The Dallas Mavericks’ owner Mark Cuban has been charged today (November 17, 2008) by the SEC with insider trading. Apparently Mark Cuban dumped his shares in Mamma.com right after he confidentially learned about a stock offering from the CEO of Mamma.com. This was back in 2004.
Immediately after I heard about Mark Cuban being accused of insider trading, I went on over to Twitter to see what people were saying about it. If you didn’t know, you can use the search.twitter.com site to search and find what people are saying about a particular topic. You can also search for your company name or even your name or another keyword. What you might want to do is use the RSS feed of the query to watch or monitor the search query if you need to watch that keyword. I often look for my name and my company’s name to see what they’re saying, if anything.
I also took a look at Google Trends and noticed that the top search phrase is mamma.com:
I am not sure when the last time I went to Mamma.com was, but apparently their traffic is on the rise. Here’s an interesting stat from Compete.com:
Compete.com shows that there were over 1 million people who visited Mamma.com last month; which is a lot less than Google’s 129 million visitors or even Yahoo’s 125 million. But, I suspect that although they’re rising last month (October 2008), this Mark Cuban Mamma.com Insider Trading scandal might be just what Mamma needs to get popular again.
I know that this may sound rather opportunistic of me to say, but sometimes getting mentioned in the news can be something that will bring a brand back into the limelight: and really, it wasn’t anything that Mamma.com actually did, it’s something that Mark Cuban did back in 2004.
Let’s take a look at the search results for Mark Cuban on Mamma.com. By comparing them to the Google search results for Mark Cuban, I see that they really aren’t that bad. Mark Cuban is owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, and I’m seeing search results for the Mavericks as well as his blog and also a page about his appearance on Dancing with the Stars. So perhaps I will start using Mamma.com again. What about you?
Is this additional publicity just what Mamma.com needs to jump start the search engine again?
Update Mark Cuban issued a statement regarding this through his lawyer.
Update – September 30, 2013 – Mark Cuban is back in court, after an appeals court sent the case back to a previous court. According to a NY Times article, “Over five years and in three different courthouses, Mr. Cuban’s case has had many twists and turns. A judge dismissed the lawsuit in 2009 and an appeals court reinstated it a year later.”