Sounds like you could stand to look though the tutorials a bit more. If nothing else it might help you phrase your question a bit more clearly.

in a 3D space you have a camera which renders to the window (viewport) and you have objects. If you move the object up, it moves up in the view port. If you move the camera up, the object moves down in your view port.

Therefore what you need to decide is are you trying to position the objects in your scene? Or are you trying to position your camera? If you are trying to create some sort of perspective (like looking at your lettering from above even though it's positioned at the top of your screen) then you'll have to change the position and rotation of both the camera and the text.

You can also use the lookat message to tell the camera what point in space to "look at", such as the position of your object.

As a hint, you want to be using rotatexyz messages. They will be more like the sort of rotation you are used to dealing with (as opposed to rotation which is in Axis-angle or Quaternion).