News Analysis: Reviews Roll In As Sites Add Video

Amazon, Orvis, PetCo jump on next wave of customer feedback.
January 14, 2008
By Kenneth Hein

The written word may be powerful, but video is mightier still, and there’s the rub for marketers.

As Amazon, Orvis and PetCo encourage consumers to upload video reviews, the marketers give the public a dynamic tool to tout or trash products.

Before a fan plunks down $69.95 for the Hasbro Star Wars Darth Vader Voice Changer, for example, they may want to watch the video review posted by Gregory J. Daniel on Amazon.com. “This is an example of what the Darth Vader helmet will sound like when you make the mistake of buying it. Don’t I sound just like Darth? Can you even hear his voice, or is it just like a droning in the background.”

Amazon has no issue with such reviews. “Written reviews have been tremendously successful, but when you can actually see the item in action all the writing in the world [can’t compare],” said Colin Bodell, vp, Amazon.com, Seattle, which added video in November. “We want to deliver a richer shopping experience and give them as much information as possible so it will lead to a more satisfying shopping experience.”

While a video review for a book may not be necessary, Bodell said they were particularly helpful for new toys like the latest Tickle Me Elmo or complicated consumer electronics devices.

For Orvis, a video of a customer catching a trophy fish using its Zero G Saltwater 909-4 fly rod speaks volumes. “It’s another reason for people to come to our site,” says Brad Wolansky, vp-eCommerce for the Sunderland, Vt., firm. “They want to engage with us and brag about their fish. Of course, we like to see them stay on our site longer—we like video for all those reasons. We also like the fact that it can make a customer feel good about their purchase decision. That’s the root of customer reviews, making them feel more secure.” Orvis added video in August.

Video consumer reviews are still new, very new. They make up only a small fraction of Amazon and Orvis reviews. But, this is expected to change quickly as more consumers embrace video and more marketers offer reviews on their sites (See “New Ideas,” page 10). Video phones and the simplicity of some of today’s desktop applications make creating video “less of an event,” said Marc Karasu, president of MeasuredUp.com, New York. Karasu left his post as vp-marketing of Hotjobs.com to quarterback MeasuredUp.com. The site encourages consumers to sound off about good and bad products and customer service. Next month, the site is relaunching with video capabilities.

Video is a natural for consumers under 30, as they are heavy users of such sites as YouTube, he said. Video can be powerful “if you are shooting secret footage of an outrageous customer service experience,” Karasu said. However, “if it’s someone standing front of a store talking about what happened,” not so much.

Video is currently only about 1% of all reviews, according to Sam Decker, CMO of Bazaarvoice, the ratings and reviews service that created Orvis and PetCo’s consumer review section, based in Austin, Texas. However, Web sites can leverage this small pool of video reviews for a larger impact. Sections can be created showing the top-10 video reviews. Consumers can also be connected directly to the videos via e-mail links and RSS feeds.

In this respect videos not only offer a valuable opinion, but also entertainment value. “We’ve had other people linking to our site to watch the videos, there is always that entertainment opportunity,” said Bodell. “We look forward to more content as it gets easier to put video up there. It will also be better produced once the technology gets better and high-speed connections continue to become more prevalent. People will find creative ways of using it that we haven’t even envisioned yet.” Authors reading chapters of their books and explanations behind their writing is starting to appear on Amazon. Brands are also invited to post product demonstrations, as well, said Bodell. However, “they can’t be blatant advertisements,” he said. “They can buy ad placements.” Amazon weighs each submission based on its value to buyers in aiding their purchase decision.

Does this start to blur the lines of marketing? Probably, said Seth Godin, author of the new book Meatball Sundae. “If it is clearly labeled as to who is producing the video, call them what you want. ‘What is advertising?’ is a question we ask every day.”

Regardless, video is “a logical, predictable next step in the evolution of consumer reviews,” said Godin. Still, there are benefits to the written word. “Video is a lot less casual. You can spend 30 seconds writing a few sentences, video is more of a commitment,” he said. “Plus you can scan a whole page of written reviews, but you’re not going to watch a whole page of videos.”

khein@brandweek.com

If you are entering the job market or thinking about ways to see what other opportunities are out there then you need to do 5 things.  These 5 things are free or cost very little and are the most important things you can do to get things going. You should spend 2 hours a week on these and in no time you will see that you are starting to generate some traction.

5 free things to do to start a job search

1. Get your resume together, refresh it, make sure your contact info is up to date and revise any objectives or skills.  You would be surprised how many people have an outdated resume.

2. Get your resume posted on as many job boards as you can.  This is free and it not only allows you to search for opportunities by city or industry but recruiters can find your resume when they search for people.  You can type “job boards” into Google to get the names.

3. Open a LinkedIn account on www.Linkedin.com  This site is amazing and by searching for past colleagues and coworkers you will in no time build a network that will help you find new opportunities and get you references.  Go on to the site and play around with it and you will see the power of it.

4. Ask your friends and family for help and to tell you if they hear of anything.  Sometimes people just need to be asked for their help and do not want to be presumptious by offering.

5. Find the best trade magazine in your industry and start reading is regulalry.  Not only will you be up to date on new industry news and language but you will see who is growing, merging and hiring. Best of all you will sound up to date in an interview.

If you do these 5 things you will see that in no time you will start to get traction in your search and the momentum will open up new opportunities.

December 17, 2007
By Brian Morrissey

NEW YORK In November, Facebook’s 23-year-old founder, Mark Zuckerberg, stood on a low stage in Manhattan and made a boast to hundreds of advertisers and agencies that caused more than a few snickers afterwards: “Once every 100 years, the way that media works fundamentally changes.”

In the subsequent weeks, Zuckerberg’s hubris was slammed, particularly when Facebook was forced to backtrack on its plan to pipe product purchases to users’ friends, a system known as Beacon. One writer, former Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner, even went so far as to title an article, “RIP Facebook?”

Yet despite the hyperbole and inevitable backlash from once-fawning admirers, Zuckerberg’s proclamation has the ring of truth to it when looked at in the wider view. More than ever in the modern era, media and advertising are changing, as epitomized by the rush of middle-aged users to social nets like Facebook. The Internet is finally beginning to live up to its promise to change media and advertising from a one-to-many, passive proposition to a many-to-many experience premised on social connectivity. For media companies and advertisers, this could make Zuckerberg’s irrational exuberance seem not so irrational in retrospect. In fact, the fundamental changes he was referring to are already under way.

“I believe the media business has changed more in the last five years than in the 500 years before that,” Peter Horan, CEO of IAC’s media and advertising unit, told a gathering of publishing, advertiser and agency executives earlier this month.

What’s most changed is how people access information. The Internet has thus far been a search-dominated medium, using faceless algorithms to sort through masses of information for the right link. Google’s role as the starting point of the many users’ Web experience gave rise to what The Search author John Battelle calls “the database of intentions”: people express themselves directly to Google, which can then match up a limitless supply of information to satisfy any need, from a word definition to a retailer selling cashmere sweaters. That’s been a sweet business for Google, which is on pace to rack up over $15 billion in revenue for 2007.

Peer recommendation comes of age

But what comes next? Search, for all its benefits, doesn’t do a great job of helping people separate the wheat from the chaff. The top result for my search is the same as yours.

Many observers see social connections as a credible alternative to search in how we find information, consume media and make product decisions—all premised on the power of peer recommendation. “Social networking is as significant a behavioral shift as search,” says Sarah Fay, CEO of Carat, part of Aegis Group. “The way search has infiltrated our lives, social networking [has become] the fabric of our lives.”

Study after study, not to mention common sense, suggests that when friends recommend a movie, product or event, it has more weight than hearing from a commercial message. Beacon was supposed to morph this premise into an ad vehicle, only to fall flat on privacy concerns. Still, the $15 billion valuation pinned to Facebook is a direct result of the belief it will turn its 58 million-plus users into a formidable advertising opportunity. And other companies are fast at work making this a reality. Archetype Media, for instance, has begun Social Vibe, a marketplace for consumers to get sponsorships (rewards) from brands they endorse within their social networks. Izea, formerly PayPerPost, is building a similar marketplace for bloggers.

The Tay Zonday DIY media model

For months, a Minneapolis graduate student had posted quirky videos to YouTube of himself singing covers and original songs in a remarkably deep voice that didn’t seem to fit his small, youthful appearance. Zonday’s “Chocolate Rain,” first posted in April, generated a tsunami of attention, racking up more than 12 million views.

By the end of the year, Dr Pepper had approached Zonday to record a follow-up version called “Cherry Chocolate Rain” in advance of next year’s introduction of Cherry Chocolate Dr Pepper. Creative merits aside, Zonday brought something else to the table: his own network. Dr Pepper relied on Zonday’s YouTube network of 20,000 subscribers to spread the Dr Pepper video. Within two weeks, it gained more than 1.5 million views. By that time, Zonday had turned himself into a mini-media property, joining a YouTube program that will show ads on his videos and give him a cut.

While the rise of a quirky personality like Tay Zonday is undeniably amusing, the story also points to how social connections on open platforms like YouTube are feeding the process of distributed media. Take Tila Tequila. At the start of the year, she was merely a wannabe model who had an inordinate number of MySpace friends, over 1 million. She was able to parlay her social networking base into a record deal and a top-rated reality show, A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila, on MTV.

Social media is not just about becoming famous. Within their own, much smaller networks, people are becoming media distributors via widgets, tiny Web applications that can be embedded on blogs and social-network profile pages. MySpace has long let users embed photo slide shows, video clips and other tools of self-expression into their pages. Having watched YouTube grow into a force on the back of distribution through the site, it sought earlier this year to exert more control, blocking some widget makers that included advertising. It eventually backed down. Rival Facebook opened its site to outside developers to build widgets that used social data, and now over 10,000 have been created, with the most popular spread friend to friend. By the end of the year, more than 50 percent of Web users encountered a widget monthly, according to comScore, typically through a slide show or video posted to a social network or blog.

In this regard, social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo are likely to spawn millions of mini-networks where content is shared among a trusted circle. “MySpace isn’t a social network with 120 million people,” says Greg Verdino, chief strategy officer at new marketing shop Crayon. “It’s 120 million social networks. There’s a lot of focus on consumer-generated media when there’s more impact on consumer-recommended content.”

Brands have nowhere to hide

As consumers take control of the spreading of media, they invariably have a say over how brands are perceived. Old notions of planning a brand image through commercial messages are running up against consumers actively voicing their opinions to each other in venues as diverse as message boards, consumer reviews, blogs and social networks. Problems can occur when there’s a disconnect between the rosy image dreamed up by marketers and the everyday reality expressed by consumers.

The crossroads the advertising industry stands at was on full display this year in Cannes. Dove won the Film category for “Evolution,” a touching short film by WPP Group’s Ogilvy & Mather that looked at the beauty industry’s false and manipulative notions of beauty. Buoyed by the ad’s impact—”Evolution” has been viewed more than 5.5 million times on YouTube—Dove released a more pointed follow-up in October, “Onslaught,” which shows an angelic little girl deluged by the marketing industry’s messages about beauty. The video met with wide praise from critics and industry types. But then something else happened. A video response was posted to YouTube, pointing out the hypocrisy of Unilever, which owns not only Dove, but Axe—a product that peddles stereotypes of women as little more than sex objects.

Although the video response gathered only a fraction of the views that Dove’s ad did, it showed how brands can get called out on empty promises in an age when connections are paramount. Wal-Mart found that out this year, too. Eager to get involved with social media, it ran a back-to-school campaign on Facebook that fell flat after the brand page was flooded with young critics of the company’s labor practices.

Some brands have taken the criticisms to heart. Back in August 2005, Dell’s customer-service problems drew the ire of blogger Jeff Jarvis. His resulting “Dell Hell” tirade sparked similar stories of shoddy services from dozens of others. Dell responded, after initial fumbling, by forming its own blog and an outreach team to contact those posting negative experiences with its products. The company went even further last February by launching IdeaStorm, a section of its site that solicits ideas from customers and gives them a forum for feedback, positive and negative.

The lesson for brands: The days of papering over poor products with snazzy messages are faltering now that we’re connected. That means the once mundane area of customer service becomes an important definer of the brand experience, says Pete Blackshaw, CMO of Nielsen BuzzMetrics. “That’s unfamiliar terrain for anyone in the marketing business, but it’s low-hanging fruit.”

What’s a friend worth?

But in a year marked by brands’ experimentation in social media, including MySpace profile pages—what Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst with Forrester Research, describes as fishing “where the fish are”—agencies are left with a quandary: How can such voluntary interactions be measured?

It’s often noted that the Internet’s greatest strength is its measurability, but when brands move from counting clicks and site visits to connections, the system breaks down, says Troy Young, CMO of VideoEgg, a social media advertising network that embeds overlay “invitations” into a brand experience. “It’s a real challenge because true engagement cost doesn’t fit into a buyer spreadsheet,” he explains. “The whole media marketplace is priced around the cost of impressions to unengaged users.”

The solution is unclear. For now, the ad industry is left with familiar forms of measurement, mostly clicks and impressions, and what will follow is becoming an ever-important discussion.

The price of all this social connectivity is the inundation of the mundane, from Facebook updates on what groups people join to Twitter messages on what someone had for lunch. And as Beacon showed, the line between what is personal and public is blurring—and sometimes the decision is outside of our control. Yet no matter where the line is drawn, the social trend set in motion this year is likely to only continue.

“Once someone starts to use social networks,” Fay says, “they rarely go back.”

Sales ‘driven by reviews’

14 December 2007

Consumer reviews are driving web sales, according to new research.

A report from eMarketer claims that word-of-mouth advertising - always an important tool for marketers - is especially influential now the internet has made view-sharing so easy.

Social networking websites, blogs and videos mean that user-generated content is proliferating on the web, with recommendations from other consumers increasingly forming the basis of purchase decisions.

Research from eMarketer found that 17 per cent of adults use social networking websites in order to participate with their favourite brands - although most do so to gain a sense of community.

The Wispa campaign is said in the report to be one example of the influence that can be exerted by consumer-generated campaigns.

“From brands’ point of view, consumer word-of-mouth is extremely valuable,” the report states.

It emerged this week that Facebook is opening its development architecture to third-party developers, with Bebo the first rival website to take advantage of the new offering.

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Leading website for customer service reviews invites business to demonstrate commitment to consumers and put up or shut up

New York, NY, December 4, 2007 – www.Measuredup.com a leading online customer service review site today announced the launch of “The Pledge Challenge” for companies that want to differentiate themselves this competitive and budget constrained Holiday season. The “Pledge” allows participating companies to demonstrate to online cyber shoppers and offline consumers that they care about Customer Service and satisfaction as much as the bottom line.

The Measuredup “Pledge” is a free downloadable customer service statement and logo that companies can download for free from the Measuredup.com website and post on their own websites so that consumers know that management, the company and brand are committed to trying to meet the consumers customer service needs.

The Measuredup.com site founded by Marc Karasu is designed to address the customer service void growing in the wake of technology’s fast pace forward. The rise in Internet shopping, automated voice systems, outsourced—and off shored—customer service departments and other technology-driven trends have served mainly to distance customers from companies rather than bring them closer together. And while the Internet has helped customers become more informed in their purchasing decisions, it hasn’t given consumers an avenue for holding businesses accountable for their customer service.

Measuredup.com addresses and resolves this void in a way that is both fun and empowering to consumers and valuable to companies who can use this information to improve and to create a conversation with consumers.

Through the Measuredup.com site, users can rate businesses or services on a 5-point scale in many categories from the expected to the unusual.

Measuredup gives new meaning to the phrase “The Customer is always right.”

About Measuredup.com

Measuredup.com is a leading Customer Service review networking site where consumers rate and review their customer service and brand experiences in a public forum. The site’s founder, frustrated by an increase in incompetent, rude and outright abusive treatment by businesses both large and small, sought to develop a platform where consumers could share their experiences, vent or praise as appropriate and, ultimately, effect change.

For interviews, quotes or discussion please call the founder and President of Measuredup.com, Marc Karasu. Contact info available here and on the site at www.Measuredup.com

Study Conducted by comScore and The Kelsey Group Reveals that 24 Percent of Online Local Service Review Users Purchase Service

November 29, 2007: 02:49 PM EST

RESTON, Va., Nov. 29 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — comScore, Inc. , a leader in measuring the digital world, today announced the results of a new study conducted with The Kelsey Group, a leading research and strategic analysis firm focused on local media and advertising, that examined the impact of consumer-generated reviews on the price consumers were willing to pay for a service delivered offline. The study, based on a survey of more than 2,000 U.S. Internet users in October 2007, revealed that consumers were willing to pay at least 20 percent more for services receiving an “Excellent,” or 5-star, rating than for the same service receiving a “Good,” or 4-star, rating.

The study examined the offline sales impact of online reviews for restaurants, hotels, travel, legal, medical, automotive and home services. Nearly one out of every four Internet users (24 percent) reported using online reviews prior to paying for a service delivered offline. Of those who consulted an online review, 41 percent of restaurant reviewers subsequently visited a restaurant, while 40 percent of hotel reviewers subsequently stayed at a hotel.

    Purchase Behavior Subsequent to Online Review Consultation
    October 12-18, 2007
    Source: comScore, Inc./The Kelsey Group
                                             Percent of Review Viewers
                                               Subsequently Making a
    Service                                  Purchase of Stated Service
    Restaurant                                         41 %
    Hotels                                             40 %
    Travel                                             27 %
    Automotive                                         24 %
    Home                                               19 %
    Medical                                            14 %
    Legal                                               8 %

Online Reviews Very Influential in Offline Purchase Decisions

More than three-quarters of review users in nearly every category reported that the review had a significant influence on their purchase, with hotels ranking the highest (87 percent). Ninety-seven percent of those surveyed who said they made a purchase based on an online review said they found the review to have been accurate. Review users also noted that reviews generated by fellow consumers had a greater influence than those generated by professionals.

    Online Review Influence on Purchase Decision
    October 12-18, 2007
    Source: comScore, Inc./The Kelsey Group
                                              Percent of Review Users
                                            Identifying Review as Having
                                             a Significant Influence on
    Service                                       their Purchase*
    Restaurant                                          79 %
    Hotels                                              87 %
    Travel                                              84 %
    Automotive                                          78 %
    Home                                                73 %
    Medical                                             76 %
    Legal                                               79 %
     * Based on responses indicating at least 4 on a 5 point scale

Consumers Willing to Pay at Least 20 Percent More for 5-Star Service than 4-Star Service

comScore asked the study participants how much they would be willing to pay for a particular service based on the quality of the service. The results showed that consumers were willing to pay between 20 percent and 99 percent more for an Excellent (5 star) rating than for a Good (4 star rating), depending on the product category.

    Amount Consumers Willing to Spend for 5-Star Service
    October 12-18, 2007
    Source: comScore, Inc./The Kelsey Group
                                             Excellent      Good
    Service (Suggested Average Price)        (5 Stars)    (4 Stars)      Lift
     Restaurant Meal ($20)                    $37.95       $25.44        49 %
     Restaurant Meal ($50)                    $59.93       $41.40        45 %
     Hotel ($100)                            $137.36       $99.73        38 %
     Home ($250)                             $252.15      $209.50        20 %
     Travel ($350)                           $366.72      $299.81        22 %
     Legal ($60)                             $104.36       $52.51        99 %
     Medical ($15)                            $29.67       $23.54        26 %

“These data show the importance of local service review sites in consumers’ purchase process,” said Steve Marshall, research director for The Kelsey Group. “With such a large percentage of review users subsequently purchasing, it’s vital that local service providers have a positive presence on these review sites.”

“This study underscores the importance of providing not just good, but excellent, service if a business hopes to generate positive consumer reviews which will result in greater sales,” said Brian Jurutka, senior director, comScore Marketing Solutions.

About this study

The comScore study was based on 2,078 survey respondents, including 508 who used online consumer reviews, conducted from October 12-18, 2007. Consumers were asked about their usage of online reviews and were also asked what price they would be willing to pay for a service given an average service price and an aggregate consumer rating.

About The Kelsey Group

The Kelsey Group is the leading provider of research, data and strategic analysis on directories, small-business advertising, online local media and mobile advertising. Founded in 1986, the company has built a reputation as the premier analyst firm covering the directory publishing community and the emerging local search marketplace, providing advisory services (The Kelsey Report(R) and Interactive Local Media), publishing (Global Yellow Pages(TM)), consulting (more than 400 individual assignments) and conferences (69 events).

About comScore

comScore, Inc. is a global leader in measuring the digital world. This capability is based on a massive, global cross-section of more than 2 million consumers who have given comScore permission to confidentially capture their browsing and transaction behavior, including online and offline purchasing. comScore panelists also participate in survey research that captures and integrates their attitudes and intentions. Through its proprietary technology, comScore measures what matters across a broad spectrum of behavior and attitudes. comScore analysts apply this deep knowledge of customers and competitors to help clients design powerful marketing strategies and tactics that deliver superior ROI. comScore services are used by more than 700 clients, including global leaders such as AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo!, BBC, Carat, Cyworld, Deutsche Bank, France Telecom, Best Buy, The Newspaper Association of America, Financial Times, ESPN, Fox Sports, Nestle, Starcom, Universal McCann, the United States Postal Service, Verizon, ViaMichelin, Merck and Expedia. For more information, please visit http://www.comscore.com.

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Bob Garfield Crusades Against the Cable Provider

By Bob Garfield
Published: November 19, 2007 Bob Garfield’s jihad against his cable provider makes one thing clear: Companies ignore customer-service complaints at their own risk. From Land Rover’s Discovery debacle to Dell hell, the online insurrection is here to stay.

“Never pick a fight,” Mark Twain is reputed to have observed, “with a man who buys his ink by the barrel.” It was certainly true.

Photo illustration: John Kuczala

A powerful publisher, if he was irritated enough, had the wherewithal to bury any adversary. It’s still true, actually, although the truism needs to be slightly amended. In the digital age, never get in a dispute with someone with access to a computer.

Because if he is aggrieved enough, and righteous enough, and persistent enough, and connected enough, he can bury you. Or at least make your life miserable for a long, long time. He doesn’t need to have a chain of newspapers; all he needs to have, basically, are fingers and rage.

For people with anger issues, the internet is a cathartic godsend and/or lethal weapon. You know the type — people who might accept the ordinary indignities of life with reasonable equanimity but become suddenly radicalized when lied to, cheated, bullied or otherwise personally abused. This kind of person will cheerfully invite a shopper with two items to move ahead of him in the checkout aisle but will pointedly confront the jerk who butts into a movie line — even if it means a loud squabble. This sort of guy might hypothetically even be disinvited from a trans-Atlantic flight on security grounds were an airline-counter employee to mishandle visa documentation, then lie to his face about seating availability, then, caught in the lie, choose to regard his resulting swearword and general seething as a sign of imminent violence and bounce the poor s.o.b. from the flight. And the next one.

In other words, a guy just like me.

Setting things right
Some of us — no matter how generally sweet-natured and generous, no matter how friendly and thoughtful, no matter how empathetic and transcendently kind — are simply not to be screwed with. Because when we are wronged, we will go to rather extreme lengths to be righted. Back in September, this was something Comcast Corp. did not know.

When they just plain pissed me off.

My story, sadly, is not especially unusual. Since personally being victimized by the company I call Qualmcast, I have read hundreds and hundreds of similar horror stories, so I will therefore not afflict you with the details of the arrogant, highhanded, dishonest, incompetent, inhuman and fundamentally asinine treatment I suffered at the hands of the cable monstrosity’s “customer service.” Just lots of not showing up, lots of broken promises, lots and lots of hold time, and an installer who left in the middle of a job “to get a drill bit” and never came back. So, in the spirit of the book I am writing on adapting to the digital age — I call the process Listenomics — plus maybe just a touch of vengeance, I fought back. It was just a brief post on my Ad Age blog. In it, I summarized the events recounted above and added a few personal thoughts:

Is this company so frantic to seize market share on voice and broadband that it is willing to disrupt customers’ lives, fail to appear, repeatedly lie to them, walk out on them and then treat the customer as if he or she is a nuisance? Well, we shall see. This is the Listenomics age. We will not take it quietly.

Probably more notable than the text of the rant, though, was its headline — which, in my view, had a nice ring to it: “Comcast Must Die: Seeking Ideas for a Consumer Jihad.”

This apparently struck a nerve; within 24 hours there were 60 comments, which compared very favorably to my previous average of zero. Some were long-winded recitations of incidents far more egregious than mine. Some were words of encouragement and support for a holy war against the whole Co-axis of Evil. Yet others wrote in to give me exactly the help I solicited. Within an hour, someone had called my attention to a YouTube video of a cable installer asleep on a customer’s sofa, where he had lapsed into slumber while on hold with his own company. And another had this to say:

“Perhaps what should be done is to buy the web domain comcastmustdie.com and establish a blog so that all of the folks that have been screwed by Comcast can tell their story. You could put a link to the new Comcast Jihad website and release a press release to drive traffic to the site. The anger and disgust expressed there would be huge.”

Melrose’s Place
Hmm. Using the web to galvanize consumer anger and disgust. An interesting idea. Of course, as I well knew, it had been done before. In November 2004, an English gent named Adrian Melrose bought a brand-new Discovery 3. It was a lemon. But his dealer, and Land Rover itself, were insufficiently responsive. So he began a blog called “Discover the Truth About Land Rover Discovery 3″ and took his complaint public. For weeks, Land Rover ignored the blog even as Melrose began to accrue hundreds, and eventually thousands, of sympathetic comments. The notoriety became so embarrassing Land Rover replaced the man’s car — whereupon the replacement immediately broke down too. Then, while they were fixing that, a loaner broke down. Then a second loaner broke down — and the whole misadventure was chronicled, of course, on Melrose’s blog.

Finally they refunded him his money, triggering accusations that he had blackmailed — or, shall we say, blogmailed — the company into submission. But it wasn’t blackmail at all. Melrose was simply exerting the leverage the digital age has bestowed upon consumers to make lemonade out of lemons. To this day, if you Google that model, you encounter Melrose’s blog on the first page — at God knows what cost to the company in showroom traffic. Yet, incredibly, the brand still has no online forum for FAQs and service bulletins, much less complaints. Melrose offered to turn over his blog for that very purpose, but the company declined. As he put it in the summer of 2007:

Land Rover U.K. needs an efficient platform to listen and care for their customers. The reason I am getting 700 hits to www.haveyoursay.com, mostly search engine driven, is because their existing customers want to talk to one of their favorite brands — just like me. They want to be loyal — but they are frustrated ’cause they think nobody listens.

Dell Hell
Adrian Melrose achieved Google perpetuity more or less by accident. In what may have been a defining moment in Listenomics, someone else contrived to do the same thing on purpose. This was on June 21, 2005, when blogger Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine finally got fed up with computer seller Dell.

One Dell of a commotion: Jeff Jarvis took the computer maker to task after a poor customer-service experience.

“I bought a Dell laptop, and it didn’t frigging work,” he says, but that was just the first part of the problem. The second part was Dell’s handling of his complaint — which was, for want of a better term, sadly Comcastic. “Too many e-mails, too many phone calls, too much frustration. I went on my blog, and I created a post headlined ‘Dell Lies, Dell Sucks.’ That wasn’t just an indication of my immaturity. It was search-engine optimization.”

Yes, Jarvis knew that his blog was so widely read and, more important, widely linked to that any subsequent Google search for “Dell” would yield a results page prominently displaying “Dell Sucks.” In fact, the last line of his post was: “Put that in your Google and smoke it, Dell.”

Eventually, like Land Rover and Comcast, Dell intervened, and Jarvis got his refund, but not before the situation got far beyond its control. Even now, if you type “Dell sucks” into a search engine, you will get back more than 30,000 results. One man tapped a deep vein of consumer frustration — frustration that in the internet age can rise, like a geyser, to the surface. As Jarvis puts it, “If you go online and type in your search engine ‘[any brand] sucks,’ you will find the real Consumer Reports.” Yet for a long time, Dell ignored the controversy, a lapse that cost the company mightily in public image and most likely on the bottom line. Correlation isn’t causation, but it’s worth noting that 17 months after Jarvis’ post, the company lost its world leadership in computer sales to HP.

Breeding ground of rage
Jeff Jarvis, of course, no more invented online bitching than I did. From its earliest days, the internet has been a breeding ground for the culture of complaint. Technorati, the blog search engine, claims to scan 109 million blogs. On Oct. 27, it tracked 1,232,853 posts using the word “sucks.” On Blogdigger: 234,448. On BlogPulse: 641,682. And on Google Blog Search: 3,264,834.

That is a lot of sucking.

Line of site: Within a week, 200 people had left comments here.

Among the items of suckitude: Bill O’Reilly, PayPal, school, skateboarding, milk, “Survivor,” cancer, Facebook, everybody, Garfield (no relation) and — hilariously enough — the Morphy Richards pod bagless compact vacuum cleaner.

That’s from about 50 of the first few entries. I can’t speak for most of the other 3,264,784, because very quickly all that whining gets a little tedious. One blogger, demonstrating perhaps the world’s highest threshold of satisfaction, found fault with orgasm. That is a person whom Bill O’Reilly, PayPal and Facebook might find difficult to please.

Obviously, whiners are a category of consumer that has always existed. There have always been chronic malcontents out there, in addition to the loudly, legitimately aggrieved. Till recently, however, their audience has been limited to the offending party and a few unfortunate intimates. Now, thanks to the internet, their audience is potentially everyone. Therefore, nobody anymore need depend on critical judgments from astonishingly perspicacious elites such as myself. Opinions are like parathyroid glands: Everybody has one. About politics, about sports, about mouthwash …

Bad taste in mouth
“Listerine was chugging along nicely from its introduction as the first over-the-counter mouthwash in 1914, killing germs and tasting like shit until 1992,” blogged a fellow named Stegmann. “This is when Cool Mint Listerine was introduced, probably to combat that sickly sweet but non-antiseptic upstart Scope. The latest variety of Listerine is Vanilla Mint. It’s advertised as being ‘less intense.’ Does it taste good? Sure, I’m drinking a glass of it right now, poured generously over ice. Yum. Listen … I don’t want my Listerine to be delicious. I want it to taste horrible and kill germs, just like it did 100 years ago. What sissies we’ve all become.”

God bless Mr. Stegmann, and duly noted. We’ll mark him down as against Vanilla Mint Listerine. What makes his post remarkable and revolutionary, though, isn’t that he thinks what he thinks. It’s that he took the trouble to inform the world at large, and that at least one member of the world at large took the trouble to listen. Multiply that times a billion, and you grasp the Listenomics world. The following is excerpted from a letter sent to the British cable company NTL taking issue — as it happens — with precisely what infuriated me about Comcast. It is what diplomats call “a frank exchange of ideas,” so I warn you on language grounds. But it’s a classic that eventually became an internet viral:

Dear Cretins,

John

John may or may not have been driven insane by his cable company, but he was decidedly an angry loner, one who just happened to find a larger audience. Others are a lot more organized. Having reckoned that consumer appetite for information and the impulse to venture opinions are both bottomless wells, a number of businesses have undertaken to host the give and take. Amazon and eBay both solicit user ratings of books and products but also of the sellers who trade on their sites. Angie’s List solicits ratings of local plumbers, roofers, and other contractors and home services and charges members a monthly fee for access. Yelp and Citysearch are advertising-supported sites for rating restaurants, stores, nightlife and local media community by community. Epinions does the same on a national level, mainly for national brands.

These mechanisms are so much part of the landscape that they’ve become a target for parody. In 2006, The New York Times discovered that hundreds of people had posted Amazon customer reviews of a gallon jug of whole milk. Among the comments sifted out by the Times: “I give this Tuscan milk four stars simply because I found the consistency a little too ‘milk-like’ for my tastes.”

Snark for good
OK, granted, the criticism culture does sometimes verge on the absurd, but it can also yield some remarkable stories. After all, what is drama but conflict? The confrontation of Big Powerful Forces by righteous Everyman can be quite riveting, quite satisfying and sometimes even quite funny. This is the premise behind the Consumerist, a gossipy, ad-supported site in the Gawker blog empire, founded in 2005 as a forum for exposing substandard goods and services in the Gawker tradition of persistence and snark. “Basically,” says Editor Ben Popken, “to inform, empower and entertain consumers.”

This is where a fellow named Vincent Ferrari became a national icon by doing nothing more than trying to cancel his AOL account — and recording the phone conversation. The Consumerist posted the audio of the AOL employee working his way down the customer-retention flowchart to the point of hilarious obstructionism. An excerpt:

AOL: Is there a problem with the software itself?

Vincent: Cancel the account. Cancel the account. CAN-CEL THE AC-COUNT.

And so on. As a result of the Ferrari tape, AOL changed its retention procedures to make it easier for customers to cancel. It also fired the employee, loyal and dedicated though he was. That’s what happens when consumerism becomes a spectator sport.

Nazi paraphernalia?
The Consumerist mounted another mini-crusade against Wal-Mart, when it discovered that the world’s largest retailer was selling T-shirts emblazoned with the skull-and-crossbones insignia of the Nazi 3rd SS Division, the so-called Totenkopf division dedicated mainly to guarding concentration camps. The story surfaced on another blog, but the Consumerist flogged it for all it was worth — even after Wal-Mart promised to pull the merchandise. Because, as it turned out, people kept finding the T-shirts at Wal-Mart long afterward.

Teed off: Consumerist crusaded against Wal-Mart over shirts with a Nazi insignia.

“We have infinite pixels to spend,” Ben Popken says, “so we were able to follow it — day five, day 27, day 97 of the Nazi-recall watch. We can follow it along to doomsday. It levels the playing field. … The determinant of who gets heard is not who has the most media dollars but who has the most interesting thing to say.”

One more player in the burgeoning e-grievance industry is Complaints.com, which has a smaller audience than the Consumerist but a bolder promise: to explicitly shame the company you don’t like. The site boasts of employing the Jeff Jarvis strategy of search-engine optimization. As its home page proclaims, “Often, a single complaint posted to Complaints.com about a business appears higher in the search-result rankings than the home page of the business that is the subject of the complaint.”

Funny. That was just my plan for Comcast.

More to the story
Once again, though, AdAge.com/garfield — aka the Bobosphere — is no BuzzMachine. My daily page views were in the dozens or the hundreds but by no means the thousands — until I commenced a holy war against my cable company. That’s when things started jumping. So I kept plugging away at Comcast Must Die: Parts 2, 3, etc. This is from my third post, from Sept. 14, headlined “The Fix Is In,” about a company spokeswoman’s claim of being appalled by my experience, considering Comcast’s dedication to providing the best service to all of its customers:

Not too bad. She didn’t actually lie till the last clause of the last sentence. As the comment traffic has made abundantly clear, Qualmcast is not working hard to ensure that its customers are receiving the best possible service. It is working hard to reduce costs to be competitive with the other telecoms, who also treat customers shabbily, in order to compete with Qualmcast.

But the other stuff was true. They have taken actions to correct my problems, which may be lucky for me, but in no way pacifying. On the contrary, as a jihadist bent on destroying their corrupt system, I am angrier and more zealous than ever. Customer service doesn’t mean kissing the ass of VIPs and putting everybody else in the hold queue till Groundhog Day. It means treating all your customers with dignity and respect, and investing all necessary resources to see that problems get solved immediately — for everyone. Which, if institutionalized in company culture, would eventually cease to be an expense and instead be a priceless differentiator in a commodity category.

Comcast had indeed put the full-court press on my particular problem. Shortly after that item was posted, there were five Comcast vans parked by the cable hub nearest my house for something like 18 hours. (And now my phone-cable-broadband service is just exquisite, thank you very much.) But, as you see, that just made me madder — implying that my jihad was just an extortion attempt to get my phones attended to. It was no such thing. Comcast Must Die was an extortion attempt to get everybody’s phones attended to.

Two weeks later …
Things were moving along splendidly, with Comcast Must Die getting the attention of bloggers and bloggees alike and comment traffic in the Bobosphere picking up apace. But then came two incredible strokes of good fortune, pretty much back-to-back. You’ll recall that on day one, somebody suggested reserving the domain name comcastmustdie.com. By day four, somebody had done just that. His name is Bart Wilson. He is founder of a company called Voyager International in Santa Fe, N.M., and he was fed up with Comcast too. Then it was but for me to find someone to actually create the site and a dedicated blog linked to it. Soon they materialized too, and two weeks into my jihad, Comcast Must Die went live with the following manifesto:

Actually, I have no death wish for Comcast or any other gigantic, blundering, greedy, arrogant corporate monstrosity. What I do have is the earnest desire for such companies to change their ways. This site offers an opportunity — for you to vent your grievances (civilly, please) and for Comcast to pay close attention.

Congratulations. You are no longer just an angry, mistreated customer. Nor, I hope, are you just part of an e-mob. But you are a revolutionary, wresting control from the oligarchs, and claiming it for the consumer. Your power is enormous. Use it wisely.

In the first 24 hours, there were 70 comments. Within a week, there were 200 — not site visits, not page views. Comments. People taking the trouble to move from mouse to keyboard and leave their thoughts — most of them, predictably, excoriating Comcast. Some even came from Comcast employees, as miserable at their workplace as we customers were on the other end of the cable. A few other Comcasters defended their company, in some cases heaping ridicule on stupid and/or hostile customers. Comcast PR executives even posted a few official comments, declaring themselves sensitive to consumer complaints and heavily invested in making their already dedicated efforts more robust still.

Those comments were met with some skepticism, including many famous-name vulgarities.

Enter the Hammer
But then came lucky break No. 2, a news event so delicious and unexpected that when I heard about it I momentarily suspended my air of preternatural sang-froid and cackled maniacally while dancing an improvised jig. I refer, of course, to the criminal behavior of one Mona Shaw. On Aug. 17, having been subjected to a typically outrageous chain of Comcast abuse and neglect over four days, Ms. Shaw sat at a bench outside a suburban Virginia customer-service center, where she’d been sent to wait to speak to a manager. After two hours in the baking sun, she was informed, sorry, the manager had left for weekend. This somehow got under her skin.

Hammer time: Mona Shaw was so frustrated by her experience she took up arms against two phones and a computer at a Comcast office.

Photo Credit: Anan Pimsler

“I think they got so bloody big,” she told me afterward, “they thought they were completely immune to everyone, they could do anything they damn well please.”

The indignity, heaped upon the previous week’s worth of indignities, rankled her all evening and all day Saturday and Sunday. On Aug. 20, she went back to the service center with her husband and a means of avoiding another tedious wait: a claw hammer.

This she used to pulverize a computer and two telephones, at which point she wryly remarked, “Have I got your attention now?” She had, indeed. But she knew that already. This was a premeditated attack committed not for a hatred of consumer electronics but for the righteousness of indignation, on the theory, as she put it, “If I can’t have a phone, OK, let’s go after yours.” The police had a slightly different legal theory and immediately arrested her — although almost as quickly the handcuffs were removed so she could be attended to by ambulance personnel. Ms. Shaw has a heart condition, and her blood pressure following the incident spiked out of control.

No wonder: She’s 75.

Mona thus became the Barbara Fritchie of cable rage. To paraphrase John Greenleaf Whittier: “Bust if you must this old gray head, but fix my freakin’ phone,” she said.

Riding the wave
Next thing you know, she was featured in The Washington Post, on “Good Morning America” and all over the media all over the world. People sent her money to pay her fine. (She donated the cash to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.) She received, via parcel post, three hammers. And wherever Mona Shaw was reported on, so was Comcast Must Die. At this writing, there are north of 1,000 comments on the site, including plenty an infuriating tale of woe, quite a few employee mea culpas, some union organizing and some corporate-PR boilerplate about how hard the company is working on behalf of all 25 million of its customers, blah, blah, blah.

But the most satisfying of the traffic to Comcast Must Die was from Comcast itself. The company was reading every single entry and, as I’d proposed, following up on every one it could. For example:

Update on my Oct. 12 posting at 9:49 a.m. … This site is fantastic. Quickly after making my post, I received three phone calls from Comcast: (1) a fellow named Mark called from corporate, left his number and told me I would be contacted by someone from my local office; (2) a call from Gwen, who was at the local office letting me know who specifically would be handling my case; and finally (3) Rebecca, who was handling my case. … I was able to connect with Rebecca today who had gone through my bill, corrected all of the charges and let me know my new monthly balance.”

Yes, as per my premise, the blog was doing for Comcast what Comcast itself should have been doing all along. Could it be that the soulless juggernaut was taking its first baby steps toward redemption? Others have. Consider the suddenly reflective General Motors, for decades the quintessence of corporate arrogance. Its vice chairman, Bob Lutz, hosts sprinkled with comments from those who despise GM products and say so — even accusing the company of a worldwide conspiracy to suppress electric-car technology:

GM’s “Volt” … is the traditional auto industry’s latest attempt to misinform the public about the viability of EVs (electric vehicles) and PHEVs. Most corporate media outlets covered the story and repeated GM’s propaganda that the battery technology is still not ready and that it will be very expensive. All the media outlets also specifically cited the Volt’s limited 40-mile electric-only range. This is also GM’s attempt to implant in the public mind the idea that EVs and PHEVs only have a 40-mile range. The truth is that the extremely reliable heavy-duty NiMH battery technology … is 10 years old and was bought by GM and then sold to Chevron, who is now sequestering the battery and refuses to sell it to small start-up EV manufactures …

Why expose yourself to such flak? Because it’s being fired up all around you anyway. Lutz thinks it’s better to have the conversation in your own airspace. Better to harvest valuable insights about your products and brands. Better to be able to influence perceptions than to be a helpless bystander. Yes, sometimes, miraculously, the scales fall off of corporate eyes.

Recovery
For instance, if you were to ask Jeff Jarvis today, he would tell you that, no matter what you might have read online, Dell doesn’t suck. In fact, he told his readers two years after the episode, his erstwhile nemesis has catapulted “from worst to first.”

It has achieved this with a multipronged Web 2.0 assault on the status quo. It began with a corporate blog, Direct2Dell, which invited all comers to weigh in on all matters — including suckitude. This came in handy when Dell laptop batteries started to spontaneously combust like a Spinal Tap drummer. Here the company also learned, in bloodcurdling detail, just how inefficient its customer-service infrastructure was. By focusing on (apparent) cost, managers had outsourced call centers too far and wide and empowered too few employees to divert from their scripts to actually solve customer problems. The actual cost of the system revealed itself after Jarvis lost his temper and Dell lost market share — and market value. Once again granting that no correlations can be proved, in the year that followed, Dell’s share price was carved in half. While it’s possible to ignore your Google results, it is impossible to ignore Wall Street.

The tiger’s new stripes all culminated in Dell IdeaStorm, an online repository for customer suggestions and interactions about all things computing. It is part complaint box, part suggestion box, part social network, and it has transformed the culture of the company from blind cost cutting to dialogue. Of course, it’s impossible to really know anybody’s motivations, but the once-recalcitrant corporate colossus sounds for all the world like a True Believer. As Chief Marketing Officer Mark Jarvis (no relation) puts it, things have changed. “I would say radically. The big revelation from us was that customers did want to interact with us. It’s changed our support and our services organization. It changed our product-development organization. It’s absolutely changed marketing in the company. … Traditional marketing no longer works. The most important marketing vehicle right now is the consumer. Things have pretty much gone bottom up at Dell.”

Open ears … finally
And Jeff himself feels quite certain this is the real deal: “Note that the company is following suggestions that customers make. At the behest of the geekier geeks among them, Dell is now selling Linux computers and is reducing the bloatware that constipates new machines. Michael Dell acknowledged that the customers’ suggestions may not be economically rewarding, but he can’t know without trying. Dell even talks about collaborating with his customers.”

On Nov. 8, I got a post on Comcast Must Die: “I work for Comcast. Sorry, Bob, you are pretty much off the radar now.” That might be true. After an initial burst of activity, comment traffic had decidedly slowed. Perhaps Comcast believed that the novelty had worn off, but there are things Comcast doesn’t know.

One is that online insurrection isn’t a novelty; it is already a fact of business life. Secondly, I am by no means finished. As this piece goes to press, I am deep into planning for a national podcast event I hope will hold the corporate feet to the fire of mounting consumer rage. And finally, as I observed 5,000 words ago, I’m pretty easily pissed off but not so easily discouraged.

For instance, this is not my first media crusade. Long ago, in the first Clinton term, I tried to take my kids bowling one Saturday only to find every local lane filled up with league play. This rankled me, because I knew there was a perfectly good bowling alley sitting absolutely idle just 20 miles from my house in suburban Washington, D.C. It was then that I decided I would take my kids there.

Just a lane
That was sort of a quixotic tilt too, given that the alley in question was at the White House for the exclusive use of the first family and their friends. And I didn’t know the Clintons — or, at least, they didn’t know me. So I set out calling on friends, acquaintances, acquaintances of acquaintances and anybody I could think of in or around the corridors of power — from my congresswoman to James Carville to the head of the American Bowling Congress to Ralph Nader — to wrangle an invite. This was done for NPR’s “All Things Considered” as a sort of parable of political influence in Washington. In fact, it was essentially the mirror image of Comcast Must Die, which is about gaining influence not by being politically connected but simply by being digitally connected, about having lots and lots and lots of friends in low places.

But there’s something you should know. The bowling crusade was meant to last an entire summer, but the family and I got inside the bowling alley within two weeks. It was fun. I think I wore Nixon’s shoes.

Today, if I were in Comcast’s shoes, I’d be readjusting my radar.