Tuesday, March 17, 2009
To underestimate Jon Stewart is unwise. To display ignorance of the power, speed and swift justice delivered at the hands of social media networks is a catastrophic error. Last week’s face-off between Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer demonstrated both.
What were Cramer, and by default, CNBC, thinking with this approach?
I believe Cramer and CNBC thought they knew exactly what they were getting into. Cramer’s strategy seemed to hinge on playing the victim of deceitful CEOs, hoping to obtain sympathy as someone who can only work with the information that is made available to him. The architects of his failed appearance knew Stewart’s questioning would be aggressive and most likely assumed that this would play into their desired perception as victim.
The approach failed, primarily because Cramer was unprepared and seemingly caught off guard by a line of questioning he should have expected and prepared for accordingly. Instead, Cramer was the one who was portrayed as deceitful and disingenuous as Stewart showed numerous clips, which were never meant for a mass audience, where Cramer describes exactly how markets can be manipulated. At one point Stewart quipped: “I want this Jim Cramer to protect me from that Jim Cramer.”
Cramer, looking ridiculous with his trademark sleeves rolled past the biceps, came across as meek and flustered. As a result, what CNBC clearly viewed as an opportunity has become a major liability in which the fallout is likely to continue for quite some time driven primarily by social media networks.
It was interesting to see Stewart open the show by making light of the fact that the interview had taken on a life of its own as two largely niche cable television hosts had created a mass media sideshow.
But that’s exactly the point - in today’s information environment no form of communication can be considered niche, particularly given the dominance of social media networks. These networks have made readership and viewership statistics largely irrelevant today.
As the New York Time’s Alessandra Stanley writes, CNBC may have viewed this as an opportunity to expand its audience by reaching millions of viewers who probably aren’t “Mad Money” regulars or even CNBC viewers. By placing Cramer on the talk show circuit prior to the interview, they took advantage of a clear and relatively easy promotional opportunity. Stanley suggests that Cramer may yet have the last laugh.
Stanley seems to ignore Tucker Carlson’s similar run in with Stewart in 2004 which many believe to be the event that eventually resulted in the cancellation of Crossfire a mere 6 months later. Back in 2004, Carlson didn’t have the many social media networks that exist today to contend with. To think that Cramer will simply benefit from this exposure is to underestimate how information is spread, digested and analyzed today. In an odd but interesting coincidence, Carlson’s subsequent MSNBC program “Tucker” was cancelled almost exactly a year prior to the Cramer appearance.
Beyond the millions of viewers who tuned into the show, consider the following:
• More than 200 stories have appeared within the mass media, including nearly every major national and international print media outlet and broadcast network. Every major U.S. wire service covered the interview as well as specialty financial publications ranging from Barron’s to MarketWatch. The story even appeared in the New Zealand Herald. This attention among “traditional” media outlets provides the necessary fuel to the social media fire.
• One day after the appearance, the interview was the number 2 result for the week on Digg, a popular news aggregator. The video clip currently has more than 7,000 “digs,” ensuring that it will remain a top result for many weeks to come. In addition, there are a dozen additional links appearing on Digg related to Cramer’s appearance with headlines like: “Jim Cramer Admits to Market Manipulation, Illegal Activity.”
• One day after the appearance, two of the top three most popular entries on Reddit, another popular news aggregator, are related to the interview and highly critical of CNBC. There are 250 Reddit entries from this week on the issue, almost all of them negative with more than 1,000 reader comments.
• On March 13, searches related to the show were included in 8 of the top 100 most popular Google searches according to Google Trends.
• Via Twitter Search, one can view thousands of tweets related to the interview, most of them reflecting poorly on Cramer and CNBC.
• According to Google Blogs, there have been more than 26,000 blog entries within the past week alone on the interview.
The points above illustrate not only the massive audience this interview has now reached, but the fact that thousands of conversations are occurring online. This is what makes social media such a powerful vehicle for information. It’s a true dialogue and very few of these conversations currently reflect well on Cramer or CNBC.
At best, CNBC’s recent face-off with Jon Stewart’s Daily Show was a gross underestimation of the speed and interconnected nature of information today and the power of social media networks over all of this. At worst, CNBC may be forced to address a very real credibility crisis and we may be witnessing the twilight of “Mad Money.”
During a much-anticipated moment, Cramer opened his show the day after the debacle by making light of his recent “Stewart appearance” and assuring the audience that he and “Stewart” were on friendly terms. He then proceeded to show a clip of himself making a pie with Martha Stewart, whose show Cramer inexplicably appeared on immediately prior to the Daily Show.
Cramer and CNBC clearly don’t understand what they’ve started here.
While they might receive a brief ratings bump and pick up some additional “Mad Money” viewers, social media networks have a unique ability to keep issues like this at the forefront of the public discourse. If you need more evidence that this is a very real issue for Cramer and CNBC, note that Cramer opened his show on Monday March 16th by again addressing the issue of his market manipulation as a hedge fund manager.
The end result is a credibility crisis that was started by a niche cable news host and will be fueled and driven by the general public and the many social media tools available to them. CNBC and Cramer have started a dialogue that they can neither control or contain.
The decision to appear on the Daily Show was naïve at best. To show up unprepared was inexcusable and only fueled the social media firestorm we are now witnessing.
Aaron R. Schoenherr
aschoenherr@greentarget.net