P.T. Barnum once famously said that there is no bad publicity. Of course, if you are, say a guy who is going bankrupt, or marrying and divorcing blondes or hosting an outrageous reality television show where you are firing people, like say Donald Trump, you probably like the idea of bad publicity. But if you are an entrepreneur running a technology company, let me tell you, there can definitely too much publicity. Infact, overexposure in media is actually bad for you. Let me elaborate.
In my long tenure as a technology writer, I have seen many patterns. The worst of them, from a startup perspective, is overexposure. During the dot-com mania of the 1990s, there were a few people who were constantly in the press — Naveen Jain (Infospace) and Jeff Dachis (Razorfish), to take just two examples. (See 60 minutes: DotCom Kids) They were always available for a quick “quip.”
Most of these quips were pretty worthless. The more these experts talked to the media, the less they had to say. After a few months of seeing their quotes, I had developed a certain kind of blindness to these entrepreneurs and what they had to say. I mean, if you read something again and again in half-a-dozen magazines and a handful of online publications, you kind of stop paying attention. Today’s technology media landscape is worse – there are just too many publications, both new and old, all looking for comments.
I totally understand that startups need attention. In order to get it, they hire media relations professionals who try and get their comments into every possible story, regardless of its impact on the overall strategy of the company. That’s their job. In fact they get paid by the media mentions! But it is the wrong approach — and extremely short-term thinking.
Why? Talk too often, and the media will soon think: He has nothing new to say — didn’t I hear him talk about this recently? Too much media exposure means that the focus of media attention starts to shift from the product (and the company) to the person, and that is never a good thing.
Now look at Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook. She doesn’t make a statement every day and doesn’t comment on everything. Whenever she speaks to the media, it is about Facebook’s operations, revenues, goals and company’s strategy. It is a good strategy to emulate. Say you are Brian Chesky (of AirBnB), it makes perfect sense for you to talk about the emergence of people-to-people economy and positioning AirBnB from that context. It makes AirBnB seem part of a much bigger movement. Staying focused on the bigger picture and your product is what it means to be “on message” without being boring or obvious.
So unless you are the equivalent of Donald Trump, keep in mind, too much publicity is bad for you.
In 2011, I took a stab at focusing my writing only on few but important topics — topics that kept me intellectually engaged and I cared deeply. The idea was to create a column/email called Om Says. It was a good experiment for it allowed me to be selective. In 2011, I published 70 Om Says. More importantly, many of you engaged – be it on Twitter or in the comments section of the blog or via email. Those conversations, helped trigger new thinking.
At the end of 2011, when I look back, I am still pleased with the topic choices I made. Though I wish I had spent more time on headlines and did a better job of self editing. But that is something to look forward to in 2012. I guess despite 10-years of blogging, I have quite mastered it quite yet.
Earlier this morning I shared my top dozen picks for 2011 with readers over on GigaOM, but here I want to share some posts I think would be extremely useful for fellow entrepreneurs and startup founders. These are are based on my own personal observations.
Read the rest of this entry »
It has been more than three years since I launched my personal blog.
In the time that has since passed, the world of blogs has been turned on its head. Many of the readers who typically would surf on over to the blog are discovering content through social platforms such as Twitter.
The new reality for blogs is that they need to utilize those social platforms and come to terms with one simple fact — conversation now happens in many places. Blog comments are no longer the only measure of engagement. More importantly, many of the readers are using their smartphones or iPads to access blogs and blog content.
When mulling over these changes, I began to wonder how a blog designed primarily for a mobile-first experience might fare. Of course, there would be a web-based version, too, but it would be not the primary focus. Mobile first meant — a great reading experience that allows readers to focus on things that matter — words, photos and videos — not the design flourishes and other elements such as social sharing icons.
Mobile first meant that the layouts would adapt themselves to the display. The iPad version would adapt to that device’s screen size while the iPhone/smartphone version would be even more barebones. The beauty of thinking about “mobile first” is that you get to use the latest in browsers, forget about backward compatibility and at the sometime are able to deploy newest technologies and hacks.
Of course, all these were simply thoughts in my head up until four weeks ago when I got access to the Om.Co domain. It was the next best thing versus Om.com. My big thanks to Dot.Co folks for helping me get the super-short web address! The new domain made me think perhaps it is time for me to re-envision the site and implement all the crazy ideas I had about a “mobile first” blog.
Read the rest of this entry »
Earlier this week, Dev Anand, a well known veteran Bollywood actor passed away. He was over 88 years old and he died because of cardiac complications. I was one of his biggest fans, something I share with my father who could at one point name every movie, recite every dialogue and talk about Dev Anand’s movies forever. He saw so many of his movies that I fell in love with them.
As a young writer in India, when being part of Newsmen Features, I got a chance to meet Mr. Anand. It was a wonderful conversation and he treated me – somewhat of a rookie writer – with a lot of respect and kindness. In my one and only interaction, he proved to be a gentleman and a star. I came back to Delhi and wrote about him in a column, that was widely circulated. That was almost two decades ago. At the time, Mr. Anand was a spritely 70.
Last night I emailed my mentor Mukesh Khosla who runs Newsmen Features, a New Delhi-based news agency and editorial service. We went down the memory lane. He dug up my article from his archives and sent it along. I share with you the article (written with many Indian colloquialisms and spellings intact), more as a celebration of Mr. Anand’s life and not as his obituary. For me, he will always be forever young.
Despite 70‑odd summers, Dev Anand is still the everyman’s hero. A man’s man and a woman’s dream. Almost half a century after his entry into films, video cassettes of his old hits are still being snapped up by teenagers who have never seen a better romantic hero than him. In fact at 70, Dev Anand looks as if he could play a couple of sets of tennis, pack a pint, look at the time and say, ” How about a three‑kilometer jog……?”
Read the rest of this entry »
Last month I published my reflections on ten years of blogging, constantly. With over 11,000 blog posts, I have formed some ideas about what are some dos and donts. They are not rules, but my own guiding principles that have helped me stay focus and keep doing what I love to do – blog. Hope they are helpful.
- Blogging is communal: In 2008, I wrote that “blogging is not just an act of publishing but also a communal activity. It is more than leaving comments; it is about creating connections.” That is the single biggest lesson learned of these past 10 years. Every connection has lead to a new idea, new thought and a new opportunity.
- Being authentic in your thoughts and voice is the only way to survive the test of time.
- Being wrong is as important as being right. What’s more important — when wrong, admit that you are wrong and listen to those who are/were right.
- Be regular. And show up to blog every day. After all you are as fresh as your last blog post.
- Treat others as you expect yourself to be treated.
- Blog if you have something to say and respect your reader’s time. If you respect their time, they are going to give you some time of their day.
- Wait at least 15 minutes before publishing something you’ve written—this will give you enough distance to edit yourself dispassionately.
- Write everything as if your mom is reading your work, a good way to maintain civility and keep your work comprehensible.
- Blogging is not about opinion but it is about viewing the world in a certain way and sharing it with others how you look at things.
- The tenth lesson comes from Kevin Kelleher when he was writing for us back in 2010. In his post, How the Internet changed writing he noted that forget tailoring headlines and posts for search results and remember that “writing with snark is like cooking with salt — a little goes a long way.”
Hope you get sometime to read the complete post over on GigaOM.
