Institute For The Future

The New York Times bump

As a former journalist (I worked for four years as a reporter in India), I truly appreciate the need for getting publicity for your company, product, and even your name. Any struggling entrepreneur will tell you that if you are able to garner a write-up about your product or company in any publication is good. Most prefer a positive review, although some argue that any publicity is good publicity.

I have noticed that after the New York Times does a story on any tech product, I see my twitter friends tweet about experimenting with it. A few days back, the NYT did a story in which they mentioned seesmic (http://tinyurl.com/q4b3fl) a desktop application for twitter and facebook. The same day few of my twitter friends tweeted that they had downloaded seismic and were trying it out. I saw the same pattern when the NYT wrote about ishoot, which is an iphone gaming application (http://tinyurl.com/pr394c). The day the story appeared tweets about downloading ishoot flew all over twittersphere. This is also a signal of twitter emerging as an important medium for figuring out trends, and what are people doing and discussing.

I have to confess I am also one of the people who tries out technology products after I read about it in the NYT.

Stephen Colbert on his show jokes about the Colbert bump. He is always touting the importance of the Colbert bump in launching books, movies and careers.  But I think there is no bump like the NYT bump, especially for tech products. This is certainly good news for the dying newspaper industry. Tech entrepreneurs talk about being techcrunched, but may be it is time to talk about being NYT bumped.