The Times catches up with the fact that every customer interaction is now part of marketing - they have an analysis up of the "please cancel my AOL" thing that made the rounds a few weeks ago (as well as the "sleeping Comcast technician" incident). Here's their take:

How should Mr. Finkelstein have responded? By writing a letter of complaint to some distant regulatory authority that will require years before it acts? Far more effective means are now at hand. He recorded, then uploaded the video clip with some humorous asides about missed appointments and unfulfilled promises, and got immediate satisfaction in the act of sharing. More than 500,000 viewers have watched Mr. Finkelstein's video "thank you" note to Comcast.

AOL and Comcast executives in charge of customer service may long for the good old days when they had to deal only with a finite number of federal regulators and state attorneys general, not a universe of millions of Web-savvy customers.

Maybe those execs should buy Glenn Reynold's book :) The fact is, every customer interaction is now a potential marketing incident - and the more Kafkaesque ones can create huge blowback. To wit - AOL has been flagged by regulators for this sort of thing before - but it didn't take. This sort of thing has a far better chance of succeeding, because it puts the negative experience of the people affected right on the front burner:

AOL internally boasts to its employees that third-party verification is an "industry-first initiative to guarantee quality," but isn't this like a parolee showing off his electronic ankle bracelet as proof of how trustworthy he is? The public embarrassment of the settlement faded with time, but then Mr. Ferrari's five-minute recording undid 10 months of public relations repair work.

Seems that even the slow learners at AOL have finally gotten the message:

On the Monday after the public debut of Mr. Ferrari's call to AOL, Scott Falconer, an AOL executive vice president, sent an e-mail message to company employees alerting them to Mr. Ferrari's blog post and warned, "On any interaction, you should assume that it could be posted on the Web."

That's only been obvious for a few years now. You would think that a supposed tech company would get that, but their failure to adapt to the broadband world has led them down a really stupid path. Reading the rest of the article, it sounds like they'll need a few more object lessons before they really get it.