The Decline and Fall of Robert Scoble

Ignored in high school, the geek princes of social media now thrive on attention from eager fanboys (and calculating flacks). Relentless Fast Company egoblogger Robert Scoble was their king. Until he got dethroned. More »

Why sponsoring bloggers is a waste of money

Even Scoble couldn't save Seagate. Almost a year after the hard-drive maker renewed a sponsorship deal with the prolific blogger, its stock is down 35 percent. Archrival Western Digital, meanwhile, is up 40 percent. So much for the profession of "influencer marketing," a field which has exploded since the 2000 publication of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and the subsequent work The Influentials. These books, translated into action by marketers, have prompted companies from AT&T to Yahoo to hire executives expressly to suck up to bloggers. Seagate's Scoble sponsorship is the purest expression of this trend. And the best illustration of why it doesn't work. More »

Seagate CEO is totally Valley's grossest dad

In an otherwise interminably boring Dean Takahashi interview, Bill Watkins, CEO of hard-drive maker and Robert Scoble sponsor Seagate, offers up this observation: "I had a discussion with a guy on one trip. I told him that the most important thing in my life was to get my daughters through high school without them becoming pregnant." This is the same guy, we'll remind you, whom we named a "hero" for forthrightly admitting, "We're building a product that helps people buy more crap — and watch porn." More »

"He was talking for 45 minutes about 'design' and 'emotion'... All we wanted to know was, how much is that light gonna cost?" — the always refreshing Bill Watkins, CEO of disk drive manufacturer Seagate, points out the differences between the designers and engineers.