Consumer Opinions About Cable on the Net

What are cosnumers saying about you on the Internet?

After my recent blog about the Cablevision and Scripps situation, a couple of individuals commented about my article; and more specifically about the parties involved.  This got me thinking about comments being made about communications companies on the Internet, so I did a little research.

Be sure to have someone from your company regularly reviewing consumer comments on blogs, Twitter, and Facebook.  Comments are being made every day–and many are either negative and/or not factual.

Here are some real-world examples:

Time Warner Cable – A quick search of WordPress.com turned up numerous blogs about Time Warner, including a number of them published by company representatives.  Kudos to them for creating such a presence.

But I also found some posts which are less flattering to TWC, including one entitled “Time Warner Cable Losing Subscribers, I’m One of Them” and another entitled “Time Warner Cable, you lie!”  Presumably someone from TWC contacted these individuals, but no follow-up comments have been posted as of this writing.

Mediacom – I checked Twitter for comments about this company and found a sad tweet from an individual who “has been caught by mediacom! No more pirate bay for me “  There were also comments about some possible outages and a complaint about telemarketing, “Stop calling me about your stupid phone service! I don’t want a land-line.”

Cablevision- I found a similar tweet about a “do not call list” and this important warning, “If my DVR messes up on Johnny Weir (Olympic figure skater), someone at Cablevision is gonna get cut.”   There were also some unflattering comments about billing and technical issues.

Cox- Tweets about Cox included “Props to the Cox Communications guy for showing up at 8am on the dot” and a rant about the emergency alert system testing during the TV show Supernatural, “IT WAS A SAD SAMMY MOMENT!” 

Xfinity – Tweets included a couple of promos from comcastinfo and DigitalMojo, as well as many questions and comments about the new branding, “”WTF is xfinity?” and “I can’t be the only one who thinks Xfinity is silly.  Is Comcast getting its ideas from Dunder-Miflin now?”

Perhaps someone from the NCTA might want to take a peek at how “cable TV” is treated on Wikipedia.  Check out this excerpt:

Fee Structure

The industry strongly lobbies against federal “family tier” and “a la carte cable television” bills which would provide consumers the option of purchasing individual channels rather than a broad tier of programming, sometimes consisting of channels which are not desired by various subscriber segments. These anti-consumer issues continue to garner attention from state governments, Congress and FCC Chairman Martin.^[7] What’s more, the argument calling for an adjustment to the manner in which cable is distributed was reaffirmed in January 2010 when cable subscribers throughout Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York found themselves in the middle of a contentious battle over an increase in subscriber fees paid to the media company Scripps Networks Interactive by cable provider Cablevision. The parties’ contract expired December 31, 2009, and as they were unable to reach a mutual agreement beforehand regarding the amount paid for each cable subscriber, Scripps pulled two of its television channels, HGTV and Food Network, from the Cablevision channel lineup on January 1, 2010 at 12:01AM. 

Somewhat one-sided, and clearly out of date; wouldn’t you agree?

 

~ by ROI Marketing on February 18, 2010.