How the Web Flips 'Caveat Emptor'

July 14, 2006 -- -- Vincent Ferrari was an America Online loyalist. For years it was his only portal to the Internet. AOL even helped him meet his wife.

"I had been an AOL customer for a long time," Ferrari said. "[But] I figured there were better ways to spend 15 bucks a month, so I decided to cancel the account."

AOL has been hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of customers, and Ferrari, an avid blogger with his own website, says he heard a common refrain while on-line.

"There has always been this rumor that AOL was really hard to cancel," Ferrari said. "So one way or another I figured I'd prove either it was or it wasn't and I'd end up with something interesting to put up on my site."

Vincent turned on his recorder and then placed the call. The exchange went something like this:

AOL REPRESENTATIVE: Hi this is John at AOL... how may I help you today?

VINCENT FERRARI: I wanted to cancel my account.

A good way to start, but the recording went on:

AOL: What was the cause of wanting to turn this off today?

FERRARI: I just don't use it anymore.

AOL: Well, actually I'm showing a lot of usage on this account.

FERRARI: Yeah, a long time, a long time ago, not recently...

AOL: Okay, I mean is there a problem with the software itself?

FERRARI: No. I just don't use it, I don't need it, I don't want it. I just don't need it anymore.

After an extended exchange, Ferrari tried to made it simple.

VINCENT: Cancel my account...

AOL: Turning off your account...

VINCENT: ...cancel the account...

AOL: ...would be the worst thing that...

VINCENT: ...cancel the account.

AOL: Okay, cause I'm just trying to figure out...

VINCENT: Cancel the account. I don't know how to make this any clearer for you. Cancel the account. When I say cancel the account, I don't mean help me figure out how to keep it, I mean cancel the account.

AOL: Alright, some day when you calmed down you're gonna realize that all I was trying to do was help you... and it was actually in your best interest to listen to me.

VINCENT: Wonderful.

Total call time? Over 20 minutes. Vincent posted the recording on his website, and responses flooded in. Soon Ferrari and his recording were everywhere. The poster boy for a burgeoning new form of consumer advocacy. A grassroots movement of sharing information through Internet blogs, audio and video files.

"It's not like we're against capitalism, we're against bad capitalism, we're against stupid capitalism," says Ben Popken, editor of the Consumerist website, which posted Ferrari's recording. "It's supposed to be a checks and balances between the forces of a corporation and the forces of a consumer."

If the American marketplace is a shark tank, Popken's site is a restaurant that serves mako. The tagline? "Shoppers bite back."

And bite they do. One Consumerist post reveals that Tropicana's Ruby Red Grapefruit juice is no longer 100% grapefruit juice. Another gave a list of direct dial phone numbers of Circuit City executives, so readers could avoid the customer service center. Photos of a Dell Laptop that spontaneously combusted in Japan went from one blog, to the Consumerist, to the New York Times.

"It used to be that if a company did something wrong you know, 'Well I'm going to have to eat it because they're never going to admit it,'" Ferrari said. "But now it's like a lot of people can get together and say yep, it happened to me."

And it's not just the Consumerist. Video site Youtube has become a haven for consumers griping back at corporate America. A clip that has become particularly popular features an unwitting star: a Comcast technician who fell asleep while on hold with his own company's customer service department.

According to Youtube's site, over 670,000 people have watched the clip. Ferrari said his site has had over 2 ½ million page views.

"If you show an ad for Walmart, it's people tap dancing up and down the aisle. What you don't hear is the guy who had to return a toaster and got hell for it. That's the difference," Ferrari says. "They can always put their image out their, but now people actually have a way to put their opinions out there as well. It's like a competing marketplace of ideas."

And this competing marketplace has caught the attention of corporate America. Remember the exploding Dell laptop? One Wall Street analyst saw it on the blogs and even warned her clients. Comcast told Nightline they have internal and external sources constantly monitoring the blogs for posts about their company.

The term for this is "Ghosting," according to Popken, and he says he has been a victim. After writing a series of negative posts about the company, a representative reached out to him.

"Agents of Wal-Mart have approached me in the night," Popken says. "He said if we keep taking these hits, I should at least take them in person and so he wanted to get together for drinks."

In the end, Comcast fired the sleepy technician, and AOL axed their pushy phone rep. Both companies apologized to the aggrieved customers. Comcast says they promptly fixed the problem and AOL went one step farther: Ferrari's call may have helped change corporate policy.

"Instead of offering you three awesome deals, now they're offering you two awesome deals," Ferrari said. "So I guess they're trying to change their policies."

The Consumerist obtained internal AOL memos sent after Vincent's call. It posted them immediately.