Image by via CrunchBaseComcast is an American Cable company headquartered in Philadelphia. The company’s core cable division has more than 24 million subscribers and is the largest provider in the US. Comcast Cable derives the bulk of its revenue from television, Internet, and digital phone services. Its broadband Internet service reaches about 13 million subscribers while Comcast Digital Voice, a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone service, has about 4 million customers. Comcast also has programming interests, such as VERSUS and The Golf Channel, and it owns E! Entertainment Television. CEO Brian Roberts, son of founder and former chairperson Ralph Roberts, control One-third of Comcast.

Comcast’s foray into social media started in 2007, and has continued with various levels of updates and interaction since then. The use of social media though as a binding agent across their multiple business divisions though is unique considering they have business divisions in both traditional cable media and internet services and interactive web sites. Their use of social media as a glue or binding agent for Comcast customers helps them extend their reach and provides a single interface point for customers who use those services, or want to know more about those services.

Comcast Social Media Web Sites

http://twitter.com/comcastcares

http://facebook.com has many pro and anti Comcast groups, which Comcast may or may not engage with, one of those groups looks official, but with the general level of background noise, there is no way to be sure if there is an official Comcast channel on Facebook.

http://myspace – Comcast has many profiles on MySpace covering local events rather than a unified master profile for their company.

http://fancast.com

http://plaxo.com

http://friendfeed.com/comcastqa

http://youtube.com much like MySpace and Facebook they have multiple channels with no unifying structure for those channels.

Comcast CEO Blog – http://www.eliasonfamily.info/blog/ Started October 2008

Comcast has a differentiated and obvious presence in social media; through both begin a provider, and a monitor of social networking services. Comcast owns Plaxo , which is a person connecting service much like Linked In catering to a professional audience. They have a minimal presence on Facebook, but have a heavy exposure on twitter. They also constantly mine the internet looking for people talking about their service, and engage in conversations directly with people who are writing about them using the “Comcastcares” moniker. The reaching out through the Comcastcares moniker was at first was deemed spooky, is now part of the landscape of social networking. People expect Comcast cares to leave a comment on a blog entry regardless of if the entry was positive or negative about the company.

Twitter is the most heavily used of the Comcast social networking channels that reach out to customers. People who are interested in finding out what is happening with Comcast need to go to the twitter channel first rather than going anywhere else on the internet. The Blog however is also frequently updated even though it is also very new (Started in October of 2008).

Comcast has also made deals with portals like Facebook to upload user-generated videos to attempt to get a role in a regular television series. People were allowed to upload small video segments, as a way to audition for the television show, what made this unique at the time was the use of Facebook to help drive attention to the contest .

The Comcast Plaxo deal was viewed as bringing social networking to the Comcast customer portal for Comcast internet users who have a Comcast e-mail address. The idea behind the Plaxo purchase was to provide a unified social networking experience across all of Comcast’s web sites and cable systems. This would allow them to have one system that would tie Comcast users into one social environment that could be used to share and inform across the entire Comcast business model .

Comcast is also involved in Friend Feed, which is updated occasionally. What is interesting is the comments that they have on their Friend Feed, they engage with customers there, as articles are posted on line, they book mark them into friend feed, and customers or interested parties have an opportunity to comment if they also have a friend feed account.

In an interview with influential marketing Comcast explained some of their social networking standards and policies, and feelings about what they are doing.

Things that Comcast is doing right:

They have the beginnings of a unified social networking experience for their customers between all the services that Comcast provides

They are active in the social networking space and use multiple systems to help inform customers or potential customers of what is happening or how to get help

Their CEO BlogsThe Unofficial Comcast Blog – this is one of the more important things that a company can do, making the CEO approachable is always a good way to get more people engaged with the company. This holds true for both internal employees and external customers.

Following their brand, engaging customers, while some of their engagement might be after the fact, they are engaging customers and in many cases showing that, they do listen at the very least. In some cases, they have been able to resolve customer issues on the spot and save that customer from defecting to another service.

Things that Comcast could do better:

They have not integrated their twitter account into their friend feed even though this is a simple thing to do. The friend feed account is separated from their other social networking systems, meaning people will have to hunt and find on the internet to find all the Comcast outposts on the internet. Realistically they should be integrating all their external properties into friend feed or Facebook into a single source of information or single source of links.

Publish their social media policy on line where the ordinary public could get to it, and explain how Comcast cares actually works. That would reduce the spooky behavior when Comcast comes along and answers a blog entry or other entry on line.

Unify the various personalities they have on the internet, one unified MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook accounts would make it easier to find them on the internet. It would also provide cross-links between systems so that people could wander around and be able to find the information that was of interest to them. This could also provide “Google juice” or links in Google amongst the various Comcast pages and systems to provide a more unified experience for users.

Have a community manager, it looks like with all the systems they are involved in, there is no one unifying personality or approach. Having a community manager would help Comcast manage these assets better, and help them be updated over time.

Have their CEO Blog

Summary

Comcast has made extensive forays into social media, with some systems being used more than others are. While there is no unifying framework or site that a person can go to latch onto the Comcast experience, they are very busy in the space, and overall doing very good public relations and marketing of their services and products. The aspect of being in both traditional and new media, and then using Plaxo as a social glue for all these systems is at the very least unique, and provides them an excellent framework to start engaging their customers. The lack of a unifying framework though has not hampered any of their forays into social media, with twitter looking like their flagship external facing service, and other new services coming on line (like the CEO’sunofficial blog) or updating various internet channels over time. They also could use a visible community manager, one who is helping unify the social networking experience. From all appearances there is no single community manager, while it does look like there are people who actively participate in those systems.

Resources:

http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/13/13034.html

http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2008/05/12/daily78.html

http://www.xchangemag.com/articles/539/72h79463591085.html

http://blog.plaxo.com/archives/2008/05/post.html

http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com/weblog/2008/10/comcasts-actual.html