KickstarterForum.org

wgbriefcase wrote:A crowdfunding campaign is a precious gem for all to see. You can't allow yourself to sully that by hiring scams. I had a project live from Jan 11th and Feb 11th with a total funding amount of $12,000 from 546 backers on kickstarter, so I know what I am talking about in these matters

The preparation for my campaign when on for 2months pre-launch. It was during this time that I evaluated every potential marketing partner, and I learned quite a bit on how to spot a scam.

PR is perhaps the most important marketing channel due to the high returns it is capable of. For this reason, I always like to keep PR in house whenever possible. I am usually able to get 5 blog posts from relevant journalists, media, and publications (small ones). Very rarely do I seek outside help, but on occasion I will do so. During my preliminary research, I engaged a total of 10 PR companies who were based in San Francisco. Most of them turned out to be out of my price range, but I digress.

My PR partner needed to target the women's lifestyle blog and media, we had it pegged as a key target market for our crowdfunding campaign. It was during this time that I engaged crowd pr guru, also known as crowd pr ninja, to handle the PR for this kind of online media.

I was pleased with the proposal I received from the crowd pr guru team, it seemed to be a spot on proposal, with specific plans on press release distribution in the necessary media of that niche. The summary was excellent, but their reputation does proceed them, as I was soon to find out and regret wasting the hour meeting I spent with their team.

Why is that? When given PR references from past campaigns they claimed to work with, I was shocked to hear back from 3 out of the 5 founders that I spoke with that they had never worked or heard of crowd pr guru. I did not hire them, and they wanted to charge a high fee of 434 us dollars for their service. I was comfortable with the fee, it did seem to be on the high side, but what was unforgivable was the bogus references. When pressed for an answer on this, the crowd pr guru team told me that I must have emailed the wrong founders. Quite an insult to my crowdfunding intelligence I say. I did not hire them, and told them I would report their antics to the community. I do not know if the other 2 founders had worked with them as I never received an answer.

After that conversation with the crowd pr guru team, I went on to do a bit of research into their marketing agency, just to ease my own mind about making the correct decision in not hiring them. They never followed up with me after that point, not even once.

Our conversation took the course of 17 emails and one skype meeting. They seemed to go to any length just to receive your payment. From what I have read online in the crowdfunding forums is that if you do send them the payment for crowd pr services, that is the last you will hear of them. Crowd pr ninja and crowd pr guru do seem to be the same agency, and I think the name itself is a dead give away.

After that point, I went on to look into other marketing agencies to see if I could find the proper fit as to what I was looking for. Women's lifestyle media is a very hard niche to target, and I wanted to make sure it was done especially well. I looked into a firm called small girls pr, but they wanted 10k for their service, which was almost more than I was looking to raise from my entire campaign. I don't know how some of those pr firms can get away with charging such a high rate.

My partner was very sold on the funded today marketing philosophy, but I showed him the scores and scores of negative reports on that firm and he wised up and changed his mind.

We were never able to find a reputable marketing partner for that niche. Every single firm and agency that we looked into had bad reputations in the crowdfunding community. I don't know why, but it seems as though scam marketing agencies target crowdfunding creators more than anyone else. Such a shame.

In conclusion, we found crowd pr guru going by other names, giving fake references, and having a total of 20 websites with similar names (ie. crowdco, crowd pr ninja, crowdfunding pr). An agency should have a unique name for these reasons alone, or else they may be associated with other agencies. Very poor branding, and if you can't do branding properly, then how can you do marketing properly?

To all who are reading my reports, please note that I do not recommend any marketing agency at all. Each and every one of them have negative reports and accusation against them. We were able to manage to raise $12,000 just fine on our efforts alone, and through our skilled management of our facebook community group we have cultivated.

I always recommend that crowdfunding campaigns do their PR in house. We were able to net $500 from our own PR efforts, sans any kind of pr firm whatsoever. Considering most of these pr firms charge about $500 to begin with, I think that we did all right for ourselves.

Our campaign was quite the success, and we hope to beat that raise on our next campaign, and we do not plan on using an agency at all ever going forward.

FRAUDWATCHMAN wrote:I've been seeing a few posts about this company, so I figured it would be a good idea for me to do a bit of research to help out the community, and make sure that future founders can avoid companies that scam projects. From what I gather, there have been a total of 3 posts about this company in the past 6 months, and I believe this warrants a full investigation into them. I will post my findings below for all to see.

ANALYSIS SUMMARY
I am seeing reports as far back as 1 year online that this is not a legit company. The first instance I ran into this on was reddit (see link 1 below). In this reddit discussion, the author claims that Crowd PR Guru is also TopLevelPr . These claims are unsubstantiated, unless the author has credible evidence he failed to share in the discussion. The last official news from the company was a press release in 2014 on PRWeb (see link 2 below). Their last tweet was in 2015 respectively.

A google search has revealed that there are countless reports and even websites setup for negative reviews about Crowd PR Guru, and these include the claims that they also go by the name of TopLevelPR, and TurnkeyPR. Link 3 below does show some evidence that the company has rebranded, so this does give some credence to the claim that they are the same company indeed. It appears as though it is the same person creating websites, reddit threads, and blog articles about this company. From what I gather, it is a highly disgruntled former client, and I say highly disgruntled because these posts date back to 2015 and continue all the way until 2018. That is a very long time, so I do take these posts with a grain of salt as someone who continues to do this for 3 years may have some sort of mental instability. Although I do not doubt one bit that they were scammed by this company.

Link 1: http://www.reddit.com/r/Crowdfunding/co ... s_scamming
Link 2: http://www.prweb.com/releases/crowdfund ... 061831.htm
Link 3: https://crowdprgurus.wordpress.com/2015 ... ny-a-laugh
Link 3: http://www.thenewestrant.com/2015/06/at ... nding.html


KEEP IN MIND
Their company website is still live at http://www.crowdprguru.com. The reports on this forum do link to this website, so this company is still up and running. The interesting thing is that the logo on their website says "PR Hacker" and upon further review, their website is an exact clone of http://www.prhacker.com. I do not know if exact cloning of websites is possible, but if it is not possible then Crowd PR Guru is also associated with PR Hacker, but this is only if cloning is not possible. Either way, this is proof that Crowd PR Guru is not a safe company to hire at all. For what its worth, I have found a ripoff repot against them as well.

CONCLUSION
No on in their right mind should hire Crowd PR Guru. Their website does not even include their logo and is a clone of a different website entirely. This gives credence to the many reports online of them being a scam. The association between TurnkeyPR, TopLevelPr, and PR Hacker does not have enough evidence to group them into the same category, but beware - as I have read 3 reports online of them being the same company, and TopLevelPR itself has over 10 ripoff reports against it directly.

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