Morgan Stanley is the bank where the veteran Internet analyst, Mary Meeker, is in residence and communicates her insights on tech stocks and their performance.

The team has garnered a good reputation for calling it right over the years and I read a fair amount of Meeker’s reports from conferences on the developments and future of the Internet too. Nonetheless, her team’s not always spot on — as this competitive spat over GOOG stock valuations in 2007 with Henry Blodget, formerly the Internet analyst at Merrill Lynch (an RIP bank, acquired by Bank of America in Q4 2008) and now CEO, co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Silicon Alley Insider, shows:

· http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2007/08/24/henry-blodget-blasts-mary-meekers-google-goog-math/

· http://www.businessinsider.com/alleyinsider

Today’s FT informs us that Morgan Stanley has a new star Internet analyst: a 15 year-old intern called Matthew Robson. Apparently, his research note on social media says in no uncertain terms that, “Twitter is not for teenagers!” and CEOs and senior people are all abuzz about the report:

* http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/035e83fe-6f18-11de-9109-00144feabdc0.html

* http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jul/13/twitter-teenage-media-habits

* http://voices.allthingsd.com/20090713/note-by-teenage-scribbler-causes-sensation/

How Teenagers Consume Media

Now — whilst this is all fantastic for young Matthew Robson — Morgan Stanley and the various CEOs and media moguls who attended Sun Valley 2009 as well as institutional fund managers need to ask themselves, “How’s it possible our 30/40-something analysts’ eyes are off the radar?! What are we paying them for?! This is the type of blind-sidedness and incompetence that ends up contributing to global financial crisis which then affect economies and employment!”

Sorry, but anyone worth their salt as an analyst — even a novice one, fresh out of Harvard / Oxbridge / INSEAD / any other Ivy League business school — would have picked up on “Twitter is not for teenagers” and the non-40something Twitterati OVER THREE MONTHS AGO! Notably, if the analysts had any sense of humor and were actually ON THE BALL they’d have seen the twitter topix link syndicated on the brilliant Kosmix (http://www.kosmix.com) and gone to the Current TV site:

* http://current.com/items/89891774_twouble-with-twitters.htm

Here are the links to the YouTube videos too for good measure:

· www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN2HAroA12w

· www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHAZt-Exuaw

[I can't embed the videos because of country restrictions. It's not available on YouTube UK site.]

Please note what the Current TV/Supernews comedy anarchists are saying: the young guy in the cartoon doesn’t get the hype about Twitter and is making a mockery out of the 40-something Twitterer. That’s a pretty good insight on whether it has teen appeal too.

Teens aren’t into tech hyped up by middle-aged celebrities or SEO spammers. They like to be the ones discovering it, populating it with their identity markers as their own identities take shape, breaking new grounds with it and they want to know that if they shell out monies to update their tweets via their mobile phone credits………..Robert Pattison (he of Twilight and a million schoolgirl daydreams), the Harry Potter kid stars and the Jonas Brothers / Miley Cyrus / the Obama girls or the coolest boy / girl in school they fancy are going to become their avid followers.

What the Morgan Stanley story about the teenage analyst shows is that senior management desperately need analysts and advisors who are on-the-ball, perspicacious and engage in a similar or like-for-like way the target market they’re writing about and trying to build business case models for do.

Moreover, this “Twitter is not for teens” is SERIOUSLY OLD NEWS to the viewers of Current TV and anyone with a genuine pulse on the socmedia sphere. The FT too will have to shape up and get more………current and informed.

LOL.

[Yes, I was the first person to flag the Current TV/Supernews hilarity about Twitter to my friends. No, I’m not a teenager but I can be child-like --- if not juvenile, immature or a novice --- about how I consume and explore media. Just because I have the adult tools to put socmedia players into a Porter matrix or McKinsey product life cycle graph or to calculate staggered revenue streams in a balance sheet doesn't mean I've lost my abilities to play with and test out digital media with the wonder (and mischief) of a child.

Hey and the YouTube videos aren’t even relayed in my country because of copyright restrictions! Still………….if a person really needs to know……….they can find anything in the socmedia sphere.]

LOOOOOOOOOOL.

Humor and wit can help our insights on business models in the most surprising ways!

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UPDATE

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I made my post early this morning, as soon as I read the original FT.com article and MS’ prognosis on twitter and other soc media for GenY (http://media.ft.com/cms/c3852b2e-6f9a-11de-bfc5-00144feabdc0.pdf).

How Teenagers Consume Media

During the course of the day, it seems to have captured the attentions of the blogosphere (ReadWriteWeb, HuffPost, Silicon Alley Insider, Crunchgear, etc.):

*http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/teens_not_into_twitter_tv_radio_newspapers.php

* http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/13/matthew-robson-15yearold-_n_230495.html

* http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-15-year-old-analyst-trashes-tv-newspapers-radio-andtwitter-2009-7

* http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/07/13/morgan-stanley-reports-shows-that-teens-dont-use-twitter-dont-buy-music-but-still-go-to-the-movies/

There’ve been hundreds of comments on the blogs. Notably, so many hours after my blog post……still NO ONE has referred to the Current TV/Supernews spoof.

I think I’m going to have to remind everyone of its comedic genius.

Clearly, the comedians are ahead of the curve compared with the analysts.

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UPDATE II

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Ah, yes, and real-life young intern Matthew Robson puts his age at “15 and 7 months” in the Morgan Stanley note. This is LOL because the fictitious character, Adrian Mole, was 13 and 3/4 when he shared his teenage insights with us:

*  http://www.adrianmole.com/

Of course, the teenage Adrian’s singular musings were the creations of the mid-30’s FEMALE author, Sue Townsend……….

*  http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=authC2D9C28A18dac23605uLr31DC862

Reading through the MS research note, it’s obvious that the 30-something analysts on the MS media team have contributed their input to the teenager Robson’s insights. Former bankers can spot this from a continent away.

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UPDATE NUMERO TRE

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I am ROTFLOL!!!

In tomorrow’s Times newspaper, there’s an interview with Matthew Robson and his mother in which they explain how he got his internship. She was walking the family dog in Greenwich Park and bumped into another dog-walker by accident. He happened to be Patrick Wellington, a senior financial analyst at MS. The Robson family dog is a whippet (as in smart / quick as) and it’s called….RUDOLPH, so someone’s obviously Santa Claus and everyone’s Christmases have come at once!

Matthew Robson gets his internship. Morgan Stanley gets buzz about a research note. Sun Valley media moguls get an insight into the teen market they themselves are (some of them with the exception of Zuckerberg) over three decades too old to qualify for membership in. Twitter gets information on which audience to focus their efforts (no strategic rationale to migrate towards tweens because the marketing efforts won’t work on them).

Synchronicity? Serendipity? The Super Being of SocMedia moving in mysterious ways?

LOOOOOOOOL, I love this story!

Oh and how does the Times entitle its article?

“TWITTER IS FOR OLD PEOPLE, WORK EXPERIENCE WHIZ-KID TELLS BANKERS” !!!!!!!!!!!!

* http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6703399.ece?Submitted=true

Ha! Now am I glad I never took to Twitter!

OLD people, indeed!!! LOOOOOOOOL! There go the hopes of the socmedia’s “I’m young and cool” hipponistas! LOOOOOOOOL!!!

I just spotted something interesting on the Huffington Post blog site and am wondering whether anyone’s mentioned it to Arianna Huffington. Here’s how Bing is being promoted across the site:

* http://www.huffingtonpost.com/business/

* http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entertainment/

You can see via the second link that although Bing is being banner advertised, the custom Google search feature is still very noticeably being used by HuffPost itself. We can ask what commercial agreement is in place between the various parties about non-compete issues……………

I’m slightly apprehensive of writing this blog entry because I certainly don’t want it to attract either controversy or spam. Nevertheless, I think it’s also important to compare marketing that’s smart and respectful to users and marketing which is, frankly, stupid and alienating.

Let me start with the smart one because if we’re going to follow good practice examples………..Always prioritize the smart ones at the top and leave the stupid ones to be the sludge/slag/s*** that collects at the bottom — just like in chemical fractional distillation.

On April Fool’s Day, I received the following email from the slideshare team:

Hi twain,

We’ve noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours. Great job … you must be doing something right.

Why don’t you tweet or blog this? Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we can track the conversation.

Congratulations,

-SlideShare Team

Now, I’ve been a user and fan of slideshare for about 3 years; I was one of their first members and within my first two postings Jon Boutelle, the CTO, sent me a connection request. Then Rashmi Sinha, the CEO, voted one of my slides her favorite. Over the years, I’ve followed slideshare’s progress and periodically I watch out for their competitions — recently they did one on the credit crunch:

· http://blog.slideshare.net/2008/11/20/credit-crisis-in-30-slides-results/

Anyway, being someone who tends to verify and cross-verify sources (a habit of due diligence as a banker as well as from being the Editor of e-Intelligence), my immediate thoughts on the “You’re a Slideshare RockStar” email were:

(1.) Ha ha, it must be an April Fool’s.

(2.) Better go and see what’s been happening to my slides on slideshare.net

(3.) It’s plausible………….

You see, Google Knol had recently awarded me another “Top Pick Knol Award” for my “How to LOL” entry:

* http://knol.google.com/k/twain/how-to-lol/31fjy9fjsu1×2/25

Separately, on dipity.com, my first ever timeline attracted 12,000+ views and the CEO is following my content.

* http://www.dipity.com/twain

In any case I checked slideshare.net and, lo and behold, my view counts had miraculously jumped by several hundred thousand. Naturally, my arithmetic skills kicked in and I cross-checked the figures provided for each link where the slides were being viewed (on slideshare itself, on other blogs, on associated sites etc.):

The numbers didn’t add up……………so I knew it must be an April Fool’s.

I then went onto Kosmix (which is now set as my browser homepage instead of Google or Apple or Bloomberg, btw) and searched under the term “#bestofslideshare”. It showed up under the Trending Topics of the Twitter panel, so I clicked the link and this is what I saw:

I LOL’d. It was………A BRILLIANT APRIL FOOL’S JOKE on the personal pride (some may call it narcissism in its extreme forms) of all contributors in the social media sphere and incorporated the uber-posterchild for Internet traffic for the moment — Twitter.

#bestofslideshare was so brilliant and pinpointed every arc on the marketing map that drives Internet + mobile traffic, reciprocity of cross-marketing and the viral effects of fame generation that I nominated it on ‘Huffington Post’ as “Best April Fool’s 2009.”

Who cared about YouTube turning its videos upside-down for the day? Or Google’s CADIE (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity)? Or any of the others on offer here:

* · http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/01/april-fools-2009-best-pra_n_181568.html

In any case, I swapped a few emails with the slideshare team (CEO, CTO and CFO) to congratulate them on their ingenuity. Here’s some of what I wrote:

The #bestofslideshare campaign didn’t use any profanity, advertise fake pharmaceuticals for certain male hormone drugs or ask/demand us to pay some faux charity or boiler-room scam.

It was strictly and purely about us each promoting our own slides in a way which was different and positive. Not all of slideshare’s N millions of members are going to be able to email their friends and say, “I won the slideshare competition” or “I made 100,000+ views!”

For a one-off event, #bestofslideshare was actually very democratizing and fun at the same time. It enabled people to promote their slides, cross-promote slideshare on twitter etc., ping it back and forth…before laughing at themselves with a Homer Simpson moment, “Doh! I’ve been had. It’s an AF! V. cute!”

Sure, some people may have considered the email of ‘You’re a Slideshare Rockstar’ to be “spam” but actually it was a smart one-off marketing special.

In fact, I hope you do something similar next year!

In short, #bestofslideshare was a celebration of its users and their content. It appealed to their personal pride in a good way. It re-affirmed their valuable contributions, it directed traffic to the slideshare.net site and then propagated it across the wider social media sphere, e.g. Twitter.

It was oriented from a win-win-win position which is why it’s brilliant marketing.

THE WORST WEB3.0 MARKETING EVER

Now for the opposite end of the strategic marketing spectrum: the lose-lose-lose. Readers are probably aware that one particular Web 3.0 offering, which I won’t pollute my blog by even naming, launched with a tacky and senseless “We organize that s***” video.

That marketing mistake (amongst the company’s persistent and many strategic faux pas) was extremely disappointing and alienating towards users — particularly since those users had spent months seeding interesting content, nurturing the growth of quality interactions and sharing their harvested gold nuggets with others on threads (including the company and particularly with the CEO).

Therefore, for the company to then launch with a piece of unprofessional, gutter-quality and narcissistic tripe was unbelievable.

It was not the use of s*** that was offensive.

It was the vanity and arrogance of the claim that it’s the company that organizes anything. Actually, it’s the core members who organize and prioritize the content. They separate the wheat from the chaff.

It was also the fact that after watching the video, people were no better informed about what the system actually does nor about the types of people who use the site or the quality of interactions they produce on the site.

The company can’t organize s***.

Left to their own devices, they don’t even know how to make their UI easy-to-use, functionally smart and speedy. They don’t know it’s important to provide user guides, despite being in beta for an entire year. They don’t know it’s vital to have open user feedback channels. They don’t know their system is attracting tons of spam and fake user sign-ups. They don’t know comment moderation matters to users. They don’t know what online democracy is and how to nurture it. Instead they decimate users’ content, breach user privacy and engage in all manner of policies that frustrate and annoy their core users — the very people who have patiently championed them and given them chance after chance.

Worst of all their marketing, which consistently insults users’ intelligence, doesn’t position their Web 3.0 offering as a smart solution at all.

It’s a tragedy and their problem to resolve.

MARKETING IS AS SMART AS THE PEOPLE WHO STRATEGIZE IT

I’m also going to share this observation about truly smart and strategic marketing, using Apple as the example.

A few years’ ago I met MT Rainey, who worked on several of Apple’s marketing campaigns during the 1980s. Subsequently, she established one of the UK’s largest independent advertising agencies and more recently has created an online social venture which offers mentoring services to new businesses and individuals about their careers as well as their lifestyles. Separately, in the past I’ve also swapped emails with Guy Kawasaki, one of the Apple Fellows (which includes Alan Kay amongst its luminaries) and one of the geniuses responsible for proselytizing Apple and imbuing the company with distinctive and positive brand values which have successfully transmitted through the generations.

Now, if we look at the LISA campaign of the 1980s and more recently the ‘He’s a PC’ one what we see from Apple is a consistent message spanning decades:

· faster than the competition

· smarter than the competition

· sleeker and cooler than the competition

Not once has Apple (or any of the tech brands which have stood the tests of time and fickleness of consumer tastes) ever allowed s*** / unprofessional / gutter-quality marketing to be associated with itself.

It’s not hip or avant-garde or smart to do so. Only stupid people would want to or go about sabotaging their own company by allowing it to be tagged with s*** in SEO engines and then attracting like-for-like s*** to their own sites.

Smart marketing is when the company appeals to the users’ better aspects. Like when slideshare encourages people to blog about the achievement of their exponential view counts and celebrates their content contributions — even if it is an April Fools.

More than anything, smart marketing is when the users are IN on the joke (and realize they’re perpetrators of the joke) rather than when the marketing is such that users are perceived to be the butt of the joke — like any explicit association of or reference to their content as s*** that the company has to organize.

Would-be marketers need to look at the best practices of brands like Apple, Google, Coca-Cola, Nike, Nokia, GE and others to realize a simple truth:

PEOPLE LIKE TO FEEL GOOD ABOUT THEMSELVES, OTHERS AND THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE WORLD.

This picture on the ‘Huffington Post’ site is so charming and spontaneous I couldn’t resist smiling. I then SMS’ed my friend, GC, and told him that the Italian premier, Silvio Berlusconi, had managed to ensconce himself with the trio of the world’s most important economies: the US, Russia and China.

GC called me back and we had a great conversation about Berlusconi, whom it transpires he’s known for many years.

In any case it’s good that despite all the supposed political frictions and grandstanding going into the summit, some core principles were agreed upon regarding tighter and more coordinated international regulation of the financial system, and that the IMF’s lending facilities were boosted three-fold to US$750 million from its present US$250 million. This will enable it to support developing economies more as they too try to survive the global recession so it’s a welcome move. Clearly, due consideration will have to be taken in TARGETED and measured lending to prevent some governments from attempting to call on IMF funds and then misspending those funds. However, in principle, boosting IMF monetary funds is a good decision from the G20 summit.

Now, some people may wonder why I as a former banker and someone who believes in capitalism would welcome stricter regulation. This is because I believe in capitalism of a particular kind: SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE and INFORMED capitalism. The current system is not as informed as it could be which partially explains why bubbles were allowed to build (from complex instruments like the mortgage CDOs, offshore SPVs, hedge funds etc.), undetected, until the burst became inevitable and resulted in a domino / ripple effect through the global economy.

There had been a lot of, “We didn’t know this was going on. There was no information available to us,” which doesn’t abrogate responsibilities from anyone but it does reflect that information is not being effectively channeled to important decision-makers; these are defined as people who affect the global economy — whether they be politicians, economists, bankers or consumers.

If they don’t have this information readily available or calculable:

· risk exposures of off-balance sheet SPVs

· hedge fund accounting

· reward structures without floors or ceilings for people who are speculating with others’ pension funds, assets, mortgages etc.

Then some of the decisions they make are bound to be from a blind spot; this means they’ll hit the iceberg sooner or later, and it’s something we all want to prevent because it takes innocents down with them. This has been seen with ordinary taxpayers being tied into various government bailouts (financial institutions as well as automobile and other sectors). Instead of directing funds which could otherwise have gone into building schools, hospitals, telcoms and other infrastructure, governments are being forced to prop up the banking system to prevent total collapse and economic anarchy.

So when I say “socially responsible capitalism” I mean the type that will support the ability for interested parties to allocate their funds towards building schools etc. whilst also enabling individuals to be entrepreneurial and generate profit and rewards.

Let me be clear: there is nothing inherently wrong with the pursuit of profit, value, growth and rewards in a capitalist democracy. However, there is also everything right with being INFORMED on a real-time basis about all the worst-case scenario consequences of how that pursuit is conducted and impacts upon the wider community.

What has struck me from my operational experiences within banking as well as now with the Internet commentary on the global financial crisis has been the absence of technology voices to say how THEY can and would contribute to solutions — both of information coordination as well as providing tools to make sense of that information to provide better decision-making tools at the disposal of political leaders, civil servants, central bankers, senior investment bankers and pertinent others that will prevent a re-occurrence of the current situation.

There are security concerns with respect to sharing and coordinating information electronically on this scale. Nevertheless, it may be worthwhile to have these conversations from the outset. Let’s have the social media sphere make genuine innovations and work out how to harness crowd-sourcing and collaboration tools (to contribute to solving serious issues) — instead of throwing electric sheep at their followers or amplifying their ADHD by limiting the full capacity of their intelligence to a 140 character tweet.

Now is the time and Tim O’Reilly himself has also asked for more seriousness from this next generation of tech entrepreneurs:

* http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2008/10/tim-oreilly-get.html

As for me, tomorrow I have a catch-up lunch with GC. We always have very interesting and productive conversations so I’m looking forward to it.

Next week I’ll meet some Silicon Valley people and I intend to ask them for their insights on how technology can play a more central role in getting the global economy back on its feet as well as preventing future re-occurrences of this last year: an annus horribulus economica.