Viral Video: Consumer Revenge

Oct. 13, 2006 — -- Many consumers realize that the Internet acts as a powerful means of talking back to companies. Savvy companies listen, because they know just how damaging the Internet can be to brand recognition.

More and more consumers video tape their encounters that document funny or downright bad customer service and post those videos on the Web. Viral video can get millions of hits a week, causing some companies to have a knee-jerk reaction and make necessary changes to mend the consumer problem. So some complaining consumers have actually helped make changes to company policies. Why? Because smart companies realize consumer attitudes can live on the Internet forever and ever, wreaking havoc on the company bottom line forever and ever.

Here are some consumers who have done just that -- talk backed and gotten companies to listen.

Last June a Comcast customer, who doesn't want his picture shown, was surprised when the repairman who came to his house to fix his cable service went to sleep on his couch. The repairman fell asleep because when he tried calling Comcast, he spent more than an hour on hold!

So the customer took a video of the sleeping repairman and added a music track by the Eels and posted it to his blog along with a list of his complaints about Comcast.

Within days, his video shot around the Internet like a rocket, appearing on many Web sites. Hundreds of thousands of people watched it, including Comcast executives, who immediately fired the sleeping repairman, sent someone else to fix the modem and revamped its customer service.

Well, right around the time when that Comcast repairman was sleeping, Vince Ferrari was trying to cancel his America Online account. Ferrari says he wanted to cancel his account, which he paid $15 a month for because he wasn't using it. He had heard that cancelling an account with AOL was not easy and he soon found that to be true. Here's an excerpt from the 21-minute taped conversation Ferrari had with John, the AOL representative.