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.

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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 »

A couple weeks ago Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch had a post on social information overload that we really liked - Web 3.0 Will Be About Reducing the Noise - and Twhirl Isn't Helping. The key part: "I need less data, not more data. I need to know what is important, and I don’t have time to sift through thousands of Tweets and Friendfeed messages and blog posts and emails and IMs a day to find the five things that I really need to know."

The issue Erick gets at in his post doesn't have any respect for the kind of media though. With the advent of what seems like a dozen new "web 2.0" social apps every day (I get more beta invites than I know what to do with), the social web that was supposed to help solve some issues with information overload (benefits of trusted relationships, etc.) is now going the way of mainstream media. Too much information and what happens? Erick says in his post he's "increasingly ignoring" it. Read more »

Yesterday Alex Steed posted a great article about a discussion he and Eric had earlier this week about online strategy, aggregation, and Managing News. One area they talked about was the impact listening in - and acting on - online chatter is having on companies. They also hit on some interesting points on how listening to what others are saying online creates a more holistic overall online approach, which in the end of the day, leads to better strategy and outreach.

You can read the whole article here.

Robin Hamman from the BBC wrote on his personal Cybersoc.com blog today about some aggregation work he's been doing with Yahoo! Pipes. We love what he's up to. (HT: I got the tweet from Rheingold's feed.)

With the rise of so many citizen journalists, Robin is trying to solve the problem of information clutter by filtering through social media sites looking for keywords that might be signals of a real breaking story. By using Pipes, he has built a single RSS feed that searches for a keyword across several social media sites where citizen reports are likely to pop up: Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and on blog search engines Technorati and IceRocket.

Using good keywords that could signal a big story -- he picked Explosion, Evacuation, and Bomb to start -- gives him feeds that let him know whenever chatter about one of these terms spikes online. Using a couple other tools that Pipes offers, he's able to do a little extra filtering and make sure he's cutting out as much clutter as possible and still finding the good stuff. Here's a picture of what part of this Pipe looks like:

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This morning I finally had some time to look at what people were saying about Rootscamp DC on the blogosphere (and Twittersphere, of course). Last week before the conference got underway, I had set up a group on Managing News to track all mentions of Rootscamp happening online, so I just went there to see what news had come in.

I noticed a few interesting things about the coverage: Read more »

• About half of all the mentions of Rootscamp were on Twitter. This makes sense since Twitter tends to pick up users and twittering frequency around conferences and it was one of the hottest tools discussed in the sessions I went to. But that makes me a bit surprised it didn't amount to more of the coverage of Rootscamp.

Posting to Twitter, a micro blogging community, via SMS makes it easy to share one liners (up to 140 characters) with all your friends at once, from anywhere. I post on Twitter about where I am going to be at night, what I am reading and working on, about how I am feeling. Anyone else who uses Twitter that wants to "follow" me can get these updates.

The result is a pretty amazing space shifting tool that allows me to connect with a lot of people about things otherwise too mundane to share outside of my immediate company. Think of it almost like a status message you broadcast out to the world (in fact, you can twitter your Facebook status message).

For example,

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