Trashing Comcast

An interesting phenomenon is the squeaky wheel getting the oil. Michael Arrington of Techcrunch blogged about his Comcast going down.

I've had these problems with Comcast many times this past winter with poor performance or just plain outages in internet connectivity. Many complaints hit brain-deadening muzak or voicemail that never gets returned.

When a person like Michael Arrington complains, we can see that the powers that be at Comcast actually listen and go out to fix his problem. His internet status certainly lets him squeak far louder than I can. I wonder if we can democratize this easily so that us nobodies can collectively squeak too.

There's one option that I know of called Get Satisfaction. You can connect to communities and business to have your customer support needs answered. But sometimes it takes a more heavy-handed approach. I recently switched from AT&T to T-Mobile, after being a customer for 5 years. Large issues with customer service and network performance really prompted that switch. Now, if I had a large bullhorn (or was famous), I could have probably worked out some deal. However, if we can network some people in to shout at the same time, this could have the same effect.

There's a facebook application called Causes that lets you support a particular cause. Perhaps there's enough ire towards companies that this application can be cloned or co-opted to rail against companies that abuse their customers. Especially in monopoly situations such as Comcast cable.