service. Whatever the case may be, Comcast is smart for acknowledging the importance of Twitter.
As much as I thought Twitter was a time-sucking Web 2.0 application that would further exacerbate my newly acquired case of ADD, I can't live without it now. In fact, some days Twitter is my primary source of news and I think Twitter is emerging as the place where a lot of news breaks first. As Arrington says "Twitter is the place where conversations are exploding well before they even make it to mainstream blogs," an "earning warning system" for brands.
Comcast may indeed show more savvy than a lot of mainstream journalists. Following Arrington's post, CNET conducted a survey of 55 journalists and found only 13 on Twitter. The holdouts read like a who's-who of the mainstream tech journalism world, reporters who work for Business Week, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today and so forth.
One of these holdouts told CNET's Charles Cooper that "Twitter is lame." I'm not sure who this journalist is but as Cooper suggests, this writer and all other MSM journalists will no doubt be tweeting away by year-end. As Gabe Rivera (whose relatively rare tweets are truly priceless gems of ironic and post-ironic humor) says, resistance is futile.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:39 AM | Print | Comments (2)
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