Tonight’s post isn’t about affiliate marketing, per se, but it does focus on an interesting incident that features business, the Internet, and the precise wrong way to go about keeping your customer base happy when using same, so I thought I’d share. If nothing else, it’ll make you laugh, and that’s always good for a Friday.

So, every year, the fine folks at The Consumerist run a tournament wherein consumers can vote for The Worst Company in America. They start with a pile of the companies featured frequently on the website – companies that are known for their egregiously bad service – and pit them head to head until only one “winner” is left standing (and, really, are you a winner if you are the Worst Company in America, and you got voted there by your own customers?) The last one standing is awarded the (un)esteemed title.

So what do you do if YOUR company is on that list?

Do you…

a) use this as a wake-up call to take the complaints leveled against you by your customers seriously and try to fix them?

b) try to figure out some way to make it work to your advantage, perhaps with a humorous ad campaign on your website or on Twitter?

c) ignore it and hope it goes away, because, after all, you are an Important Company, and some whiners on the Internet can’t take your money or your birthday away over some stupid poll, so whatever?

or

d) miss the point entirely and try to cheat?

Well, if you’re smart, you’d choose A. Or perhaps B. Or, at the very least, C.

But if you’re the reigning Worst Company in America – otherwise known as Comcast – then what you actually do is go with D.

Because that’s exactly what Comcast did. Upon learning that they were once again in the running for the title, Comcast, instead of taking the high road somehow, decided instead that their only recourse was to throw a tantrum and try to game the system. So they sent out some inter-office memos to all of their employees, urging them to use company time and resources to go vote for the other guy instead to “show that Comcast is a great company.” Employees were further encouraged to vote from as many different IP addresses as possible, since voting is confined to one vote per IP.

Naturally, this didn’t stay contained within the confines of the Comcast offices for long, and The Consumerist was sent a copy of a couple of the emails, which they promptly posted for everyone to see.

The result? Well, when polls closed on that particular match-up, Comcast managed to pull in 83.39% of the vote, which is something of a landslide. A Comcastic landslide, no less.

And if you read the comments on the entry, you’ll see approximately one metric ton of commenters pausing in their pointing and laughing to go vote for Comcast specifically because of this stunt. Even people that aren’t Comcast customers voted for Comcast as Worst Company because of this stunt. And I’d LOVE to know how many of Comcast’s own employees voted for them upon recieving this missive in their inboxes – I’m going to take a wild guess here and say it’s way more than none.

And so, Comcast gets the dubious honor of winning that round, largely due to their own idiocy and failure to understand both the Internet and how to provide decent service to their paying customers. If they’d let it alone, perhaps their opponent for the round, Charter Communications, would’ve taken it – or the margin of voters would’ve been much less wide. We’ll never know for sure, but it’s funny nonetheless…and it gives us a great example of what not to do when people complain about your business practices online, regardless of whether or not you feel they are justified in doing so.