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As most Americans now, our consumer broadband market is basically a duopoly: we get to pick between our local telephone company (AT&T or Verizon for most of the country) or our local cable operator (Comcast, Time Warner, and Cox are the big players there). And as is often the case when two companies control a market, it’s a choice between two mediocre options.

Houston Chronicle tech editor and blogger Dwight Silverman wrote about the choices in Houston, Texas on his blog recently, but did something interesting: he asked the companies to respond to his questions about them so he could share those responses on his blog:

Comcast and AT&T, help me out here.

Comcast: Please e-mail me and explain why I should continue to be a customer. Explain to me why I shouldn’t care that you don’t seem to care about Net neutrality. Tell me why — with as little corporate jargon as possible — that what you’re doing isn’t evil.

AT&T: Please e-mail me and explain why your actions with regard to domestic surveillance shouldn’t matter to me as a customer. And tell me why, as a customer, I shouldn’t worry about your plans to block traffic you unilaterally deem illegitimate. Tell me why — with as little corporate jargon as possible — that what you have done and may be planning to do isn’t evil.

I’m not the only Internet user concerned about these issues, so when I receive your e-mails — which I hope happens in a timely fashion — I’ll post them there in TechBlog.

I didn’t expect him to hear from them - these are two companies who look at customers the way a tick views a warm-blooded mammal. So my first question was, “Do these folks even monitor blogs?”

But they did respond, and Dwight shared their responses in a follow-up post. (I’m sure it helped that Dwight is a journalist at the daily paper in one of America’s largest cities.)

You can read the responses there (they’re a bit long to quote here) but what’s really interesting is what Dwight’s commenters had to say.

The Comcast guy started off by telling you something you already knew, went on into press-release mode about future features, then concluded by lying to you about BitTorrent.

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You got a response from These 2 companies? I can’t even get them on the phone half the time! Stick it to ‘em Dwight!

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Note that Dan [AT&T] didn’t even attempt to explain or defend this horrible policy. He just brushed it off by invoking national security. As we’re seeing with the ongoing change in the political landscape, the answer “it’s for national security” simply isn’t effective warding off inconvenient questions anymore.

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Dwight, you contacted ATT and ComCast and asked them both to respond to what are loaded questions. The responses you got could have been written by a ‘bots masquerading as PR flacks. They thump their chests and then dance around the nasty bits.

I can’t say I’m surprised by the canned responses from the companies. These are, after all, two companies who seem to use their web sites to prevent customers from talking to them. AT&T makes it nearly impossible to get information about what services they offer and what they cost online. Comcast won’t even tell you the hours during which you can reach a human being; once you find a contact number, you have to jump through numerous voicemail hoops just to be told that no one is there to speak to you. In short, these are customer-hostile outfits who are the last people you’d expect to use social media well.

And if you’re AT&T, you are really not going to use a blog to comment on a situation where you’re lobbying Congress to grant you immunity because you appear to have broken the law.

Even so, there are some lessons here.

1. If you try to engage in social media using PR tactics, people will see through it and call you on it.

2. You can’t use social media to make up for the dysfunction in your organization; if anything, you will draw more attention to it. The comments on Dwight’s posts are striking because they reveal a widespread sense among customers that both companies are horrible, and this little interaction seems to have just confirmed it.

I don’t know if anyone with the power to set policy (as opposed to someone with the power to respond to PR inquiries) is reading things like the discussion on Dwight’s blog, but they ought to be. Comcast and AT&T, like their peers, are pretty safe right now because it’s not easy for anyone else to enter their market and eat their lunch by actually serving customers well. But those situations rarely go on forever. This is the time for these companies to be learning how to delight their customers and make a profit at the same time. These social media encounters can teach them a lot.

Someday, that will be a requirement for survival, not just a nice thing to do. If they aren’t leaning now, it will be too late then.