There's no doubt that if you asked the attorneys at Goldman Sachs if
they were afraid of Mike Morgan and his Goldman Sachs attack website,
they'd dismiss you as overreacting. As this graph of people searching
Google for Morgan's website shows, interest is currently high.
(click on it to go directly to the Google search)
See that spike before the 'A'? That was caused by Goldman sending a cease and desist to Morgan. The letter had no ability to take Morgan's website down, but as you can see, it gave Morgan a news hook that drove people to his website as he parlayed it into press coverage.
Future
press coverage is not a given though. The United Pilots union launched
"glenntilton.com", dedicated to the removal of United's CEO and have
been struggling to keep attention on the campaign ever since. News
coverage has dropped to nothing, and their last update to the site was
in two months ago, in February. After a whirlwind of press coverage at
launch, they've lost their mojo.
This
is the compete.com graph of the estimated traffic to glenntilton.com.
You can see how the site has been struggling since launch to capture
any attention.
The model campaign for how to keep the media paying attention is Eric Jackson's multi-year campaign to reform Yahoo! as an activist shareholder. Jackson's success was hinged on providing something that a news-hungry media wanted: quotes and perspective applicable to other shareholders (ie their readers).
Morgan has positioned himself as a political attack figure, not as an expert on financial matters, and will likely only be of interest to reporters as long as conspiracy theories about the financial industry stay in vogue. Of course, this topic has a pretty rich potential at the moment, but will wane over time unless more facts emerge to give such theories credibility. Since the news hunger for conspiracy theories is usually small, and only in vogue at the moment, Morgan is likely to experience great difficulty keeping press interest unless he re-invents himself.
Possibilities for keeping press interest include:
- becoming a source for whistleblowers inside Goldman that expand his scope to becoming a sort of Goldman Sachs Drudge Report (unlikely, given my time there, it's the least miserable place on Wall Street to work);
- expanding his campaign to expose general conflict of interest problems in the financial industry and how they take advantage of consumers;
- migrating to a position of credible activist shareholder to take advantage of the financial news cycle.
The current course Morgan has plotted, which seems to involve drawing global conspiracy maps of all current and past Goldman execs, is likely to diminish his press coverage over time, as mainstream reporters have an innate dislike for conspiracy theories. If he continues this course, Goldman attorneys will likely be jumping for joy.
Disclosure: I have no financial interest in either Goldman Sachs or Mike Morgan's attack website.
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