Just the other day, Penny Arcade posted this email exchange between Paul Christoforo of Ocean Marketing and a customer inquiring about the delivery of their new Avenger N-Controller. In just a few short exchanges, the conversation gets increasingly aggressive and agitated and insults and name-calling become commonplace. As a business owner, seeing the representative from a company talk to a client that way is absolutely shocking! No matter how angry a customer may get with your company/services/products, you should never devolve into personal attacks and threats. Your online reputation and business can’t afford to get into a spitting war with your customers, especially in today’s world of social media. Everything you do/say/post/write/comment/upload online has the potential to go viral and be seen by the online world at large, especially when you are dealing with a loyal segment of the Internet community (like gamers) who know how to use the system to their advantage. It’s not a battle I would ever want to fight.

Since Ocean Marketing and Paul Chrisotoforo were under the scrutiny of the Internet once this exchange was made public, Reddit users decided to “look under the hood” of Ocean Marketing’s website and uncovered a big SEO red flag—plagiarized content. The only reason I heard about Paul Christoforo and Ocean Marketing was because a reader of the Search Engine Optimization Journal sent me this Reddit thread that hangs Ocean Marketing out to dry for stealing content to build practically every page of their website, including their business blog and “About Us” section. The reader noted that one of Ocean Marketing’s blog posts looked suspiciously similar to one I had written back in May.

Check out the two posts and see for yourself:

Search Engine Optimization Journal: Who is Handling Your Social Media Marketing?

Ocean Marketing Blog: Who is Handling Your Social Media Marketing?

I could understand two titles being the same, that’s not really a big deal. But even if you just skim the two articles you’ll see they are WORD FOR WORD copies of each other. Normally I regret including the date into the URL of my blog (it’s too long), but for once I’m glad it’s there so you can see that my post went live about a week before Ocean Strategy published their “version” of it. Plagiarizing content is probably one of the few hard and fast SEO rules that every website must NEVER break. Sooner or later someone is going to notice and your online reputation is going to suffer because of it.

If there is anything worse than stealing content and posting it as your own, it might be trying to usurp someone’s actual online identity in attempt to salvage your own reputation. Kotaku.com posted this really eye-opening story—they tried to contact a man named Brandon Leidel, whom they believed was the Director of Marketing for the Avenger Controller. They got a quick reply from Brandon, but the “From” address was cstrophic@hotmail.com, which they uncovered to be owned by Christoforo and NOT Leidel. The real Brandon Leidel eventually got wind of the situation and sent an email over to the folks at Kotaku saying, “I wasn’t going to chime in but since he is replying as me, I can’t resist. I personally can’t stand him.”