SharedBook: On Demand

Perception = Reality

Given that I find a marketing lesson in, well, everything, the one we got delivered to us yesterday morning by JPMorgan Chase was a no-brainer.

Hastily, JPMorgan Chase increased its offer for the critically-injured Bear Stearns five-fold, from $2 to $10 per share. Now why, we ask, would the acquiring company voluntarily agree to a quintuple multiple on an already accepted bid?

Because the Bear Stearns shareholders, screaming like proverbial stuck pigs, felt maligned.  Not to mention poorer than when they acquired the stock.  So, in order to calm the waters, JPMorgan Chase is coming up with the cash.

The marketing lesson?  Glad you asked.

Bear Stearns traded for around $30 the Friday before it sold for $2.  The week before that, it traded north of $70. Around a year ago, it was around $180.  With this as the context, why offer $2?  Why not zero?

At least if you offer zero, you get to be the hero!  “Look, guys – as the acquirer, we’re taking on responsibility for your dodgy sub-prime deals, to the tune of $30 Billion.  You’re tapped, so we’ll take it from here, and protect you from going completely under.”

Instead, it was as if they hosted a dinner for 6 at Le Cirque and left a $5 tip.  The $2 offer, seen as insulting, had the opposite effect of the message they had intended, that of financial saviour of the venerable brand.

Now they’re up to an offer of $10/share to allow everyone to save face, and to stave off potential lawsuits and whatever else.  Yes, this is an egregious oversimplification of a complicated financial transaction, but there’s a very simple point at the bottom of the whole mess.

You see, in today’s wired world, EVERY action sends a message that is delivered almost instantaneously, and EVERY message becomes a touchpoint that your constituency uses to form and revise their opinion of your brand.  In this case, protectors get seen as pikers, because one portion of their actions made them seem penurious.  Perception once again equals reality.

A good lesson for me, anyway.  How about you?

Exploring Social Media

If you haven't seen it already, Stephen Baker and Heather Green have updated their 2005 "Blogs Will Change Your Business" BusinessWeek story to "Social Media Will Change Your Business." The article is full of updated statistics and observations and I think it could be helpful to anyone interested in raising their online presence.

Go Giants!

We haven't featured video on this blog yet, and today seems like a good day to start!

On our way into the New York office this morning, most of us encountered throngs of New York Giant fans already lining Broadway in anticipation of today's ticker tape parade. What a sight! I haven't found any video of the actual parade yet, but here's an Associated Press report that was done in advance. When the parade started at 11 a.m., we could hear the cheers all the way up on the 27th floor -- Go Giants!

SharedBook Rocks!

Before another day passes, we would like to respond to a post that appeared on Joe Wikert's Publishing 2020 blog late last week. We were thrilled to see that Joe had come across Blog2Print earlier this year, and had hoped he would be interested in seeing the Random House news. Thank you to Joe for taking a look, and sharing the information with your readers.

The Oracle of SharedBook

Here’s a slice of life for you: if you want to know which way the market is headed, ask someone who works at SharedBook.

On Tuesday morning, just when it looked like the Dow was going to do a cannonball off the high board, a few of us earlybirds were heading into our office.  And we saw TV truck after TV truck with satellite dishes extended and at the ready, and reporters with camera crews doing stand-ups in many languages. 

You see, our offices, at 14 Wall Street, are across the street from the New York Stock Exchange!  And if there’s something going on in the market, a key indicator is always the crush of media, armed with technology, ready to report, breathlessly, and interview anyone who seems remotely connected with the trading floor. We’ll see Jim Cramer, from CNBC, and Maria Bartiromo from time to time, and it’s fun, in a way, being so close to what is now so important to the global economy and our collective sense of well-being.  And the side benefit is that we always know when something big is up with the Dow.  (Of course, you could always go to wsj.com – but where’s the fun in that?)

We have a feeling, given the media’s penchant for reporting only the bad news, that our new “Satellite Truck Concentration Indicator” is mostly a tell on a severe downtick, but we’ll keep an eye out.  It may be some time, though, before we’ll see if the crush returns for a new Dow record high …!

SharedBook and the Media Business

Chris Anderson started an interesting discussion re: the media business model recently (based around a core of free or almost-free content) that included some of Fred Wilson's thoughts. We were pleased to see that Michael Cader added alternate output to the mix and mentioned SharedBook.

Another Round of Thank You Notes

Before any more time passes, I want to make sure to convey our thanks to several people for their help in spreading the word regarding SharedBook recently.

Thank you to Kimberly Maul of The Book Standard for covering the Ohio State FanBook announcement yesterday, Mike Shatzkin for including SharedBook in his "15 Trends to Watch in 2008" story in Publishers Weekly, Michael Popke for reporting on the recent FanBook launches for Georgia, James Madison and Penn in the January issue of Athletic Business, and finally, to J.D. Biersdorfer and Pedro Rafael Rosado for spending some time with Caroline on Tech Talk, a weekly podcast from The New York Times. You can listen here if you're interested.

Disruptive Learning …

My friend Tom Ryan at Bessemer Venture Partners recently reported about his participation in a $2.7M Series A round with San Francisco based Grockit.

Grockit has been in the online learning space for a couple of years now, but has apparently decided to reinvent its business model with technology they describe as MMOL - Massively Multiplayer Online Learning – on the theory that students learn best from each other.

Tom’s pumped, but nobody’s talking. Not Grockit, not the investors, and not the media. There’s a complete vacuum around the specifics of what MMOL will actually be.

From what I gather, this is a fairly recent shift for them so I’m not quite sure how far along they are in commercializing the product. To be quite honest, I’m not even sure how to evaluate the placement. The VC community is an interesting bunch to say the least.

I guess I’ll just have to take Tom’s exuberance as a positive signal and wait for the details to surface.

With Appreciation

It is hard to believe that Friday is almost here again -- this has been another very busy week around SharedBook! We're in the process of introducing the CarePages Keepsake Book and the SharedBook Open API Challenge, our first developer contest. We also relaunched SharedBook.com which produced some late nights and strained eyes for Andrew, Gokce and Tracey, as well as several others. Check it out if you get the chance. The new features include an enhanced developer section for anyone that is interested in working with our API.

Before the week gets away from us, we would like to acknowledge a few individuals that have mentioned SharedBook recently. Kristen Nicole of Mashable, Allen Stern of CenterNetworks and John Musser of Programmable Web have posted information regarding the SharedBook Open API Challenge. Blog2Print was featured on the BizIII podcast by Les Bain and Mike Hughes and Taeho Lim mentioned the widget on Databazaar's PrinTips blog. Thank you for noticing how much Blog2Print simplifies the book making process -- that is the basis for everything SharedBook offers! Thank you to all.

The Latest from SharedBook

If you're interested in seeing what some others have said about SharedBook recently, please check out what Jim Lyons (Jim Lyons Observations) thought about his Blog2Print book. Cheryl Hagedorn of Blooking Central, Michael Cairns of PersonaNonData and Kimberly Maul of The Book Standard also mentioned the CarePages Keepsake Book launch this week. Another one of our partners, Regent Seven Seas Cruises, is now offering all of their passengers the ability to make a commemorative photo album of their voyage. Modern Agent mentioned it here.