Does this still work in today’s day and age? I guess the same can be asked of spam, and the inevitable answer is yes, it does. “He who blasts, lasts,” once joked a colleague of mine who ran direct marketing. Nevertheless, I and many others found Matt Bacak’s hard sell a little hard to swallow. His (social media-friendly, I might add) press release yesterday took every rule out of the 1995 Internet Marketing Playbook and ran with it. I haven’t seen so much hyperbole in one place since WrestleMania III back in 1987.

Now I’m told that Matt is a multi-millionaire, and probably has a lot of great techniques, but his credibility has been hurt a bit recently. This kind of blatant self-promotional, superlative-rich, content-free press release died back in 2002 along with sock puppet corporate mascots. And I should know—I’ve written plenty of press releases since 2002, and none of them have been anywhere near as bad as this one.

Press releases are designed to attract attention, and he did well at that. But can he execute on a strategy for responding to the criticism that’s cropped up all over the blogosphere and the Twitterverse?

I hope so. His supporters are speaking up, and he has come out of seclusion (he’s been teaching a class) to respond to at least one blogger (Media Pirate–you’ve got to scroll down a LOT to find his response). Here’s an excerpt:

I never suggested to my writer to have it even say that I am a twitter god or an expert in social media or to challenge anyone because I’m not. I am new to social media (as you can tell) and have a lot to learn. But, I am very good internet marketer and email marketer. I have over 300k subscribers to my online newsletter. That’s exactly what I teach my clients (email marketing and direct response marketing).

Kudos to Matt Bacaks for coming clean, fessing up, clarifying and apologizing (with just a little chest thumping on the side). Now, get to commenting on all those other blogs that may start to get some Google juice with your name… And think about revisiting your messaging and marketing strategy for the Web 2.0 world…