Turkel Talks

Posts Tagged ‘TechCrunch’

The New Cost of Digital Infidelity

February 6th, 2012

Buck’s Restaurant in Woodside, California, is ground zero for venture capitalists that invest in technology. I’m in town to give a presentation in Silicon Valley and stopped by this diner to eat breakfast and drink in some of the local culture.

Like lots of small, family-owned breakfast and lunch spots, Buck’s has a vast collection of local memorabilia hanging on the wall. Except where you might expect to find display cases with trout flies or Harley Davidson parts, Buck’s walls are festooned with silicon chips and tech discoveries.

The people look different here, too. Most are young men, conscientiously scruffy in their North Face fleece vests and expensive Italian eyeglasses. The few women who are here are also young and fresh-faced, and look like they just strolled off a ski slope.

Almost everyone is on their smartphone or tablet. Those who aren’t are sharing a presentation on their MacBook Pros. And everyone’s talking pretty loudly. But unlike coffee shops in New York, where everyone talks about financial schemes, or restaurants in LA where the chatter is all about “the business” (movies and entertainment), the talk here is all tech-related “speeds and feeds.”

The couple in the booth next to me is a perfect example. The guy is in his late 30s, studiously underdressed with a severe case of bed head. His date, a bubbly blond in her 20s, is hanging on his every word and expressing her interest with staccato outbursts of self-conscious laughter.

What caught my attention were the words he was using to keep her attention. Instead of the compliments and bon mots of typical seduction, his romancing was peppered with terms such as “milestone-based,” “seed relationships,” “mobile solutions,” “platforms,” and “self-partnering.” I’m not sure all of these are even real tech terms but she kept giggling appreciatively so his rap must have been working.

The other thing he was doing to impress her was listing the various companies his venture firm has invested in. And here’s where it gets interesting: The logo embroidered on his jacket read “Azure Capital” and he was talking about one of their larger investments, an online video site called “TwitVid.” So with a few stabs on my web-enabled iPad we pulled up his company’s site and found his name and CV. His headshot confirmed that the guy on the screen and the guy on the make were one and the same.

Are you following what just happened? Talk about loose lips sinking ships. Thanks to ubiquitous Internet information and a loud-mouthed Lothario, we were able to trace and substantiate an overheard rumor with real market confirmation. If I was a reporter, a competitor or a corporate spy looking for info, imagine what could have happened.

If there were something in it for me or for my clients, I could have tweeted the information he discussed immediately or posted it online. Either way, it’s highly possible that his partners or his competition could have read about him and his secrets before he even got back to the office from breakfast. And with info aggregator sites such as TechCrunch and Mashable acting more and more like scandal site TMZ and actively scouring the web for up-to-the-minute scoops, the info about Azure and TwitVid could’ve been worldwide before lunch. Luckily for my new friend, I have no interest in his business nor in publicly embarrassing him.

But all of a sudden, people everywhere are armed with the digital cameras and web-enabled access devices that turn them into 24/7 Internet paparazzi and the worlds of business, news, and politics will never be the same. Gary Hart, Donna Rice and the Real Monkey Business were only the beginning. Soon television reality shows and whole Internet channels will be dedicated to unscripted, caught-in-the-act user-generated “gotcha” videos.

This revelation suggests that not only should business people, et al, be more circumspect about what they say and where they say it, but that new chances will continue to pop up for rumor-based marketing opportunities. Also, that formerly no-brainer branding vehicles such as logo-ed shirts and caps and vanity license plates should now be used judiciously because of their ability to give the cyber sleuth a quick and easy way to start their search. After all, most of us have secrets and skeletons we’d rather keep hidden in the closet. And today’s technology is going to make that harder and harder.

Tags: Azure Capital, Buck's Restaurant, Donna Rice, Gary Hart, Mashable, North Face Fleece Vest, Real Monkey Business, TechCrunch, TMZ, TwitVid
Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

Can Millions Of Words Earn Millions Of Dollars?

December 6th, 2010

It’s funny. Almost everywhere I read and listen, people are talking about the passive income that can be earned selling books and e-books online. Speakers at the National Speakers Association meetings speak about it; magazines such as FastCompany and Wired write about it, and Tim Ferris even wrote a New York Times Bestseller — The Four Hour WorkWeek — about it.

Yet almost everyone who actually writes online products (and speaks honestly about it) says the same thing: there’s really very little money in it and it takes an awful lot of time and effort.

Truth be told, I haven’t found my blog or any of my books to be directly profitable. The first two (BrainDarts and New Design: Miami) were coffee table volumes published through Rockport Publishers and only produced a little bit of money. The third (Building Brand Value) was self-published and has produced real dollars but mostly because the people who invite me to speak at their conferences often buy 300 or 3,000 copies at a time to give to their attendees. Believe me, the hand cramps I get at the signings are a welcome price to pay for the privilege of distributing my words.

It seems to me that book publishing is like speaking is like blogging is like painting is like recording music, and so on. Lots and lots of people do it and lots and lots of people do it well but very few make any money at it. However, since a small number do cash in, that carrot keeps the rest of us donkeys moving forward and snapping at the end of the stick. We read that Mike Arrington sold his five-year old blog, TechCrunch, to AOL for ±$30 million and we believe we all can do it — and so thousands and thousands of people keep cranking out millions and millions of words, hoping to get their bite of the apple. Ironically, what many of the bloggers are writing about are occurrences such as Arrington’s big hit and that just fuels the fire further.

But the online world continues to grow and develop and lots of people keep trying to figure out where they’ll find their own big opportunity. It’s similar to almost every other craze that came before Web 2.0 — from 1627’s Dutch tulip mania to new world exploration, cyclical real estate booms, and Web 1.0. Except now thanks to today’s burgeoning 24-hour news cycle, we hear about it all the time.

So what is the real value of all of this democratized data distribution?

There’s choice, of course. We no longer have to read just what the established publishing juggernauts think we should read. Instead, we can open our minds to opinions from all stops on the spectrum. Conversely, we can choose to limit our input to our own narrow viewpoint (conservatives getting all their editorial opinions from Fox News and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, for example).

Then there’s the fulfillment of genuine expression — thanks to the Internet we all posses the means to have our voices heard — regardless of whether we have something worth saying or not. And there are the advantages and disadvantages of unfettered access to information — WikiLeaks’ outing of State Department secret correspondence is the timeliest example of this phenomenon.

As my friend, author and copywriter Susan Greene points out, becoming a published author can position you as the authority on a particular topic. Your writing can also help build your brand more quickly and cost effectively than many other forms of marketing.

To Susan’s point, I find that the real advantage of publishing is the credibility that it produces. My blog reaches almost 9,000 people every week and many of them (you?) are favorably disposed to what I write about. At speaking events and agency presentations lots of people comment on what I’ve written and most of them wouldn’t know me from Adam if they hadn’t read my words. And while my published books don’t produce direct income commensurate with the amount of work they took to create, they do produce oodles of credibility — they’re great to send to prospective clients and to demonstrate that we have a unique process and a strong opinion about building brands and selling our clients’ services. The monetizable bottom line is that the notice and credibility result in speaking dates, consulting gigs and agency contracts, which in turn produce hard dollars and continue to provide additional opportunities.

But perhaps most importantly, it makes my mom happy that her son is a published author. Who knew all this new technology would lead to that?