Over the last weekend I blogged about the problems I had with Telstra and harassment by their sales staff.

This evening I had a call from someone in Telstra who asked me if he could discuss the Perceptric blog with him. I asked him if he had come across it as a result of the complaint phone call that I had made last week, or as a result of a key word trawl to pick up negative comments about Telstra. He told me that his job was to monitor social networks in Australia, particularly Second Life, Twitter and blogs.

Very quickly he cut to the chase. He told me that he would be happy to arrange to have my phone number deleted from the call out database and would be happy to pass on upstairs any complaint letter that I would like to forward through him.

How amazing is this...?

You can telephone a Telco and get nowhere. And you can blog your problem and get reaction on the first work day after the weekend that the blog was posted.

A big thumbs up for one part of Telstra, anyway. Customer service is alive and well.

But only if you are online and actively blogging, day after day, putting memes into the marketplace.

Telstra - I applaud you for paying attention. Is this the lead that other companies are going to have to follow in order to survive the slings and arrows of the horde, the one that reads blogs and virally transmits the memes that it finds?

By the way, my deduction is that there are rogue elements within Telstra that are the problem. They want to get Telstra fined for calling out to blacklisted numbers. Lets see if I get any more sales calls....