I've written time and time again about the need to stay on top of things when it comes to finding out what people are saying about your business online. I've also pointed out how essential it is for businesses to realize that anything and everything that they and their employees do could come back to bite them in the online butt. Those two points were demonstrated to American Online in graphic detail over the past two weeks as a disgruntled customer and a five minute audio tape made the rounds through cyberspace reaching not dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people...but reaching tens of millions.

It all started when Vincent Ferrari decided to cancel his American Online account. Ferrari had heard that people often ran into problems while trying to deal with pushy "retention consultants." In fact, American Online's cancellation customer service line is so successful, that a full 50% of callers ultimately end up sticking with the company. With that in mind, Ferrari decided to make a tape of his call so that if he did run into problems, he'd be able to share them with friends via his blog.

Things went even worse than Ferrari expected and he quickly made a blog post sharing his experiences. When his server crashed a short time later (thanks to more than 3000 Diggs of the story), Ferrari posted the sound clip to Putfile.com (where it has snagged almost 200,000 downloads so far) so that he could try to salvage his own server. Soon, the story found it's way onto the Today Show, with it's obvious audience of millions. Not long after, the clip showed up on YouTube, where it's since been downloaded more than a quarter of a million times. That's not even counting the playing of the clip on multiple radio shows, almost all major networks and most major metro newspapers.

In other words...one man with one tape recorder and one blog caused a public relations nightmare that could cost the company millions in sales.

I'll say it again...blogs are powerful.