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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."
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.
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
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
Yep. The only time "bad" PR is good PR is when it is outrage by a small segment or manufactured entirely. So like when some people got up in arms about the nuke scene in Call of Duty 4, it wasn't actually bad PR. While those people were complaining and the media was reporting on it, the controversy made gamers say "I need to see that!" The actual customers were interested and thus it was good PR in reality.
When you get PR for something like this, or for criminal activity or whatever it is just flat out bad PR. It scares customers away and you never want that.
It's not just the drugs, he really does have psychological issues. Notice how in both his apologies he mentioned making the mistake of underestimating the people he was replying to, demonstrating a total lack of remorse. He's not sorry for what happened, his only concerns are the career-ending consequences. Bullshit apologies are expected as standard procedure for damage control in situations like these, but normal people tend to adopt a stance that the public can empathize with.