Call the tabloids: I’m gonna be infamous! Ok, not really, but I did just have my first “celebrity” encounter, if you can even call him one, and it wasn’t pretty. Yesterday I visited Command PR’s Web site, the PR agency that will be featured in the new E! series, SPINdustry, produced by Kim Kardashian. The site is a neat idea: flashing lights imitating paparazzi in our faces, since they are, after all, a firm focused on celebrity publicity. Words like CREATE, STRATEGIZE and EXECUTE flash in your face, which is appropriate for a PR firm. But then, there is a short boilerplate (with a missing comma, I might add) and a link to an e-mail address should someone want more information. Absolutely zero content on the site, other than what year the firm was started. No links to previous work, no homepage, nothing.
So now, the drama unfolds. After seeing the site, I tweeted the following message: “WOW, Web site for Command PR, agency that #SPINdustry is about, is basically a boilerplate with flashing lights and a typo. www.commandpr.com.” Innocent enough, right? Giving my opinion from a PR point of view. WRONG. Little did I know that Jonathan Cheben, the owner of the firm, had nothing better to do that night than follow the #SPINdustry hashtag and leave rude comments to everyone that had something negative to say. His comment to me was “@amandaaviles1 Don’t hate, not a good look.” Other comments to “haters” included, “Get over it!” and “Then don’t watch the show!” Right off the bat, he just lost three viewers. Congrats. As a PR person, hasn’t he ever heard of the value of Word of Mouth? That little statistic that we are all taught that says for every positive thing a client/fan/viewer experiences, they will turn around and tell 3 people, but for every negative experience they will tell 30? Sure, there were only a few rude comments so far on his profile, but if he sits at his computer and is rude to every person that criticizes him in the slightest bit (heck, I planned on watching the show but am so turned off by his rudeness/immaturity that I now won’t), he is going to ruin his reputation and get his show off on the wrong foot. And as an added bonus, I was also sent rude @replies from some of his little groupie girls. Classy.
I just find it interesting that a PR person would not know how to positively promote his company and himself. Though his argument would probably be that “he doesn’t need our support and it’s not like he needs clients or money” behavior like this is just plain bad for his image. Twitter is supposed to be used to engage in conversation. Companies/organizations/people should use it to listen to what people are saying about them and learn from it, or at least ignore it. Maybe he shouldn’t have been so defensive and actually taken the fact that I took time out to look at his site to heart. If you have a comma missing, isn’t that the perfect time to correct a mistake? You would never see an organization jump down a person’s throat for complaining; instead, they rush to right their wrongs, or at least consider the comments being made. The whole situation makes this man look very rude, immature and arrogant- things that no PR person should be.
