Paul Gillin's Library tagged influence →  View Popular

Other Comcast customers have used blogs, too. Dan Ortiz says he called the cable provider at least 20 times during his first month as a subscriber to fix dropped Web access and screen-image problems. Then the 26-year-old bike messenger logged on to The Consumerist, a blog with more than 2 million unique visitors a month that's part of Gawker Media's digital empire of snark. There he found a consumer vigilante's gold mine: a list of e-mail addresses for more than 75 Comcast executives and employees, along with instructions for launching what the blog calls its "executive e-mail carpet bomb."

Ortiz got lucky. After firing off a note copying all those names the day before Thanksgiving, he quickly had an inbox full of out-of-office replies, complete with contact information containing direct numbers. He called a Chicago manager at home, who put his lead technician on the case. Ortiz says a swarm of eight trucks showed up on his block. "Once you get ahold of [executives], they bend over backward for you," he says. He adds that Comcast sent him a tin of gourmet popcorn for Christmas and more than $700 in credits. Even better, he now has the mobile numbers for the lead technician in his area. "I'm not calling customer service ever again," he says.

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