Slashdot Mirror
World's Worst PR Guy Gives His Side
First time accepted submitter Narnie writes "Follow up to Tuesday's story of a PR rep's lack of professionalism. Kyle Orland provides a follow up interview with Paul Christoforo after a simple email chain escalated into internet infamy. N-Control official response to Paul Chrostoforo's actions can be found here. Kotaku.com even has a whole section devoted to covering the entire ordeal. I for one found myself caught following the news releases and in awe of the combined load forced on penny-arcade's servers from Slashdot, Reddit, Digg, Kotaku, and other news sites covering the story."
Its great, because this guy is getting MASSIVELY screwed right now. I would feel bad for the guy, except that he's a gigantic asshole, and isn't even sincerely apologetic.
Even then though, I start to feel like maybe this all just got out of hand...
Then you read the part where Ocean Marketing's website was DIRECTLY PLAGIARIZED from websites like forbes.com.
Thats it, no more excuses. This man is A CON ARTIST. He has been running a SCAM. He has this coming 100%
Oh, the lulz.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
Not to be clinical here but a thousand times as many people now know about the Avenger then before.
If the product dose what it is design to, most of its target market (including Dave) won't be put off by a 1 month delay or a poor choice of PR firm. The whole fiasco is almost certainly a net positive for the product's sales.
Yet despite all the drama, Christoforo said he hasn't lost any of his other accounts, aside from Avenger.
So could someone please dig up the names of his other clients and post them?
Funny thing is he was at PAX this year and presented the Avenger. There is a Youtube video of him being totally inept. If you get asked if the thing you are selling will be available for PS3 then you don't talk about entering that market. When you talk to customers or interested parties you don't talk to them as you would do to your business account representatives or marketing chums. He comes over barely prepared and unable to stress the good points of the thing he is supposed to sell. Christoforo represents only Christoforo.
Also attending PAX and not knowing who Gabe is is barely competent. Finding out who he is and saying "He has a lot of connections, ones I want too." is a clear indicator that reality burns up on entry of the atmosphere of planet Christoforo.
I deal with sales critters on a professional basis. The best ones are the ones who honestly want to do right by their customers. Which requires a bit of empathy. I watched a sales rep of my company giving a potential customer the phone number of the competitions sales rep because they will do better by them. A sales critter at my local electronics shop told me I don't want a G15 if all I want is a good keyboard. Sold me a generic Cherry keyboard for 20 bucks. Both did build a bond with their customer and both generated huge repeat business.
A masive ego only impresses for the first few moments and needs to be followed up by substance. That substance better not be warm, stinky and brown.
20 minutes into the future
As a professional, you're not entitled to having bad days.
This goes double because email isn't exactly an immediate medium. It is utterly trivial to delay responding to a given email(or even fake an out-of-office if you simply must have more time).
In situations where you can't escape and you have somebody physically in your face, right now, some risk of snapping inevitably exists. Some people bear up better than others; but it can happen. Flipping out over email, though, is flipping out even after you've had the benefit of choosing how much time you need to calm down, drafting as many revisions as you need, and knowing for certain that this text is on the record... Everybody has a breaking point, and a sufficiently bad situation can push you to it; but email is far lower pressure than most situations.