This is the tale of a pile-on. And by that I mean a lot of other bloggers and such are writing about the same thing. As compelling as the original is, though, the pile-on is the real story. Let’s start with my favorite quote from the whole affair, courtesy of Say Uncle:

“Don’t send bloggers stuff that makes you look like an asshat. They tend to blog about it.”

It all started when an out-of-work man and his wife, Katherine Coble, were intimidated and manipulated by a job search company called JL Kirk and Associates. Katherine describes how the company lures unemployed folk into their offices and uses high pressure sales tactics to squeeze money out of them, in exchange for “representing” them to potential employers. It sounds to me like a terrible deal–job-seekers are asked to shell out thousands of non-refundable dollars up front to *maybe* get some job leads.

Katherine blogged their bad experience, and her post quickly appeared at the top of Google’s search results for JL Kirk. Being so publicly unmasked must have freaked out JL Kirk, as bad press would scare any of us. But as we keep demonstrating on this blog, the ways in which a company engages with disgruntled customers makes all the difference in the world.

JL Kirk went the Darth Vader route. They had their lawyer, King & Ballow, send a fearsome letter demanding she “take down the blog entry…together with entire thread of comments.” They accused her of defamation and “tortuous interference,” and threatened her with monetary damages if she doesn’t comply with their demands by April 13. Confronted by a pissed off customer, their instinct was to actually crank up, WAY UP, the intimidation that Katherine had already described.

This was rocket fuel on a campfire. Within a few hours there were dozens of blog posts amplifying and repeating the whole scenario, including this one by superstar blogger Instapundit. Several others have mirrored her blog posts. The original post, already the seventh most prominent link on a Google search for the company, and referencing articles will likely grow far more visible thanks to all the incoming links and repetition. I’m happy to pile on, because this brutish attempt to shut down a person’s freedom of expression is an attack on all of us. It’s worth pointing out that the EFF, one of our favorite non-profits, exists to help combat just this kind of abuse.

Ironically, they’ve undermined their own ability to smother this issue. As Bill Hobbs writes: “The entire contents of the original post and all subsequent posts have become items of news interest…That’s not good news for King & Ballow or JL Kirk Associates because it means that I and the rest of the world’s 71 million bloggers are perfectly free to republish them in their entirety in the course of reporting on this story.”

It’s sad to see this behavior on a day when I had an overwhelmingly positive customer experience on this blog. Mere hours after describing an accidentally offensive automated email from Geni, an uber-cool genealogy app, the company had responded apologetically. They saw my public airing of the misfire as an opportunity to show they cared enough about my experience to reply personally. Now that’s a company that gets it.

It goes without saying that JL Kirk and Associates is a member of the Hall of Shame.