I have been going thru links to see if they are current
Joe Trippi-
Catapult Strategies
getcatapult.com
Joe Trippi
Chief Technology Officer
Joe Trippi co-founded Catapult Strategies and its affiliated company Trippi, McMahon, and Squier - a nationally recognized advertising agency that specializes in campaign advertising, strategy, and tactics. Joe has over 18 years of experience in advertising, marketing, and public relations. Joe has worked for development stage companies such as Wave Systems and Fortune 500.
[McMahon is Steve McMahon you see on TV alot:(snip of story of their company--notice the name switch from older article)
Consolidation Is the Trend in Influence Industry
by Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, Washington Post
April 27th, 2004
Political consultant Joe Trippi became a celebrity by bringing former Vermont governor Howard Dean to the verge of the Democratic presidential nomination. Now Trippi's partners are open to capitalizing on that experience to find a buyer for at least part of their firm.
Steve McMahon of Trippi McMahon & Squier said potential purchasers are doing "quite a bit of tire kicking" of the firm's lobbying affiliate, Issue & Image. "If somebody made us an offer we couldn't refuse," he said, "we wouldn't refuse it."
McMahon is part of a much larger trend. Lobbying and lobbying-related businesses are being gobbled up at such a swift rate that three publicly traded advertising and public relations companies -- WPP Group PLC, Omnicom Group Inc. and Interpublic Group of Companies Inc. -- now own most of the influence industry's best-known names. These global behemoths control firms founded by former president Bill Clinton's pollster, former president Jimmy Carter's spokesman, and the current chairman and immediate past chairman of the Republican Party, among many others. ]
now Trippi is gone and McMahon is the boss:
msastrategies.com
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MUST READ ARTICLE --(long) how he campaigns is to seed the field (one could say unfairly
but its not a straight up on issues or ideals its getting the people in to sway)
and the snip is his involvement with WAVX:
JOE TRIPPI REINVENTS CAMPAIGNING
Organization Man
Issue date 11.17.03
by Noam Scheiber
tnr.com
Trippi has always been a self-described technophile. He spent three years at San Jose State University majoring in aerospace engineering. Beckel remembers doing a panel discussion with him not long after the 1984 campaign, when Trippi was already talking about an early version of the Internet and how it could change politics. "I said, 'Joe, I don't have any idea what you're talking about,'" Beckel recalls. Meanwhile, though Trippi's profile in the small world of political operatives continued to grow with each successive presidential campaign--Mondale in the 1984 election cycle, Gary Hart and then Dick Gephardt in the 1988 cycle--he'd begun to sour on the life of the political operative. The constant plotting and scheming of a presidential campaign had started to wear on him, as had the growing importance of money in politics and the implosion of the Hart campaign over something as seemingly irrelevant as Donna Rice. So it wasn't entirely surprising that the late '90s found Trippi entrenched in Silicon Valley instead--investing in tech start-ups, sitting on boards of directors, and doing corporate consulting on the side.
One of those start-ups was a little-known firm called Wave Systems, whose products secure information--like credit card numbers--used in online transactions. But more important than the technology was the investor community Wave created. Starting in about 1997, the company set up a chat board for Wave investors interested in exchanging ideas with one another. Pretty soon the site was attracting hundreds of posts per day from so-called "Wavoids"--at all hours of the night. What kept them coming back was the fact that Wave executives were actually reading what the investors wrote. "They had this constituency," says Jason Barkeloo, a Ph.D. student living in Ohio who invested in the company early on and remains a frequent poster on the company's message board. "The people involved in this community were doctors, neurosurgeons, psychiatrists, professors. ... I'd come home at four, five in afternoon, and I'd be online doing research 'til two in the morning."
Joe Trippi--username "random1"--was also a Wavoid. "Snackman, Bigtim, EcommerceMan--I can tell you everything about that community," he says. Trippi had begun investing in Wave and posting on its chat board in 1999. Although he was intrigued by the kind of community Wave had built, within a couple months it became obvious that the company wasn't doing as good a job as it could of interacting with investors. "They had a really tough time communicating in English what it is they do," Trippi recalls. So Trippi sent an e-mail directly to Wave CEO Steven Sprague and his father, Peter, the company's chairman. "I said, 'I think you guys are screwing up. You're not communicating things right. ... Here's why and how and everything.'"
A month later, Trippi was on the company payroll--a move that, according to Barkeloo, was like catnip to the Wavoids. "When Joe came on board, through the community there was an air of, 'One of us now is on the inside.' Joe, as far as I know, was the bridge between the community and the company." Sprague estimates that, before long, Wave's investors were generating 1,000 and 1,500 posts per day, something basically unheard of in the corporate world. "I don't think there's anyone that will tell you there's anything like it," Trippi says.
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from Feb last year: Message 19781629
Scheiber talks about Trippi's experience as a stock speculator and participant in the infamous Raging Bull message boards. Trippi was a vocal investor in Wave Systems and then an employee of the company. Scheiber is fairly charitable about this, only indirectly alluding to the collapse of Wave's share price. (It ran from the teens to the high forties in 1999 and 2000 and bottomed out at about .75 after the crash - it now floats at around $2.50.) When I first found this out, while doing research for my own story on Dean, I wasn't sure what to make of it. For one thing, I haven't yet figured out if, at the time that Trippi was praising the stock on the message boards, he was also taking a check from the company, or if he stopped hyping the stock when he was hired. And, though I figured quite a bit could be made of this by somebody with an ax to grind, it is the kind of thing that seems most significant to people who are unfamiliar with the rather peculiar environment of the R.B. message boards during the height of the boom. I spent a lot of time on Raging Bull when researching Dumb Money. From Sheiber's piece, it sounds like everybody in the Wave Systems forum knew exactly what was going on with Trippi - and were completely thrilled that one of the online traders who was long on Wave was in a position to communicate directly with the company executives. I suspect that, given the denoument, this may be a slight exageration. On the other hand, Wave survived the crash - albeit after its shareholders took a brutal haircut - and that's more than can be said for most of such bubble companies. aether.com
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The book “The Road Warrior” by Peter Goldman
was NEVER published yet wrote about ( the bottom of a link I previously made at Raging Bull)
ragingbull.lycos.com
by reading previous articles that book should be an interesting addition to the tactics
and strategy used by political PR people.
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Plus going through WAVX boards and reading on SI and Raging Bull,
at one time I had notes to links (yep I did my Raging Bull thing too) but don't want or have the time to do that again |
