Mastercare: having a lot of fun helping Marie's campaign against Dixon's Stores Group, and their clueless customer service arm, Mastercare. The novel thing about Marie's blog is how it captures the powerlessness and agony of the consumer on the recieving end of automated, scripted CRM. This is what happens when companies like DSG (PCWorld, Dixons, Currys) view customer service as pure cost and overhead.

The Cluetrain Manifesto was largely about the way clueless companies alienate their customers by attempting to automate them, and how the Internet can change that by opening a new channel for a real person to person conversation. I do fear that corporations that could learn from it may now dismiss it as part of late 90s dot com hype. Blogging is a new kind of channel that gives a near real time public voice to the consumer. Can it help swing the pendulum against companies that treat their customers like DSG ? I hope it can, especially when it's combined with the power of Google Adwords.

Doc Searls recently wrote insightfully on Google Adwords. His article prompted the idea of using Google Adwords in Marie's guerilla campaign. Buying one of those little coloured boxes on the right of a Google results page is incredibly cheap. At the cost of 4 pennies per click through Marie bought a sponsored link for "Mastercare" as a search term. Try it. Then try this. If Marie's ad doesn't come up it's because she's hit her daily spend ceiling at Google. When it does come up it's mixed right in with Dixon's own ads. Retailers like DSG spend millions developing and promoting their brands. But Google Adwords allows Marie to get her message in on a par with DSG's. And her message is a truthful, grassroots account of what it's really like to be a DSG customer with a problem. Radical !