Transparency - Learning from Comcast and Famous Frank

Fascinating article, The Dark Lord of Broadband, about Comcast in what I *think* is the February issue of Wired. (What? It isn't 21st century to make the issue month clear or something? Sheesh.)

As we've been becoming increasingly convinced of our need to become actively transparent to our donors, fielding all their questions publicly, responding publicly, and doing so without pretense or evasion, it's helpful to see good examples at work. Comcast's Famous Frank is a good model:

Brian Roberts is learning. And part of his education has come from an employee nicknamed Famous Frank. Last spring, a middle management customer-support executive named Frank Eliason, 36, started Twittering in his free time. Eliason is relentlessly upbeat and hated searching for "Comcast" on Twitter and seeing only slams. He asked for permission not just to defend the company but to actually try to fix the problems. If someone on Twitter complained about, say, an Internet outage, he'd start troubleshooting for them.

Eliason—who goes by the online handle comcastcares—had already been gaining attention, and accolades, when one of Comcast's senior executives realized that maybe Roberts should be clued in. She left Roberts a voicemail—voicemail, not email, is the preferred form of communication among Comcast executives. "You're doing what?" he responded in his own voice message. "We're just letting him go at it?" Nevertheless, he did nothing to stop it.

Eliason was actively trying to prevent customer complaints from spiraling into angry vendettas. These weren't just regular users, either, but Twitter users, many of whom were likely the same early adopters who love BitTorrent, who complain to the FCC, who might even enjoy building an anti-Comcast blog. Roberts began following the Twitter feed, and he realized that this was ... good. He OK'd adding people to Eliason's special forces team, overruling Eliason's direct boss.

Soon, Eliason became a minor Internet celebrity, hence his new nickname inside the company. He was asked to speak at conferences as well as to other companies struggling with similar problems.

Thanks to Famous Frank, Comcast began thinking about going even further. The weekend that the company published its response to the FCC—outlining how it managed its network and how it planned to change—one of Roberts' lieutenants suggested something even more radical: having ordinary company engineers go on message boards to answer questions. It was the kind of proposal that violated every tenet of the old cable code of business, and the matter could be settled only at an executive board meeting on the 52nd floor.

Roberts, sitting with his back to the window, listened to both sides. Then he declared it was time to be a bit more transparent. He finally got it. He was turning a page. "I think we should do this, but we all have to have thick skins," he said. "People are going to vent. But that's all right."