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| Verizon's Social Media Reputation Management Team |
If you are a VIP in the media and you write or say something negative about Verizon you might just get a call from one of these guys. Here is a by Chris Dawson from ZDNet and his rant about Verizon’s inability to provide DSL service to an address where he had steadily been serving broadband for the previous three years.
@VerizonSupport on Twitter responded to my angry Tweets with offers of help if you follow them. Of course I’d follow them and send them a direct message with my issues! This, however, was not the panacea for which I was hoping. Not surprisingly, I got a call the very next morning from Verizon’s “Social Media and Customer Experience Team.” These are what you’d call cleaners in a gangster movie. They make everything work for high-profile folks who will keep telling the world about their bad experiences if things keep going wrong. Fundamentally this really bothered me. Why should I get the royal treatment just because I get to write blogs on ZDNet and tens of thousands of people get to hear how upset I am? Here is the full story.Verizon has an unrelenting reputation of phony marketing and social media content farms who try and squash any information that comes up in the media that is negative about the company. If they can't squash the information they will just ignore it until they are forced into responding to it by a legal entity or government agency. Verizon very often goes to extreme means of trying to get comments taken down versus actually doing any thing to resolve the problem. We often say "Verizon's Arrogance Rules the Air" and Verizon has 5X more coverage lies than AT&T. We have also seen many examples of Verizon using social media content farms who try to bury negative blog posts in Google by writing bogus content for the search engines. Deadcellzones.com and our mutual Verizon customers have poking holes in Verizon's dishonest coverage maps for years. Now that the industry is down to two major corrupt companies AT&T and Verizon it just might be up to one of the smaller carriers like Sprint or cable company offering wireless to finally get aggressive about exposing the marketing fraud.