Today on Twitter news spread like wildfire about Matt Bacak (don’t follow him) and his terrible PR release that he put out on PRWeb. Not only does this highlight my prior post that Twitter has become a numbers game and popularity contest, but it shows that this guy is a self promoting monster. Sure, we all self promote some, who doesn’t? But this guy takes it to a new level of ego and arrogance.
One of Matt's websites! How friendly!
People on Twitter swarmed on this guy. In his press release he claimed himself to be big on Twitter because HubSpot’s Twitter Grader put him in the Twitter Elite for Atlanta, GA. The language used made him seem so full of himself, egotistical and in short a douchebag. It was enough for hundreds to Digg his press release claiming him the “The Biggest Douchebag in Social Media“. It should be noted that Twitter Grader can’t tell that “Atlanta” and “Atlanta, GA” are the same place, and that he’s only highly ranked in “Atlanta, GA” where even a Cat is above him as was pointed out in a comment on Jamie Scheu’s blog, in a post about the ordeal.
You should take a glance at the Search/Summize feed for this guy, as its a riot from the past few hours.
I had a hint from the beginning that this likely wasn’t a one time occurance however, and when Googling his name my Firefox autocomplete put finished out his name with “scam” at the end. That seemed odd, so I selected it and searched for “Matt Bacak Scam“. All of a sudden I felt that I was watching an X-Files or Lost episode where what you thought was the main plot suddenly became a diversion and melted away.
It seems that our friend Matt Bacak isn’t just a newbie in PR and marketing that got it all wrong. No, this guy knows what he’s doing and is a grade A scum of the internet douchebag that makes the guys on 4chan look good.
There have been alleged scams that he’s ran (that seem like 1-step pyramid schemes), every press release has more spin than watching Fox News, oh and he has great sites like http://www.generatemillionsonline.com/ on which he claims he made over 3 million last year, on the front page. Most people don’t even like to talk about their salaries, but bragging about it like that is pretty bad. Other sites like http://www.powerfulpromoter.com/ are just as bad, claiming to make you gobs of money with your web business.
It’s almost too much to type. He puts stupidly shameless self promoting stuff on Digg. Not just blog articles that he wants to share, but ones like “Matt Bacak joins Twitter“.
Then he has the audacity to have a site like “Matt Bacak’s Pansy Report” in which is partially refutes some claims against him, and tries to use reverse psychology and other sales techniques to try to get you to sign up for his stuff. Oh, and he claims in it to warn you about the “Dark side of internet marketing”. There’s complaints on Rip-Off Report about this guy. He IS the dark side of internet marketing. Look at the final page on his Pansy Report. It’s a get-rich-quick scheme.
So let’s be clear, this wasn’t one guy’s small mistake in putting out this press release. The guy’s entire career is a dark mark on the internet, marketing, pr and social media as a whole. I don’t care how much money the guy has made, but he’s clearly one step from being a fraud, and doesn’t make what most of us would term as an honest living.
Sickeningly, since all of this has happened… he’s gotten almost 100 new followers. Of course Matt himself hasn’t responded to anyone via Twitter so god knows what he thinks about this. Incidentally he has his office phone number of 770-271-1536 on his website, so maybe I’ll call tomorrow morning and ask for comment.
UPDATE 12/5/2008: Yea, I tore into this guy a little hard. So did just about everyone. He screwed up. Putting something out on that PRWeb site cost him at least $500, so I’m sure it wasn’t something done without ‘any’ thought put into it. I mainly have a problem with this guy’s ego and tone. I have zero problem with success in social media. I’m friends/acquintences with many ‘big’ people in social media and think they are great. None of them are full of themselves, or have huge egos. I didn’t even know that Chris Brogan or Laura Fitton (@Pistachio) were “big” in social media until someone else told me. Zero ego, just confidence and skill. Matt’s done some of the right thing by partially owning up to making a mistake. He hasn’t done so with the hubris that I’d expect after a massive screwup like this, but he has done well and tried to reach out to the people who made comments about him and for that I respect him. I still think that in general what he does online with “Internet Marketing” isn’t exactly something that I find to be good or wholesome and I’m not sure what real value it offers, more than just pissing people off or offering get-rich-quick schemes. He’s obviously done well in his field, but just needs to tone down things a bit and learn a bit of humility. He charges for seminars, but in him doing this, he’s gotten more than a seminar of Social Media consulting of what not to do.
-
Phil
-
James
-
Sam
-
Lois
-
Ken