I wrote in June about early numbers from research being conducted at the University of Maimi that attempted to quatify the impact of a Walt Mossberg review on a company’s stock price:
Initial data shows on average, “firms with bad product reviews saw stock losses of $200 million, while those with positive reviews saw gains of $500 million,” proving traditional media influencers
still pack a punch.
The research study, The Value of Quality: Stock Market Returns to Reviewed Quality of New Products, has now been published and can be downloaded without charge from the Social Science Research Network.
The research was conducted under the following premise: “Firms are always in a rush to bring new products to market. This attitude is probably driven by several factors such as capturing market share rewards to new products, shaping consumer preferences, exploiting economies of experience, or pre-empting lucrative supplies, market positions, distribution outlets, and shelf space (Robinson and Fornell 1985; Carpenter and Nakamoto 1989; Kalyanaram, Robinson and Urban 1995). However, compelling evidence and some theory suggest that first movers may not have the advantages attributed to them in the past (Golder and Tellis 1993; Shankar 1999; Zhang and Narasimhan 2000). Further researchers have shown that speed alone does not lead to higher sales growth nor does it lead to higher accounting returns (Ittner and Larcker 1997). Superior quality is what consumers really look for in a new product (Liebowitz and Margolis 1990; Yin and Tellis 2003). Indeed, quality may well be the most important factor in the success of products and the market performance of competing brands (Tellis and Golder 2001). Yet, firms may systematically undervalue the importance of quality.
This paper suggests a simple but powerful method by which one can measure quality and assess market rewards to it: the event analysis of abnormal stock market returns of firms whose new products are publicly and systematically rated. Use of stock prices for market valuation has at least three benefits. First, data on stock prices is abundant and precise. Second, an accepted paradigm of research provides a clear method, the event study, for assessing stock market returns to information about quality. Third, a focus on stock prices is responsive to the ultimate goal of the firm — maximizing shareholder value (Srivastava, Shervani and Fahey 1998).”
The clear takeaway here for product companies is to focus on getting the product right first and only when the product quality is high should you think about getting that product in front of Mossberg.
Wired may have captured it best:“Walt Mossberg is walking through a convention hall at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas when a man starts screaming at him. The screamer, Hugh Panero, blames Mossberg for his firm’s recent problems: falling stock price, a sudden plunge in consumer interest. Mossberg is annoyed but hardly intimidated. As the author of the weekly ‘Personal Technology’ column in The Wall Street Journal, he’s used to dealing with disgruntled execs. He lets Panero shout. A crowd is gathering. Finally, Mossberg yells back, ‘I don’t give a f—- about your stock price!’”
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: consumer electronics, gadget, influencer, influential, PR, product, public relations, traditional media
So, you’ve read my post on How to get started with social media or you follow what Chris Brogan, Sarah Perez, Jeremiah Owyang, Brian Solis and others have to say on the topic. You’re interested. Social media looks promising to you, but it also seems like a lot of time spent without measurable return and I’m too old to be taking part.
Am I close? If so, check out the research Universal McCann pulled together on social media in the embedded deck below.
The best part? There are fantastic resources all over the web where you can get all kinds of free advice, research and trend information. Bloggers are doing all the hard work and pulling all of the information together so you can digest in bite-sized chunks.
Brian Solis over at PR 2.0 created a graphic below to assist us all in knowing what service / Web app does what.

Remember, you don’t have to join every conversation and you don’t need a presence on every platform. The key is to start slowly. Pick people and topics to follow and engage that most closely map to your area of interest.
Don’t even try to keep track of every service out there. there are new ones popping up every day. Dip your toe in the water. Get a feel for the conversations and then ease in as you feel more comfortable.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Marketing, PR, product, social media, social networking, web 2.0.
If you’ve got a hot new gadget you want to pitch and you want Ryan Block to write on it, you’d better act fast. Block will step down as editor of this publication in late August to start a new (undisclosed) company.
In his post today, he said of his new chapter, “I’m extremely excited — but there’s also simply no way I can give up working with Engadget that easily, so I’ll remain on as editor-at-large, where I’ll have a longer-term advisory role to the site (and do some writing from time to time, as well).”
Ryan Block and Peter Rojas built one of the most successful blogs on the Web in Engadget.

Engadget remains the go-to gadget blog and is #4 on Technorati.com’s top blogs.
With the departure of Peter Rojas and now Ryan Block, Engadget will be in the hands of Josh Topolsky and Joshua Fruhlinger. After August, you’ll want to be pitching them to cover your latest innovation.
Follow Ryan at www.ryanblock.com.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: peter rojas, pitching pitch engadget, ryan block
(UPDATED July 30, 2007) socialmedian, which styles itself as a social news network, is slowly emerging from stealth mode has emered from alpha. Founded by serial entrepreneur Jason Goldberg and backed by notables, Gordon Crovitz (WSJ), Reed Hundt (FCC), Julius Genachowski, (IAC/ LunchBox Digital), Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive and Allen Morgan (Mayfield Fund); socialmedian’s goal is to help users keep up-to-date on the news AND the news makers that matters to them. TheDeal has more on the funding.
Imagine FriendFeed meets Techmeme.

On socialmedian, users set up News Networks (ostensibly mini Techmemes) based on any topic(s) they are interested in and populated with content from the news sources they specify. It’s all fully user-customizable, which means people like “a VC” blogger Fred Wilson can filter news so he can hear from who he is interested in “…like seth godin, jeff jarvis, dave winer, scoble, umair, calacanis, nick carr…” (via tweet).
(Updated) MEDIAdeluge here:
What interests me most about socialmedian is the filtering. In my post about the conversational Web, I disagreed with Jeremiah Owyang, who suggested, information on the social web needs to be sorted around people, not content
My thinking: Jeremiah is a smart and interesting guy. I follow him on Twitter and FriendFeed, but I’m not really interested in what he ate for breakfast (not that he necessarily posts that sort of thing). That said, when he writes about the social web, I want to know about it.
socialmedian lets me do just that. I can follow everything Jeremiah posts, or just what is relevant to me. This could become a very popular feature as the noise online grows and it becomes harder to sift through all of it to find what you want.
As part of socialmedian’s emergence from closed alpha, it now connects new users to the people they follow on Twitter who are already on socialmedian using the Twitter social graph API. So, when a new user joins socialmedian using their Twitter username, socialmedian will pre-populate the people the new user already knows.
As socialmedian emerges from closed alpha, it has relatively few users – especially when compared to FriendFeed – but that appears to be changing as influential bloggers like Louis Gray and Robert Scoble commit to trying out the site.
What will be interesting for socialmedian will be the potential Scoble effect. What seems to be more and more critical for social sites to gain traction with the tech early adopter crowd is Scoble’s seal of approval.
Use this link as an invite to socialmedian. Follow me at http://www.socialmedian.com/christiananderson
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: conversational web, Fred Wilson, friendfeed, Jeremiah Owyang, louis gray, microbloging, news, scoble effect, social media, social news, social web, web 2.0.