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PR Firm Unwisely Tangles With Penny Arcade
New submitter FSWKU writes "Courtesy of Penny-Arcade, Paul Christoforo of Ocean Marketing provides a perfect example of what not to do when interacting with customers, especially if you are doing so on behalf of another company. There's name dropping, an ego trip worthy of Charlie Sheen, and even what appears to be a promise to commit libel. Other outlets are already picking up the story and running with it, and an examination of Ocean Marketing's website has generated accusations of plagiarism."
of how not to do your job. I have been laughing all day at this debacle, and will continue to do so. This is a comedy goldmine.
with people who buy ink by the barrel. That's an old saying about fighting newspapers. What's the best way to update that for the internet? "Don't pick a fight with people who have huge daily unique views." "Don't pick a fight with people whose backlinks beat 5 digits." Help me out here.
Now maybe if just N-Control had there own Marketing maybe they would not end up as part of this mess.
Seriously. Re-read the e-mails and ask yourself, "Does this sound like something a sociopath would say?"
If you don't know what a sociopath is, then read Snakes in Suits.
Go Penny Arcade! Not only do they run one of the oldest and kickass web comics for games, they run their own gaming convention, their own charity called child's play (its mentioned in the email thread) and they've featured jack thompson on the comic a bunch of times along with the modest video game proposal thing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Video_Game_Proposal
These emails are also from the president and founder of the company, not some out sourced customer relations kid. So yea, it probably should ruin it for the whole company.
There *are* laws about delivery promises with mail order, particularly if there's prepayment going on. Notification of ship delays, opportunity for refund, etc.
Perhaps online sales aren't subject to these laws?
Otherwise, the might and fury of the postal inspection service will be visited upon the miscreant.
(and, if the payment was made by credit card, there's all those merchant card agreements to worry about... The credit card companies take a pretty dim view of merchants pulling the "pay now, oops we delayed shipment" thing, and pretty soon, you can't be accepting credit cards any more)
Christoforo had an Avenger for sale on his ebay site, which made me wonder if he was diverting (i.e., stealing) them and selling them himself, while the rightful purchasers get stiffed.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
Interesting portfolio... So he went to college for 2 years, leaving in 1992, then vanished for 18 years. Now suddenly he works for this other company. It's almost like he doesn't want people to know what he did during that time...
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
A few months back, TheBloggess got a generic PR Pitch, completely disconnected from what she blogs about. She responded in her usual fashion, by directing them to a page that, in part, had a photo of Wil Wheaton collating papers. (See: http://thebloggess.com/heres-a-picture-of-wil-wheaton-collating-papers/ ) Usually, the PR companies that get this response don't reply or send back a polite response. A VP at this PR firm decided to reply to call her a "bitch". Did I say Reply? I meant Reply All. Including TheBloggess. An e-mail tiff ensued with VP claiming that the TheBloggess should be grateful that they sent her the pitch as their sending pitches to her was what gave her relevancy. She ended the exchange with "Please stand by for a demonstration of relevancy." Then, she blogged and tweeted about it.
Now, if you don't know, TheBloggess is big in the blogging world. She has almost 200,000 followers on Twitter and has a HUGE blog following. Her followers went berserk and inundated the company's Twitter account. Wil Wheaton who had posed for that photo on TheBloggess' site and who has almost 2 million Twitter followers tweeted about it. The PR company was forced to backpedal big time.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The "maker" of the controller is a small company that realized that they couldn't make it themselves because they don;t have the capital, so they made an agreement to have a company in china manufacture it for them. The Chinese company probably did it for close to nothing, but the small company that placed the orders didn't get all their ducks in a row when it comes to manufacturing timelines etc. If you've read some previous complaints, they had previously hired another company to do their customer service for them, again most likely outsourcing because of a lack of capital. After a lot of previous problems, they lost that company. It's not clear if that company bailed, or if they fired them.
It then looks like they hired dave, Whose linkedin page basically says he graduated from Newberry college in 1992, then had no job until he started a small SEO company. SEO as many of you know is a soft art, as 90% of SEO firms don;t actually break the search algorithm, they just figure out some of the effects and learn how to game the system a bit. Well for some reason Avenger decides to hire this web guy to handle their sales and customer service! He was probably willing to do that for close to nothing, and had no idea what a Customer Service nightmare it was. Also previous customer service had made a lot of promises that he couldn't possibly keep, because the maker probably didn;t understand what was going on with shipping and customs and couldn't give him good information on what to accept!
That being said, what should have happened is he should have either - told Avenger he wasn't equipped to handle the scale of the problem, or required enough capital to pay for a team of Customer service people. But like most small business owners that fail, he was an idiot and buried himself and the company that hired him.
This stuff happens all the time, because small businesses operate on small margins, and when you grow to fast it is very very hard to control all aspects of the situation. That being said the controller looks pretty cool.
If this is "not all that bad", I really need to see an example that fits your definition of "that bad".
Clearly it is bad...but there is worse: Gerald Ratner's after dinner speech. Ratner's used to be a high street jewelry store in the UK. This one speech wiped ~500 million pounds (possibly over $1 billion dollars with the 1991 exchange rate - even more in today's money allowing for inflation) off the value of the company, almost causing it to collapse.
...so even when it comes to disasters this guy is still not all that great!
No. You're wrong.
It's important to expose psychopaths for what they are so that society can protect itself.
Dave was understandably angry. I would be also. But he was also rational and in the right.
Paul has all the earmarks of a psychopath. Note that he isn't giving up, is not shamed into retreat, is not changing tactics. Is not capable of thinking that he is wrong.
This sort of exposure should happen more frequently, with harsher results, with more informed discussion as to what psychopaths are, what their behavior traits are, and how best to destroy them. They are not human. They are manipulators, bullies, killers with zero hope of rehabilitation.
Exposing them is a duty, not an act of 'douche-dom'.