Criminally Stupid.

One of the issues facing anyone dealing with new media and helping companies and organizations maximize the new media world is the dual issues of “shining penny syndrome” and “criminally stupid online stories.” I’ll save details on the shining penny issue but essentially it means that senior executives will look at what you are proposing as nothing more valid as a young child fascinated by a ‘shiny penny.” With Facebook, for example, we often suggest that clients invest in building their fan base for very valid reasons (communicating with supporters, empowering activists, building donors) and often are meet with the look of bemused parent. The second and frankly bigger issue we face is that there are so many stories out there that involve online operations and criminally stupid wastes of money and I fear the recent AOL / Bebo debacle will stick in many people’s minds for quite some time. To recap the quote unquote highlights of the whole affair, AOL paid $850,000,000 for the social networking site Bebo less than two years ago and that included $766 million in “goodwill” which essentially means the site at the time was valued at just under $90 million but AOL paid $850 million for it. AOL just sold Bebo for $10 million which is just shocking. Is there no recourse for AOL shareholders? Shouldn’t there be some sort of investigation into this level of stupidity? Do the people who made this decision still have jobs? It also unfortunately means that again, the Internet will be viewed as a world of stupid money and wasted investment which is a shame. Why AOL paid this sort of money in the first place makes no sense. Why anyone, frankly, would pay $10 million for it now is also a bit suspect. But there is no doubt another stupid story about how another financial disaster occurred won’t help anyone in the space one bit.