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What Did You Think Was Going to Happen, FunnyJunk? A Lesson in What NOT to Do with Reputation Management

Posted: 13 Jun 2012 04:00 AM PDT

My friend Matt Inman, who I’m sure many of you know as The Oatmeal, has caused quite the media stir this week, and he has FunnyJunk to blame (or thank, depending on how you look at it). On the slim chance you aren’t aware of what’s happening, I’ll get you up to speed. Matt creates popular web comics, and like most content creators, he often runs into the problem where other websites repurpose his content without proper attribution. FunnyJunk was/is one such site, and last year Matt called them out for stealing his comics, posting them on their site and surrounding them with ads, and placing the blame on their users for stealing the content when they get contacted by the original artists/authors.

The feud died down but this week FunnyJunk decided to drop-kick the bee’s nest and served Matt with papers, threatening to file a federal lawsuit against him unless he forks over “$20,000 in damages.” So FunnyJunk expects Matt to pay them, a site that still features his content without proper attribution, $20k for allegedly making “false statements” about them. They play the martyr and deny knowingly stealing his content, once again blaming their users and insisting that they follow a “rigorous DMCA policy” when it comes to copyrighted content (yet naturally Matt was able to easily find hundreds of pieces of his content that were still up on the site).

FunnyJunk’s laundry list of accusations is hilarious; they’re also really butthurt that TheOatmeal.com ranks for “funnyjunk” and accuse Matt of doing that on purpose to screw with their brand given his “background in SEO” (they must not have a very good idea of how search engine rankings work if they still think spamming a page with a keyword is the sole factor in being able to rank highly for that term). As retribution for these heinous acts, FunnyJunk is demanding that Matt remove all mentions of their brand from his website and fork over $20,000 in apology money.

Strangely, Matt wasn’t keen on agreeing to FunnyJunk’s demands. Instead, he wrote a blog post detailing the whole ridiculous ordeal and decided to raise $20,000, take a photo of the pile of money alongside a drawing of FunnyJunk’s owner’s mom “seducing a Kodiak bear,” and send the donations to the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society.

His post went viral in an instant for the following reasons:

The Oatmeal has a huge fanbase
Even people who aren’t fans of The Oatmeal can clearly see how bullshit this threat of a lawsuit is
The Internet more often than not loves to root for the underdog
Lots of people hate lawyers
The blog post was pretty damn funny

Matt raised the $20,000 via indiegogo in a little over an hour; as I write this post the donations are currently sitting at nearly $140,000 and will probably be higher by the time you read this. The story has spread like wildfire, and Matt’s situation is a win-win because he’s:

Bringing attention to his brand
Making FunnyJunk look like assholes (although FunnyJunk did most of the work on that front)
Using his Internet celebrity status and the situation to raise money for and awareness of two great charities.

FunnyJunk, on the other hand, emerge looking like delusional, clueless douchebags. I’m not sure what they thought would happen by threatening the creator of a massively popular web comic and trying to get him to pay them $20,000, but I guess they weren’t expecting this shitstorm. So you’d think that the profound embarrassment of getting bitch-slapped across the entire length of the Internet and back would cause them to quiet down and lay low for a while, right?

Instead, FunnyJunk’s lawyer, Charles Carreon, is trying to get the fundraising campaign disabled because he thinks it’s a violation of indiegogo’s terms of service. So in an effort to de-douche your brand, you try to take money away from two charities. Good call, that’s fantastic reputation management there.

The mind-boggling clueless manner in which FunnyJunk and their lawyer keep digging themselves deeper into this hole of a reputation management nightmare is a fantastic, squeal-worthy case study of what not to do. I really don’t think you could envision a better scenario of failure. Their June 12th deadline to Matt has come and gone, and instead of being $20,000 richer and having better rankings, they’re 10,000 times worse off than if they had just let last year’s quarrel stay in the past and remain forgotten. It’s still early to tell how this will all play out, but I’m guessing it’ll end with the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society each getting nice donations, The Oatmeal getting a boost in sales and a growth of fans and readers, and FunnyJunk pretty much getting the exact opposite of what they wanted.

(BTW, if you want to donate to BearLove Good, Cancer Bad, you still have until June 26th to do so.)

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