Several years ago while working on the restoration and transformation of my 1983 VW Vanagon named Zeno I used a product called POR-15 to seal everything below the bathtub line. I spent a considerable amount on the product, but in the end I was very pleased with the results and then recommended POR-15 to others. In the process I also created a fan site on Facebook. Since then the POR-15 fan page has simmered along nicely. Several years worth of people saying things like “Love this stuff on the cars, not my hands… Tough ass paint” or “I just put the third coat down on the floor of my ’68 Mustang Coupe…….in a few hours I’ll be applying the POR-15 Topcoat.” but not much else.
Frankly beyond being part of a small crowd of people who sealed parts of a car from rust the page wasn’t much use to me specifically or to anyone else.
Recently I received a message from someone claiming to represent Absolute Coatings (the company that makes POR-15) as their “Brand Manager”. Previously, I’d get messages asking me if I’d like a brand manager or could I point them in the direction of our SEO representative. My response was cut and paste, “just a fan page, you’ll need to talk to the company here.”
This guy was different, basically he was, at best, abrupt and demanding (without actually making demands). There was an exchange of messages, I could tell that he had been hired to run a low level social media campaign for Absolute Coatings even before he made allusions to the effort. And boy had my fan effort hopelessly complicated things for him.
Let me make it clear at this point that at no point was the Facebook page in question made to camp the name POR-15. This seems like a pretty smarmy way to make a living in my book so it never entered my mind, but the implication was made in our messaging exchange and that bothers me. I don’t need to read between the lines to figure out what you want me to do with a fan page on a third party resource like Facebook “brand manager.”
So you’re wondering what did I do? Well, while I made the offer to transfer admin to the Brand Manager Facebook wont allow the transfer unless the new manager has already liked the page. I went out of my way to inform said brand manager that he needed to like it first and got nada in response. Waited. Waited some more. Got fed up with waiting. Un-publised the page, scheduled it for deletion, and turned off messaging.
So here is today’s lesson. Don’t be a dick, it will cost you time. I suppose that Scott and the folks at Absolute Coatings are not to blame for hiring a pushy punk, but its an unfortunate reality that leads me to question future use of the product. Just a little bit of grace would have gone a very long way here, I clearly stated, up front, that I was happy to turn the page over. Instead I got a snarky fuck-you. Facebook will only delete the page after a two week waiting period.
FeetForBrains 