What would be more interesting to watch: a train running smoothly, or a train wreck? As much as your conscience may deny it, you can't help but watch the train wreck.
A train wreck. That’s exactly what has happened to Paul Christoforo of Ocean Marketing. Although I usually post about marketing strategies and achievements, I couldn't help but blog about this PR fatality. It does kinda relate to gaming too, so I can get away with it.
The whole issue arose mid this month when a customer enquired about the shipment of his pre-ordered Playstation-3 Avenger N-Controller, which was stated on the website to be delivered late November/ early December. After some conversing, Christoforo started to email very unprofessional and rude comments. The customer was enraged by the comments and poor customer service. His criticism and frustration weren’t well-received by Ocean Marketing, who threatened and intimidated the customer.
Upset, the consumer forwarded the email to Mike Krahulik from the gaming/comic website, Penny-Arcade.com, who was subsequently bombarded with threatening and intimidating emails by Christoforo. Late last night (27/12/11) Penny Arcade posted the series of emails between Ocean Marketing, the customer and himself, on their news feed.
Ocean Marketing’s and Christoforo’s reputation has taken a hard beating in the last 24 hours as negative word-of-mouse has spread all around the world. In less than a day since Penny Arcade’s post, Youtube parodies have been made, scandalous revaluations have been revealed, and Ocean Marketing has lost a major client.
After reviewing the emails and a previous case of OM’s poor customer service, there were several major notable marketing mistakes performed by Paul Christoforo and Ocean Marketing:
Mistake #1 Aggravating opinion leaders. Even though Christoforo may not have realised how popular Penny Arcade is (if he bothered to check PA’s 75,000+ twitter followers), he should have been still been more cautious, direct and savvy when dealing with this influential third-party. Big or small, gaming websites act as opinion leaders for gamers. And if the site is dissatisfied, the readers are too. By name dropping, name calling, threat throwing and patronising the website and their success status, Christoforo was not only able to personally irritate the co-owner of Penny-Arcade.com, but also permanently damaged Ocean Marketing ‘s public relations with opinion leading website. And you bet-ya’; Penny Arcade had no problem posting Ocean Marketing’s shameful communication and practices to 75k+ global followers
Mistake #2 Ignoring the fact that the consumer is king. One of the first lessons in modern marketing is that the consumer can hire and fire you. Without that end customer (a happy one), a business can easily fail. Christoforo must have missed this class. He interestingly said, though, “Customer service of old is gone, we’re in a new generation now.” It’s true, customer service has changed: we are now living in a consumer-orientated society where customer service and communication has evolved to become one of the most important aspects for an organisation. And telling your customers they aren’t special and treating them insensitively is not an intelligent strategy.
Mistake #3 Poor communication with consumer. At first glance you would think that these emails were informal- perhaps written by some nasty teenage girl. Instead, these unedited and grammatically incorrect emails were sent by the PR representative of Ocean Marketing. Christoforo’s communication was usually vague and simple (at one point the email body consisted of 2 words) and had poor structure. The unprofessional style of writing reflects the frivolity of the communication on Ocean Marketing’s end. This is a bad sign, along with the frequent off-topic ranting by the representative towards the consumer. However, OM could have avoided this whole fiasco by simple and direct communication about processing and delivery of customer orders to consumers.
Mistake #4 Unfriendly, intimidating and demeaning brand image and public relations. From Twitter, to consumer relations, to Penny Arcade, Ocean Marketing has portrayed itself as arrogant, distant and callous:
Arrogant- due to shallow name dropping. The customer and Penny Arcade were both intimidated by Christoforo and his rap-sheet of industry conventions attendance and connections (most of which denied their support and fondness for the representative), not to mention the threats of a PR smearing campaign and arrogant boasting of success. In a recent interview by the MSNBC, Christoforo claimed he was trying to "impress" the recipeints of his emails, with his credentials, but failed because the tone he was trying to convey couldn't be captured in emails. As well as mistakenly added intimidating gestures after these credentials, Christoforo should not have have conversed at a dominating level (degrading and mimimising those he spoke to), nor should he be writing emails whose tone could be ambigious. Another unsurprising revelation from the MSNBC interview is that he doesn't really know the major of Boston, and that he was joking; in conjuction with being arrogant, 'joking' (lying, really) in serious bussiness-related emails is unnessasary and highly unproffessional.
Distant- due to their lack of sympathy for the customer. Even if there are a million things to do you, you should make sure that the customers come first, and if they aren’t, an organisation must be careful to empathise with their consumers, no matter the triviality or who’s responsible in the situation. It is one thing to explain to consumers that organisation is working quickly to deal with their enquiries, it is another to tell them about their responsibility woes of “hundreds of emails daily” and “I’ve got a new born baby”. Sympathy is for the consumer who has been waiting 3 month, or the one who was hollowly promised the product by Christmas, not for the busy PR guy.
Finally, callous, due to the unprofessional and excessive name calling and language, not only toward the customer who was referred to as a baby and a child, but also towards Penny Arcade who was called “amateur at best”. At one point, Christoforo, for some reason, started talking about sperm and balls- Not appropriate or acceptable.
Mistake #5 Underestimating the power of social networking, the internet and word-of-mouse. For a company that claims to be professional Social Media Marketers, Ocean Marketing should have known how fast, far and furiously news could circulate on the internet. Consumers that Christoforo claimed were “one…out of millions” and a website that was “amateur at best” successfully smeared the reputation of Ocean Marketing and Paul Christoforo globally within hours. The story didn’t die as a ranting post on an indie gaming website like Christoforo had hoped, instead it has been picked up by numerous gaming, technology, business and news websites, who now inform millions of people about the professional and personal face of Ocean Marketing and Christoforo.
Christoforo and OM should be reminded of the nature of the internet: everything is eternal. Every email, every un-cited piece of plagiarism, every threat, every name dropped, every angry e-response is captured. A professional social media marketer like Christoforo should know that unless you want the world to see and hear about it, DON’T post it on the web
Mistake #6 Any publicity is good publicity. Christoforo’s loss of sleep, representative position, clients and reputation is testament to this. Ocean Marketing may never be able to recover from this PR nightmare and Christoforo may never have a respectable marketing job again. If only he took a breather before he hit SEND on those emails, especially with Penny Arcade. He baited the gaming/comic site and his consumers to start a PR storm, and when they delivered, Christoforo sure knew that this publicity was never going to be good.
It’s hard to not project my own personal feelings and ethics into this critique; especially when SO many basic customer service, social marketing and co-consideration principles have been ignored. Paul Christoforo is currently in hot water as the angry public slander him and game industry identities abandon him. It will be interesting to see how this prevails.
