Comcast and Twitter: Can Words Overcome Products?

This is the classic social media case study that finally someone has put a real face on. I read MG Siegler’s account of Comcast’s CEO Brian Roberts speaking with John Batelle of Federated Media and was getting lulled into the same Comcast story we have been reading for months now. While it is a nice piece of PR there is still an underlying reality that is not mentioned by many. TechCrunch’s Siegler starts the coverage innocuously

Today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts spoke on stage with Federated Media’s John Battelle . For the first part of the discussion, they talked about the usual stuff: the state of the industry, competition, and the like. The answers were pretty PR-friendly, as you’d expect. But a bit of a surprise came with Battelle asked about the role Twitter is playing with the company.

“It has changed the culture of our company,” Roberts said. Comcast has for a while now been using Twitter to scan for complaints and engage with customers. The idea was not his, but rather rose organically when someone in the company realized that a lot of public complaints were being sent over Twitter.

That’s the nice side of the story. Big company has customer service issues and the use of Twitter has made a huge difference in how they do business. Enter the platitudes for the poster-child of customer service Twittering, Frank Eliason. He says

Roberts went on to note that “Famous Frank,” also known as Frank Eliason (Comcastcares on Twitter), now has 11 people working under him simply to respond to information about Comcast being broadcast on Twitter. Roberts says that it’s an entirely different kind of dialogue coming in then the usual phone complaints, and he seems very pleased about the work the team has done with the customers on Twitter.

Now we hit the meat of the matter. Despite all of the positive vibe around using Twitter to change Comcast and the ability for a company to create a better customer facing effort, Siegler tells the real story that is the personal side of this whole thing. In other words, there may be more hype than reality to this whole story (shocking huh?)

As a very unhappy Comcast customer, I’ve had a number of interactions with Comcast’s Twitter team. There’s no doubt, they are very responsive, and are trying to be helpful. The real problem Comcast has is that their product and all other forms of service are simply not up to par, to put it nicely (I often put it much less nicely on Twitter).

Bingo! So is what Comcast doing with Twitter a more elaborate cover up for their apparent inability to bring their service in line with their new image as a customer caring organization or is it TRULY affecting the culture of the company? Cultural change would imply that the products get better and less fussing is required by their customers. Maybe C –level understanding of this kind of customer engagement and the ensuing publicity should go a little deeper than “Hey this makes us look good”. Maybe it would be smart for Comcast to address the issues that create the need for 11 people to handle complaints regarding their service?

So this feel good Twitter story may just be another marketing / PR tall tale. That’s too bad. At least Frank responded in the comment section to Siegler’s dissatisfaction.

MG, could you keep us up to date if the product eventually catches up with the customer service effort?

YouTube: Not So Stupid?

This year, we’ve seen a lot of pessimistic estimates of YouTube’s operating losses. While the site does bring in some advertising revenue, they haven’t quite covered that $1.65B price tag yet. And based on bandwidth costs, various analysts have estimated annual operating losses of anywhere from $470M to $175M.

Note that the more conservative estimate here still includes a bandwidth bill of nearly $50M. But new reports are estimating that cost as even lower. After Arbor Networks’ recent analysis of 256 exabytes of Internet traffic, it seems YouTube may be paying nothing for their bandwidth.

As we mentioned before, Arbor Networks found that 6% of all Internet traffic worldwide was going to Google. With that much traffic (we’re talking almost 17 quadrillion megabytes), it seems Google would have to have some serious pipage to support their popularity.

According to Wired,

The cost of bandwidth has fallen and so too have the profit margins for moving bits, even as traffic grows at an estimated 40 percent a year.

With the growth of Google’s network and Content Delivery Networks, the economics of who pays whom to connect grows more complicated than the early days of the net when money flowed upwards — little ISPs paid regional ISPs who paid major ISPs who paid backbone operators.

Now if you are Google, you might even begin asking Comcast to pay up to connect its Google Tubes straight to their local cable ISP networks. That way, YouTube videos and Google search results would show up faster, letting the ISP brag that YouTube doesn’t stutter on their network, a potential commercial advantage over its DSL competitors.

Unfortunately, Wired says, the true nature of the Internet infrastructure is guarded by NDAs, so we may never know who owns the pipeline.

What do you think? Is YouTube operating for pennies because Google owns so much pipe?

Phishing Attacks Plague Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo & More

A phishing attack is targeting thousands of web-based email users, according to the BBC and Read Write Web. Tens of thousands of users of each site have already been victimized, with the usernames and passwords available on lists.

The scam to entice the users to offer up their private passwords, phishers imitate legitimate sites and ask for login information. The reports didn’t indicate what site the phishers were imitating.

This comes hot on the heels of Gmail dabbling with showing favicons from a few trusted senders. Maybe they should start considering

The first list of 10,000 usernames covered users of Hotmail sites, AOL, Gmail, Yahoo, Earthlink and Comcast email services. But only usernames starting with A and B were included—meaning that there could be hundreds of thousands of other victims.

The lists were originally posted on pastebin.com, a site for sharing snippets of code. The owner of pastebin has removed the lists and plans to put more safeguards against this kind of activity.

Worried your account was affected? A Google spokesperson said:

We recently became aware of an industry-wide phishing scheme through which hackers gained user credentials for web-based mail accounts including Gmail accounts.

As soon as we learned of the attack, we forced password resets on the affected accounts. We will continue to force password resets on additional accounts when we become aware of them.

If you think your account was affected, change the password. If you use the same password on other accounts, change it there, too.

What do you think? Is there more Google et al. can do to prevent phishing? What can we do to safeguard against it?

Nielsen to Measure Online TV Audience

Nielsen has been measuring television audiences for decades. Now online TV is starting to take over—but do we have accurate measurement of the online TV audience?

comScore and other online measurement companies are watching videos—I mean, online video audiences—grow and grow. Now Nielsen will use a new “Internet Meter” with its People Meter families to measure online as well as offline TV consumption.

The Internet Meter will measure the “extended screen”—online television from cable companies, such as OnDemand Online from Comcast and TV Everywhere from Time Warner. This type of viewing may have slipped past online measurement companies looking at web-based TV, like from Hulu. Nielsen has worked in online measurement as well, though they don’t say if they’ll be combining Hulu numbers with the online cable numbers.

According to Read Write Web, Hulu has tended to prefer comScore’s measures of its audience, since comScore’s numbers have shown a higher viewership than Nielsen’s. Online measurement is notoriously tricky in this area, since there aren’t set industry standards on how to count audiences, and as always, there can be sampling biases.

RWW says that the Internet Meter might combat inherent problems in sampling—but the Internet Meter will be based on the same statistical principles, which are fairly sound. (Yeah, I know, it doesn’t seem like a small number of people can accurately predict the habits of the general population, and a larger sample usually yields more accurate data, but if people are truly chosen at random, a small sample has a 90-95% chance of accurately reflecting the population, depending on how they do their calculations. </AP stats lesson>)

What do you think? Will this make a difference to online television? Will it affect ad prices online?

Twitter Can Be Good for Business

There are rumors out there. There are rumors of rumors of how people are using Twitter to drive awareness and new business. What has started to happen though is that the rumors tend to stick with the same names like Dell, who attributes some $3 mil plus in revenue to its Twitter presence and Comcast which has turned its customer service upside down and inside out with great success. What we need is more evidence for those that are still unconvinced that Twitter has any real application beyond sharing the inane like when someone has looked out the window and “Tawt Tay Taw a Puddy – Tat” (hat tip to Tweety Bird from Bugs Bunny, the original Tweet).

Here’s some fresh new success hot off the presses. ClickZ tells the story of Moonfruit, which is a DIY web site creation service celebrating 10 years in the business. First off, congratulations, now back to the other stuff. As a way to get others involved in the fun Moonfruit has put together a promotion in which they will give away 10 Macbooks.

Although the concept of a Twitter promotion isn’t a new one, Moonfruit founder Wendy White said even she had been surprised by its success. The promotion drove a 600 percent uplift in traffic to the site, and doubled the number of users signing up for trials of its services since the Wednesday launch.

“The response has been beyond belief, far more effective than other marketing channels,” said White. “We wanted to drive both brand awareness and direct response, but this has achieved both in a far more personal way,” she added.

The article tells about some other social media pieces that were woven into this promotion. All in all it looks like a very nice job of getting the word out. And the response has been tremendous. The Moonfruit promotion has garnered good press (like this post) and even was at the top of the trending searches for Twitter ahead of Michael Jackson and Wimbledon.

So we now know of another success story. There are more out there. There is little publicity around them right now, though. We told you about Naked Pizza a while back and there’s the rolling taco stand in LA that uses Twitter to drum up business. Tell us the success stories you have heard. Please don’t relegate success to number of followers either. The only way Twitter makes any sense to a business is bottom line measurable results. Just like anything else in the world of business if can’t be measured it can’t be improved.