Web Phenomenon

Blogger Fatwā Against Comcast?

Dec 04

I’m not in a Comcast territory so I have zero experience with their service but it’s generally a bad sign when a fairly well respected columnist creates a site where the URL itself reflects his commitment to the ultimate demise of your brand. Apparently, 44% of Comcast’s customers are dissatisfied and the site is being designed to act as a lightning rod for their complaints and rants. It’s already the fourth Google article when you search for “comcast customer service” and the rest of the results aren’t too nice either. Yeah, there’s definitely a storm a brewin’.

If Dell Hell was a wake-up call for how large companies address customer service issues online, then I would hope that Comcastmustdie.com is acting as a wake-up siren. While BuzzMachine’s anti-Dell campaign showed how a blogger like Jeff Jarvis could use his blog to bring a vital brand issue to the surface, Bob Garfield, who’s more of a traditional media vet, apparently wants to use every trick in the book to take down Comcast.

For starters, Garfield is hosting a star studded podcast on December 11th to discuss the issue and build awareness. Among those he’s inviting are Jeff Jarvis (surprise!) and former presidential candidate and consumer advocate Ralph Nader. This isn’t some slick production that’s being funded by Advertising Age either, it’s a crude collection of free online tools, like Google’s Blogger.com, that are being used to organize people quickly.

So put yourself in the place of Comcast. What do you do?

For starters, I would get in touch with Bob Garfield and see if you could send someone to take part in the podcast. If the company has been doing anything to improve customer service, and I find it hard to believe that they’re not investing somewhere, this would be a prime opportunity to tell the world about it. Plus, this is obviously a case of consumers feeling like they have lost their voice and if a Comcast representative is present at least that gives the impression the company is listening and not hiding behind a non-existent corporate fortress.

Even more to the point, Comcast should organically address their eroding search ranking around the service behind their product. Take a lesson from Dell and jump on this early with a customer service blog that addresses some of the ranting and raving that is taking place in the blogosphere. Maybe commenting will fuel the fire but there is an opportunity through selective use of trackbacks to allow the corporate voice to be heard as well within the sea of discontent. At very least you’d be creating a more appropriate forum for these issues.

Comcastmustdie.com is supposedly relaunching their site soon. I wonder if Comcast will take notice and act even sooner.

Greatest Internet Phenomenons of 2007: Widgets

Dec 04

Although I might not call it the Year of the Widget, like GigaOm, 2007 was definitely the year when Internet junkies seemed to finally reach consensus on a word that was as alienating to non-geeks as “wiki.” With Internet publishers yearning for more power with less knowledge of what they were doing, the concept of portable code became more and more attractive to less and less sophisticated publishers. You can probably trace it back as far as the first WYSIWYG editors and then onto the various publishing platforms that have made the idea of publishing content less frightening to people who don’t know what “a href” means but 2007 was probably the first year where consumers felt comfortable being the mules for their favorite services or destinations.

While blogs can definitely account for what drives a lot of widgets, it was really the social networks that took the concept from being a fringe technology to a ubiquitous presence on cites like MySpace. Of course, widgets could also be blamed for the many annoyances of MySpace that are driving more and more users to the cleaner Facebook, where widgets remarkably become “applications.” The movement continues to expand and suddenly Google jumps in with OpenSocial and suddenly the entire social networking world can add widgets with a few clicks. No more embedding code or giving third parties your login information. Widgets are now only a click away.

Oh right, and then the advertisers caught on. Now this seemingly altruistic sharing of development resources could be funded by the beloved brands that ship shoes across the country for us to try on and send back and the ones that sell us leftovers that people didn’t want the first time they were marketed to them. Yes, why just share when you can sell other people’s products for free.

Ok, maybe advertisers haven’t quite figured this out yet.

The New Influencers: Engaging Trolls

Nov 29

By now most marketers have woken up to the importance of bloggers as key influencers and, with varying degrees of success, figured out how to incorporate them into how they operate. It took a while, and several appearances on the 24-hour news networks, before marketers were ready to admit that not all bloggers live in their parents basement and spend half their day playing Dungeons and Dragons but I feel like the battle has been largely won. It isn’t over by a long shot but you can say that they first layer of social media has definitely been peeled back a little.

However, once you pull back one layer, it’s only a matter of time before you want to go one layer deeper, which brings us to the seedy underbelly that is the blog comment area.

The rabid hoards that dwell in the comment areas of major blogs, seemingly only to start trouble and argue with anyone who will listen to them, are referred to as “trolls.” Due to the anonymity of commenting on the Internet, trolls are generally pretty comfortable posting personal attacks or just about any defamatory statement about anyone or anything. College Humor hit the nail on the head with this portrayal of what life would be like if people in the boardroom spoke like Internet trolls (probably not safe for work):

Pretty funny, right?

The question is “are these people influential?” I think they are.

Obviously not all Internet commenters are trolls but almost every high volume blog has some element of troll-like behavior that you will undoubtedly encounter while trying to engage with commenters transparently. One rogue troll may not, by themselves, have an influence but it is a fact that people who read blogs are more likely to pay attention to a piece of content if there are a lot of comments.

As opposed to the standard blogger relations guidelines that nearly every PR blogger posts at one time or another, dealing with trolls seems to be a bit of a gray area. I think most PR professionals would recommend to steer clear of online conversations that are tainted by troll activity but I don’t think that’s good counsel.

I’m still formulating my opinion on this but I believe it comes down to being nimble. Tactically speaking, I think you need to jump into the conversation at the beginning and then back away when the flaming begins. In addition to being a good communications practice in principle, there’s also the technical problem of your response getting buried in six scrolling pages of a flame war.

Does anyone have a theory on this? I’d love to hear how other people deal with trolls when they’re attacking their brands.

Greatest Internet Phenomenons of 2007: Lolcats

Nov 20

Lolcat Since it’s pretty much Thanksgiving (I have a giant dead bird in my sink, can you think of any other reasons?), perhaps this would be a good time to begin my first annual Greatest Internet Phenomenons of the Year series. I use the word “greatest” with a fair amount of leeway so please refrain from sending me BlogPulse graphs or BuzzMetrics reports to prove me wrong on any of these.

Without any further ado, my first award of distinction goes to “lolcats.” Yes, lolcats. While some argue that the O RLY? owl came first, few can argue that random pictures of cats with inline captions written in Engrish isn’t funny. Not only are they funny but they’ve become a whole new way to communicate, albeit only with geeks. Want to get back at that guy on Brooklyn Vegan who always posts “what time does Daft Punk go on?” regardless of whether or not they’re featured in the post? A well placed lolcat might just do the trick. Annoyed at the co-worker that responds to every company-wide email with some smarmy half-witicism? Lolcat.

Don’t be the last on your block to communicate with a lolcat. The Web 2.0 gods have been good to you and created LolCat Buildr, which is obviously still in beta while they make the rounds at the Bay Area VCs.

Another Option for Striking Writers

Nov 13

Sick TV If the writers strike is proving anything it’s that the model that they’ve depended on for their entire careers is broken and their employers have taken advantage of them. I think just about anyone will agree with that. The problem for me is that we have two sides fighting about digital rights without anyone looking at where the online entertainment industry is actually going.

For starters, any assumption that the TV networks are raking in money from ads they run on their Web sites is fairly misguided. Yes, they make money and the sites are definitely profitable but this revenue is nothing compared to the ad dollars that have come in through television and supported this industry for generations. Television would be a drastically different place and writers would be living in near poverty if they had to rely on Internet ad revenue for all their money.

Secondly, no one seems to be talking about any parallels between TV and music. How do both the networks and writers think that they’ll actually be able to control digital entertainment when the music industry has already proven that it’s impossible?

Put simply, the future for writers is certainly not with these behemoth media companies that depend on television ad revenue. If the writers union really wanted to help them, they should not only ask for royalties but also ask for rights to the content. The future for this form of entertainment is going to be creating the destination online that has removed the most barriers for consumers and the television networks are gearing up to lose that battles (despite the positive feedback on Hulu).

What I’d really like to see is some of these kings of content take their shows and run. What if Andy Samberg posted “Dick in a Box” on his own site? Do the Daily Show writers really depend on the production capabilities of Comedy Central so much that they couldn’t take their show independent? Sure, there will be a ramp up period before these destinations start generating traffic (and, of course, not all content on TV is good enough to find an audience on the Web) but it seems like a more fruitful struggle than fighting against media companies that have historically had no interest in sharing revenue.

In fact, Om Malik at GigaOm writes that this strike could be a tipping point for online content producers as the networks look to find other ways to find compelling programing. There is a supply and demand question here and it certainly isn’t in favor of the writers.

Political Science

Nov 08

In news that doesn’t make you feel too great about the power of viral ideas, there is apparently an effort underway by conservative blogs to get people to vote for Climate Audit as the Best Science Blog in the 2007 Weblog Awards. Basically, conservative sites are telling their readers that the award would be a great way to combat the idea that global warming is a scientifically sound phenomenon, which a vast majority of science blogs (and, um, actual scientists) seem to subscribe to.

BoingBoing was quick to jump on this since they believe that this is a politically motivated campaign that has little to do with science. Of course, once BoingBoing chimes in the fun really starts, as you can see in the 200+ comments on the most recent Climate Audit post.

The consensus amongst non-conservative blogs is that Bad Astronomy, a site that, among other things, talks about misconceptions regarding astronomy, should win the award. In fact, Bad Astronomy is playing hardball and actually embedding the voting application directly into their latest post. As of the time of this post, Bad Astronomy is behind by about 500 votes.

What do you think? You can go cast your vote here for a little while longer.

Is Netvibes the Ultimate Social Network?

Nov 07

Netvibes may be pulling away in this whole modular Web movement. Yesterday the company announced that it would be launching it’s own universal widgets standard, which wasn’t much of a secret, as well as a new start page codenamed “Ginger.” As Mashable reported, the company no longer has any plans to build a social network of it’s own but I’m starting to wonder if that even matters with the way OpenSocial and other standards are emerging.

When you think about what has really been the key factors in social networks like Facebook and MySpace taking off, it usually comes back to the level of customization. Wasn’t the lack of customization and other restrictions pretty much responsible for the decline of Friendster after all? Not only does Netvibes accommodate the need to customize but it’s commitment to open standards is pretty much ensuring interoperability with most other social networks (although it still remains to be seen whether or not Facebook will embrace any of these standards).

Let’s imagine a future where social networking is completely ubiquitous. Your grandma is on Facebook because it’s easy, the AOL of social networks. Your company’s computer guy has built his own page that incorporates these standards based on some template he found on Source Forge. Your niece is on some yet to be launched service that protects her from creepy old guys. What kind of service would you choose? Is Netvibes technology too daunting for casual users? Not really. Does Netvibes easily allow you to aggregate content from other services? Yes, just about as easily as possible. Does Netvibes enable you to express yourself and share your “profile” with others? It’s not completely seamless but it’s getting there.

Egg on Your Hulu

Nov 01

Hulu I’m not sure if the blogosphere has been so universally positive about a corporate entity moving into the world of Web 2.0 than they are about Hulu now that they’ve had their chance to get their hands on it. With very few detractors, people are calling the new online video channel “the kind of service that should scare startups trying to develop their own distribution platforms.” After being backed by iTunes detractor and big media bad guys NBC and receiving more than $100 million in VC financing, the concept behind Hulu was the butt of many jokes over the past several months and bloggers were waiting with baited breath for their first peek during beta testing.

TechCrunch’s speed in posting the first error message they found on the site made me think about what Gartner likes to call the “hype cycle.” In a sense, TechCrunch was poking fun at the hype cycle and were quick to update the post to reveal how short the outage was (and, come on, it’s in BETA!).

The hype cycle cites a “technology trigger” that begins the cycle and then a quick ramp up to a “peak of inflated expectations” before the “trough of disillusionment.” What about when the people behind the hyped product aren’t respected by the influencers? When you’re an outsider, or not respected by the influencers, you pretty much start in trough of disillusionment and have to fight your way onto the ramp of inflated expectations.

What will be interesting to watch is how the lack of a technology trigger really affects the rest of the hype cycle. The final stage of the hype cycle is the”plateau of productivity,” which is an evolution of the technology that is dependent upon acceptance.

With a beta program that has won over so many initially critical influencers, is it possible that Hulu will launch publicly into the final wave of the hype cycle and avoid the pitfalls that come with missing expectations?

Crashing the Waffles(.fm) Party

Nov 01

Waffles.FM

My prediction of it taking a week to replace Oink may have been a little hasty. As Waffles.fm has recently found out, running a giant torrent network isn’t as easy as it may seem. After launching yesterday, the site received a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which basically shut the whole thing down all night.

The respective IRC channels were abuzz with spectulation as to who would attack the site. Although this appears to be complete unsubstantiated, the prevailing theory was that a disgruntled partner in the project, who went off to start What.cd after some internal disagreements with Waffles, may have been behind the attacks.

Regardless, it appears that torrent sites are back to their old policies of being extremely careful about who gets invites. In the invite channel on IRC for Waffles anyone who “asks/begs” for an invite is immediately banned from the channel.

It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out. I wonder if any of these sites will try to move to an ad supported model to pay for their technology costs. If you think about the traffic Oink got with 170,000+ users, there is definitely an opportunity there. What is the best business model for an illegal torrent network?