Never have I ever in my life seen a company throw their name away in Cape Town as fast as Marine Taxis did on Friday. It all started with Shaun Oakes and a piece he wrote about Marine Taxi’s two years ago.

If you go onto Twitter and search Marine Taxis I counted some 80+ Tweets about Marine Taxis and their horrendous public relations effort that happened on Friday. I was following it straight from the beginning and saw it explode on Facebook and Twitter within a matter of hours. By the end of Friday Marine Taxis name had been obliterated on the local scene. I think when Dave Duarte mentions it, you know you have made a right cock up.

Oooooh I DO HOPE I’m allowed to use their logo, as they have not given me the right to advertise on my website! FAIL!

It’s funny though, because you can see the shit about to happen, and Marine Taxis could have saved it, but they just completely blew it.

I loved the following few lines:

Shaun wrote:

“I can go onto Twitter right now, and publish how heavy handed you are being, and in a matter of minutes hundreds of people in Cape Town will be posting tweets about Marine Taxis. Are you then going to contact each one of them and demand that they get signed off approval from you first?”

Ursula, Marine Taxi’s  PR person, replied:

“Regarding thinly veiled pseudo threat, please, be my guest, twitter away or go on to Facebook or whereever else you wish, have fun and do your worst…We too have access to these (and other) social media platforms…so, off you go then….and type to your heart’s content. Maybe the rest of TWITTERDOM would be interested to learn the real reason behind your vindictave story…….. or maybe not……..
Also, if you had any sort of actual contact details on your website, a mere telephone call could have cleared up this issue far more effeciently.”

And from there, it was literally like a hurricane, it was in fact a shit storm! If Ursula knew anything about social media in SA, she would know how good Shaun is at his job and the people he mingles with. That’s like social media suicide right there.

To those of you who missed it, catch the story HERE on Shaun’s blog. Seriously, it is THE funniest thing I have ever read. It’s actually bordering on completely bizarre and the utterings from a PR agent actually sound more like those of a meth head smashing her head into a brick wall. If the blog awards were just a bit later, we would have needed to reinstate blog post of the year, and this would have won.

And that everyone, is how to completely blow your brand. I for one, will never ever use Marine Taxis in this lifetime, or any other lifetime.

Cheers to that!