It's no secret that Comcast isn't a beloved company. It's reputation for bad customer service even made it into its Wikipedia entry. But it seems they're doing something to fix it.

The New York Times writes today that Comcast is using online tools to monitor what people are saying about the company on the web. An internal team is using these tools to watch for negative mentions of Comcast on Twitter, blogs, and other online mediums and when they find a complaint they're reaching out to the disgruntled customer to fix the problem.

It's great that Comcast recognizes that online tools make it easy for them to find unhappy customer - and even better that they're acting to make these people happy. It's good for Comcast too. The majority of people interviewed for the article were very appreciative of the online response, which makes sense - their problem was dealt with and their internet/cable service is back up and running. By finding and addressing the people talking about their Comcast problems online, the company is winning over customers and vocal critics.

It helps that they're fast. Ericrabe posted this to Twitter at about 9:45 am.

Comcast, via its own Twitter account, got in touch with him almost immediately.

Read more »

Today the Associated Press estimated 200,000 people attended Obama's speech in Berlin. One of the iconic photos from this historical speech will surely be Jae C. Hong's (with the AP) image that you see above, a similar version to this is already on the New York Times website right now and will probably end up printed on the front page tomorrow.

The only thing more powerful than this picture of this amazing crowd would be an aggregated of collage of the 458 people that have their cameras in hand, which are marked as white dots here. At 1:00 am on July 25th, there are currently 1,060 photo's tagged with Obama + Berlin. You can be sure tens of thousands more will be shared and posted in the coming days on flickr and other sites.

With the first big hurricane of the season touching down today, I knew we'd see some interesting news coverage. As I was scanning the chatter about Hurricane Dolly over lunch, a tweet by the Red Cross caught my eye.

My first reaction was, "the Red Cross uses Twitter?" I followed the link to its blog covering Hurricane Dolly. Although neither the blog nor the twitter feed is a great source for breaking news, I found it very interesting where they were directing folks to get updates on the storm: to the Flickr, Twitter, and Youtube feeds mentioning the hurricane from the public at large. Read more »

We’re still following what’s happening with FISA, and we saw some interesting trends today. Look at the difference in coverage of FISA on different mediums.

Here’s at look at the number of posts about FISA on Twitter over the last two weeks.

You can see that there was more chatter about FISA on Twitter yesterday than at any point over the last two weeks. That’s a different story than what you see when looking at coverage from mainstream news sources and blogs.

Here are the stories about FISA picked up by Google News over the last two weeks:

And here are the blog posts about FISA picked up by Technorati over the same period: Read more »

Sometimes monitoring blogs and mainstream news sources just isn’t enough. This can become very apparent when you’re trying to manage your company’s brand or image while an issue is exploding in your lap.

One example of this is the uproar that happened when Senator Obama decided to support the compromise bill on FISA immunity recently passed by the House. These tweets were posted on Twitter just as the group Senator Obama Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity — Get FISA Right, was forming on my.barackobama.com to protest Obama’s stance on FISA.

The anger that caused people to post these tweets has helped the anti-FISA group become the singe largest in Obama’s own online community: a fact that has received significant media coverage from mainstream sources. Read more »

The conference agenda this year looks great. It is amazing how much Micah has really grown this event with Andrew over the years.  I have been to the last three and it is good to see a heavy focus again on detailed sessions, made more possible this year since it is now two days.  

We will be taking the conference as an opportunity to pull the veil off of our new work on Managing News and show off the new clipping tools that we have built that can help out campaigns. Beta use has been great, and later next week we'll be making an announcement about a new option that will lower the barriers to entry a lot. We've gotten a bunch of requests from smaller NGOs that want to use this for just a couple key terms.

If you are going to be at PDF, you can be sure to find me at a couple key sessions.  Here are my favorite ones so far:

* Visualizing the Political Blogosphere

* Covering the "Click-ocracy": Tracking the Internet's Impact on Politics and Journalism

* Reinventing political media (the rise of semi-pro journalism?)

* Inside the Presidential Campaigns: What Worked, What Didn't Peter

* Design Principles for Online Democracy: Connecting Government and Constituents in the Internet Age

I am excited to see a lot of you folks next week!