"A discovery was made about an EW employee which was highlighted in the thread just moments before the entire thread was deleted. It was the most damning thing I had ever learned about EastWest, and most of you who were following the thread probably hadn't had the chance to read that final post.
Here's what happened: While most of you saw that the user "UltimateComposer" had been exposed and proven to be an employee of EW by the name of Jonathan Kranz (which he continually denied), there was another suspicious user (later on in the thread) defending EastWest named "ETM Dude." While not quite as hostile as UltimateComposer, ETM Dude was broadly defending EastWest and pushing the notion that they had done nothing wrong. Throughout his defense, he ignored the fact that EW had sent in a shill to act as a satisfied customer. Sending in a shill, I think we'd all agree, is definitely "doing something wrong."
So I was suspicious that this "ETM Dude" was another shill. He had been registered at GS for 3 years with 250 posts to his name, but there were a few alarming facts surrounding this account. He had disabled his vCard contact info (which was how I identified UltimateComposer) and he'd disabled all private message and email communications. "Red flag," I thought. Well upon googling "ETM Dude" I learned that pseudonym was registered at ProSoundWeb, Northern Sounds, MOTU-Nation, and soundsonline-forums.com (EastWest's own forums for troubleshooting, discussion, and announcements of sales/deals). On ETM Dude's user profile at ProSoundWeb, his real name was listed as -- who else -- Jonathan Kranz, the same fellow who was busted for shilling earlier on in the EW thread over here at Gearslutz.
So at this point we had two shill accounts (created by the same EW employee) infiltrating the EW thread, and not surprisingly neither of those accounts had a signature or any other means of identifying an affiliation with EastWest.
Now let me go back for a moment to ETM Dude's (Jonathan Kranz) accounts on the other above-mentioned forums... a few of his accounts (including the one at GS) had been active for the past 3 years, and way over 50% of his posts were EastWest product-related. Many of his posts were just alerts of new audio demos for EastWest products. Not terribly harmful, I don't think.
But the truly troubling fact at play here is/was the existence of an "ETM Dude" account at EastWest's own soundsonline-forums. (One of) Jonathan Kranz's official positions with EW is moderator at their forums. As moderator, he keeps the peace and jumps in with help whenever he's able to do so, much like a moderator at any other forum (I won't go into the claims that EW censors their forums -- I haven't witnessed it first-hand). Yet Kranz had created this alternate persona "ETM Dude" which he used to inflate the perception of customer-satisfaction among EW's user base.
I read through each one of Kranz's 137 posts as ETM Dude at soundsonline-forums.com and not once did he identify himself as an affiliate of EastWest. Common practice for ETM Dude would be to interject in threads that were critical of EW's policies, with statements like (paraphrasing) "I'm sorry but you are flat out wrong." He would jump into a thread about lackluster EW phone-support and say "I've called them over a dozen times and have always had a pleasant experience." He on numerous occasions pointed out how great a job EW staffers were doing. And a healthy portion of his posts seemed to be written with the sole intention of convincing other users to jump on some killer monthly sale. Finally there were the flat-out propaganda posts: "New PLAY version 2.X. Working great! Problem free!!!!"
This sheds a whole new light on Doug Rogers' plea for us all to visit the EW forums and see what a happy, satisfied, problem-free user-base he's got (which Doug fittingly refers to as his "database").
I felt it was important to expose EastWest for what Jonathan Kranz has been doing over at their own forums for the past 3 years. Not to mention all he's written as a "satisfied customer" at Gearzlutz, Northern Sounds, and MOTU-Nation. Doug Rogers often seems to bank on the selling point of "Well, why don't you come over to our forums and just see for yourself how happy everyone is." If an invitation like that was Doug Rogers' last line of defense amidst a bad PR storm, my biased opinion says he's finally lost his last little bit of credibility.
