My experience working with Jonathan I. Gillardi: My experience working with Jonathan "Jon" Gillardi, a self-proclaimed Twitter and social media marketing guru, was so frustrating, disappointing, and horrible over the past six months that I feel it's my public duty to share my experience with you so you don't have to go through what I went through. (This is his personal twitter account: http://twitter.com/jgillardi)
I paid Jonathan Gillardi $5,000 to perform the following three services according to the Twitter Marketing Purchase Agreement between STREVANA, Inc. DBA Jonathan Gillardi and me, STREVANA, Inc. DBA Jonathan Gillardi. (See a copy of the contract here. See a copy of the judge's ruling here! I crossed out my name for anonymity.)
Here is what Jonathan Gillardi and the contract promised to provide for my $5000:
1) Provide me with a list of the Strevana, Inc. DBA Jonathan Gillardi network of personal and client managed twitter accounts and the number of followers for each account upon submitting payment.
2) Build my twitter account to over 10,000 followers in a 120 day period from the date of the contract within a specific niche or category without employing the strategy of following thousands of people in order to get them to follow me
3) Post one tweet per day for 30 days prior to my book launch to the 5,000,000 to 6,000,000 twitter followers in the Strevana, Inc. DBA Jonathan Gillardi combined twitter network of personal and client managed niche accounts and three tweets on the day of the actual book launch of March 17, 2010.
WHAT WERE THE RESULTS? In my experience, it was horrible! Jonathan Gillardi didn't performed a single one of these items! But it gets so much worse...
Cagey and Fishy: Something just didn't seem right working with Jonathan. In my experience, he was always cagey and fishy on the telephone. He rarely answered my questions directly and would answer most questions with a long story that went totally in a different direction from my question. It was almost impossible to pin him down on anything. Worse, whenever I would press him for specifics on my campaign, i.e. how it would work, his strategy, etc. "something would mysteriously come up" and he would end our call. I'm not kidding. In fact, he hung up on me nearly every single conference call we ever had! We would be in the middle of a conversation and I would ask him a direct question about his business or how things would work with my campaign and he would suddenly say something like , "Something just came up. I have to go. I'll call you later..." And he would never call me back! It would take me week's worth of phone calls and e-mails to get him back on the phone, and after 15 minutes, he'd just hang up on me again with some excuse or other. This happened nearly every call we had. It was incredibly frustrating! Someone else Jonathan was working with told me that he did the same thing to him as well!
Let's look at item #1:
Jonathan agreed to send me the names of all of his accounts for which he managed so I could track the campaign. This is an exact quote from an e-mail that he sent to me, “My 154 accounts of which I am the only owner of are the 5,000,000 + followers. The 500 others are client accounts which I manage are not part of the 5,000,000 +. They can be contracted in the future which can bring a larger reach beyond 5,000,000 + but those are on a case by case basis and very costly. Once the contract is executed then the 154 account list can be divulged. As well your @NAME will be in each tweet so you are able to see the tweets being sent in real time which I will show you how to monitor…" Live with Passion, Warmest Regards, Jonathan Gillardi
As you can see in the contract, Jonathan promised the following, "Upon submitting payment, STREVANA, Inc. DBA Jonathan Gillardi will provide me with a list of the network of personal and client managed accounts and the number of followers for each account." After I wired him the money, he sent me the names of the following accounts to follow:
Adam_gilmer
Andrewkamchi
Askjon
Bizinnercircel
Calnutrascicorp
Garycooper1
Gillardi
Hsullivan1
Imarketwisely
Jgillardi
Johngillardi
Jongillardi
Johngillardi
Kellybangert
Kevincox1
Mlmmarketer
Myorganic
Ronniejbiz
Terrystarkey1
Thenewrich
Usaloecorporate
Water4kids
Worldwidescam
Xowiitopteam
But, every time I asked him to send me the entire list, he refused. No matter how many times I asked, he would not send them two me.
Let's look at #2 in the contract:
Build my twitter account to over 10,000 followers in a 120 day period from the date of the contract within a specific niche or category without employing the strategy of following thousands of people in order to get them to follow me.
Over a six-month period, Jonathan builds my account up to just shy of 3000 followers and had over 3000 followers following me in return. The only technique he applied to accomplish this was to follow thousands of people so that they would follow me. He told me repeatedly that he would remove my followers, but he never did.
Now let's look at item #3:
Post one tweet per day for 30 days prior to my book launch to the 5,000,000 to 6,000,000 twitter followers in the Strevana, Inc. DBA Jonathan Gillardi combined twitter network of personal and client managed niche accounts and three tweets on the day of the actual book launch of March 17, 2010.
When I first spoke with Jonathan over the telephone, he told me he had an entire office floor in a big office building with hundreds of people working for him, tweeting all day long to his hundreds of accounts. He bragged about how capable his team was, how automated they were, and his streamlined tweeting system.. I just have to laugh at even typing that out.
About 60 days before my campaign, Jonathan asked me to come up with between 40 and 60 tweets that his team could send out for me once per day for the 30 days leading up to my campaign. I spent hours coming up with these tweets and sent them to him immediately. He told me that they would all get scheduled and automatically sent out, one each day for 30 days, just like the contract said. But it never happened. He sent out about five tweets from five different accounts to like 40,000 people total. I monitored the tweets every day, my @accountname, but he wasn't doing it. I would call him, get him on the phone, and he would promise to start tweeting from all of his accounts, but he would never do it. I have records of every account you sent me above, every tweet they have ever sent, and only three or four of them actually sent any tweets, and only a few times. No other twitter accounts within the entire twitter system ever tweeted or retweeted my tweets. I have proof of all of this as well. I spent three solid days putting together my court case for the judge. I had over 250 printed piece of paper with all the tweets from any account on twitter that had anything to do with my book launch or my account.
The closer we got to my launch date, the more worried I became. Jonathan just wasn't following through with anything he said he would do. About two weeks before the campaign, I finally got him on the telephone after weeks of calling him. To compensate me for not doing any of the things he said he would, he said he would send out one tweet every hour on the day of launch from all of his 154 accounts. He said he would have one of his "many employees" preschedule all of the tweets for me and that it would be a done deal. He asked me to provide him with 30 tweets to do this, and I did.
Here's the best part yet!
One day before the launch, I got him on the phone to confirm everything was set up. He then proceeded to tell me that none of the tweets were prescheduled. He said he was going to be traveling that day and would monitor from his cell phone all of my tweets that I had personally set up from my own account and would re-tweet them from his cell phone throughout the day!!!! Can you believe that? After four months of talking and talking and talking, trying to pin him down on having a solid strategy, having everything prescheduled by his "many employees", he told me that None of them were prescheduled and that he would retweet my tweets from his cell phone while he was flying across the country! I was shocked. I said something like, “What iare you talking about? You told me that you would pre-schedule everything with one of your employees... He yelled at me and told me not to tell him how to run his business!
On the day of the launch, I searched Twitter for every tweet that I made and that I sent to him to tweet, and I only found 5 of my tweets retweeted, and only from four of the accounts above reaching a total of like 50,000 people. If he had done what he said he would do, there would have been hundreds of tweets and retweets for all of his accounts. The search results only turned up less than a dozen for any of my tweets, something not possible if he actually did what he said he was going to do. Twitter tracks everything. I did searches and searches for days gathering all the information about what was actually tweeted. He hardly did anything at all! seriously, he retweeted a few of my tweets from a few of his accounts. And I paid him $5000 for all of this!
I am still shocked to this day that after countless phone calls, e-mails, and all the communication that we had, plus paying him $5000, that it ended up this way. A few days after my campaign, I asked him for refund. He refused and hung up on me saying that we had nothing to talk about. It was incredibly disappointing! I e-mailed him and told him that I was going to take them to small claims court if he did not refund my money. He would never return phone calls or e-mails ever again. So in the end, I took them to small claims court and won. After being presented with the judges' ruling, from both me and the court, he has continued to refuse to refund my money. To this day, he has not done so. (Click here to see the judge's ruling.)
IN CONCLUSION
I created this website to share my experience with you so you don't have to go through what I did. Jonathan Gillardi did not do what he agreed to do in our contract. It was a huge disappointment. when I asked him to refund my money, he refused. After taking him to small claims court and winning, he has still refused to refund my money.
I believe that Jonathan Gillardi is a very persuasive salesman, but working with him was a horrible experience. I strongly recommend against ever doing business with him, no matter how persuasive he may sound.
Don't go through what I did!
I strongly recommend that you never work with Jonathan Gillardi!