Arrington describes Twitter as an Early Stage Warning System for Brands and Companies

Michael Arrington (TechCrunch) lost his Comcast Internet service a couple of days ago. After 36 hours of exasperation with Comcast customer service runarounds, he vented his frustration about it on Twitter. Since Michael is one of the highest profile techies in the world, his tweets got a lot of attention and other high profile people began blogging and tweeting about it. Within 20 minutes, Michael received a call from a Comcast executive who monitors Twitter and other social media for Comcast-related discussions. Needless to say, a Comcast repair team was dispatched and Michael was back in business post-haste. Here's how Michael under-scored the point of this experience at his post about it on TechCrunch:

"But wow, (Comcast is) doing at least one thing right. Well before most people they have identified blogs, and particularly Twitter, as an excellent early warning system to flag possible brand implosions. This may help them avoid situations like what Dell went through with Jeff Jarvis in 2005.

It’s trivially easy to do a brand search on Tweetscan and create a feed for any new postings. Whether you join in the conversation directly or reach out to aggrieved customers is up to you. But Twitter is the place where conversations are exploding well before they even make it to mainstream blogs. With the information just sitting there, it’s surprising that more brands aren’t watching the tweetosphere.

And a piece of advice to anyone with a Comcast service problem. Skip the hold time on their customer service line and go on the attack at Twitter instead. You may find your problem fixed in a hurry."