Aussie telco downs own website poll

AUSTRALIAN TELCO Telstra has had to take down a poll on its website after an embarrassing result for the company. The site - www.nowwearetalking.com.au - was established to give Telstra a chance to promote itself.

The site is billed as a place "Where you can have your say, and Telstra listens, on issues affecting our company and the telecommunications industry as a whole.”

However, in response to a poll that asked, “Who do you think is blocking high-speed broadband for Australia?”, an astonishing 97.1 per cent of the 13,000 respondents claimed it was Telstra, largely overlooking the other options - the Government, the Regulator, the Telecom industry and ‘don't know'.

The result is a slap in the face for the telco. While it has not rated as well as it would have liked in other polls it has run, it has not taken them down. The editor of the site, Rod Bruem, has however claimed that the poll has been hijacked, and that this is the reason why the poll has come down. He claimed that the sheer volume of votes indicated that the poll's results had been skewed by a ‘computer program' that deliberately interfered with voting.

Whether this true, or whether the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's claims that the formerly-public company has held back the provisioning of the next-gen broadband has hit home with the public, the result is embarrassing.

If you listen to Telstra chief Sol Trujillo, the Australian people need to be patient, as the company has been held back by being partially government owned, and is still being held back by government and ACCC over-regulation.

If this, and the other (verifiable) poll results are taken at face value, than the NWAT website has some way to go. It's just this sort of would-be guerrilla marketing that often gets big corporate types into trouble - witness the less than positive reaction to the Coca Cola company's “The Zero movement website, and the lead balloon that it quickly became.

For those interested, the results can still be found on the archive page, however, over here. µ