COURTLAND BROOKS INTERNET DATING AGENCY-CONSULTANCY

IDEA WOW + IDEA SUMMIT, in Chennai, India

COURTLAND BROOKS - Apr 9 - The Internet Dating Excellence Association World Officers Weekend happened over the weekend, and the IDEA SUMMIT happened Monday. Here's video summaries of our adventures in Chennai.

Day 1

Day 2

IDEA SUMMIT was a closed door event. It was a very full day of learning and sharing. 14 presentations were made by the CEO/Founder of Matrimony, CEO of Mamba, Chief Mobile Officer of Matrimony, CEO/Founder of Lunch Actually, CMO of Woo, CEO/Founder of Agape Match, CEO of LoveMe, MD of Insparx, Owner of SuccessfulMatch, Owner of Hubpeople, Co-founder of LoveMe, MD of Mamba, and CEO of BetterHalf.ai.

You can see the full information and line up here. Now we're working on the next event.

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Courtland Brooks Book-of-the-Month - PR for Humans

COURTLAND BROOKS - Apr 7 - I find the best PR advisors are former journalists. Mike Sergeant is part of that fray (CNN, BBC), and has authored this brilliant advisory on how to get PR right, and be human. PR for Humans is out April 18th. (Amazon UK book, or Kindle UK). I believe the people in the personals business need to be more personal with the public, so this book seems very apt. Mike argues that we should aim to 'connect human leaders with human audiences,' and his book covers new-school storytelling, reputation building and how to 'be a hedgehog!?' Why not. Enjoy. Please let me know your thoughts. :-)

Tinder has a story. Bumble has a story. Does your dating app have a story? You must be known for something, or you won't be known for anything. Find our more about Courtland Brooks services. Please email mark@courtlandbrooks.com for more info.

Courtland Brooks Book-of-the-Month - Talk To Me

COURTLAND BROOKS - Mar 5 - The March book-of-the-month is 'Talk To Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think.' The book is out 26th March. I think we have to keep our eye on big media transitions. Voice is huge for search. Which means it should be huge for the way we enable people to search for singles. This book will walk you through the concepts around Conversational AI and what Google, Amazon and Apple are working on. Essential reading IMHO.

This post also appears on OnlinePersonalsWatch

A Great Pitch Email

COURTLAND BROOKS - Mar 4 - We get pitches for OPW.news quite a lot this time of year. Here's a great example IMHO. Short, sweet, got my attention, and shows they did a little research on us...

Hey Mark,

How much does it suck when the person you match with on Tinder or Bumble looks nothing like their pictures?

A lot, right?

That's why I've developed Filter Off, a dating app that allows users to participate in a facetime-style 60 second chat. There’s no messaging or swiping!

I know you've written about dating apps in the past, so I'd like to invite you to write about us! We launch on Saturday, March 9th at 9 pm ET. If that time doesn't work for you, we can do a private session.

Interested?

Sincerely,
Zach
--
Zach Schleien | Founder | Filter Off

Navigating (Dating) Industry Disruption, Mark Brooks HBS Interview

COURTLAND BROOKS - Feb 24 - I interviewed with the HBS testimonials team about my career in Internet dating, and my experience with the Harvard Business School PLD program. The dating industry has gone through some significant disruption with the rise of mobile dating, Tinder, and POF. Here's my story.

White Paper: Background & Reputation Checking Services for Internet Dating

COURTLAND BROOKS - Feb 18 - In this analysis, which was sponsored by MyLife, you'll learn:

• Are background checking services useful for dating services?
• Why should you do them?
• How do dating sites offer them?
• What are the Costs and Risks?

Contact: Jeannette Weinstein, Head of partnerships at MyLife.com at jw@mylife-inc.com

Has Facebook Been Good for the World?

VOX - Feb 4 - 15 influencers weigh in on the company's 15th birthday. Here's some key quotes relevant to us in the dating industry. - Mark Brooks

Sherry Turkle, author of Life on the Screen and clinical psychologist at MIT
Facebook friendships offered the feeling of connection without the demands of intimacy... At the Facebook launch, I expressed my disbelief that we could have intimacy without privacy and democracy without privacy. But I thought about the two problems separately. Facebook taught us that we can only consider them together. The social media business model sold our privacy in ways that fractured democracy.

Ro Khanna, US Congress member representing Silicon Valley
Facebook has been a net good for humanity by democratizing communication and mobilization... It has allowed members of a diaspora to stay connected to their relatives. It has helped provide a sense of community in an age when families have been split.

Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now and professor of psychology at Harvard University
The problems created by social media differ in a key way from wars, dictatorships, epidemics, and other scourges: They are not imposed on people but chosen freely. Billions of people have decided that the benefits of social media exceed their costs. This doesn't necessarily mean that social media are a net benefit; people can make choices that are bad for them, like addictive drugs, and they can make choices that are good for them individually but bad for the world, like carbon emissions. Finally, many of the rumors about the social, psychological, and political pathologies loosed by social media do not survive fact-checking. Careful studies have shown that social media has not led to epidemics of loneliness, depression, and suicide (see the references in the "Happiness" chapter of Enlightenment Now and in my follow-up essay).

Jonathan Haidt, author of The Coddling of the American Mind and professor at NYU
There's an old joke about an optimist who fell off of the observation deck of the Empire State Building. As he was passing the 30th floor someone called out to him: "How's it going?" He replied: "So far, so good!" I think that joke has some relevance for humanity in the Facebook era. Facebook and other social media platforms are powerful centrifugal forces, binding groups together to fight other groups within their own country... By 2030 we will see the spectacular political collapse or geographical division of more than one Western democracy that seemed rock solid on the day Facebook was founded, 15 years ago.

Peter W. Singer, author of Like War: The Weaponization of Social Media and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution
"The goal wasn't to create an online community, but a mirror of what existed in real life." Mark Zuckerberg, [is] not just a billionaire, but the ruler of a digital kingdom that has more members than any single nation in the world.

by Sean Illing, Kurt Wagner & Karen Turner
See full article at Vox

Your Opinion - IDEA SUMMIT Topics

COURTLAND BROOKS - Feb 6 - The 1st ever IDEA SUMMIT is happening in Chennai in April, and we'd like your input. 18 Internet dating industry leaders are speaking. 13 are CEOs. 11 of them have served the dating industry for 15+ years. We'll be talking about matters of importance to the dating industry and would appreciate your input on any burning issues you're experiencing and topics for presentation and discussion. If you contribute an idea, I'll put it to the group and send you some feedback on the thoughts and conclusions from the meeting on your suggested topic. Please email mark@courtlandbrooks.com. Thanks.

Book-of-the-Month - The Future Is Asian

COURTLAND BROOKS - Feb 5 - Courtland Brooks is starting a new book-of-the-month recommendation, and Parag Khanna's new book, 'The Future is Asian' is the February book-of-the-month. The book is brand new, out today, Feb 5th.

Asia is now the hottest area of the world for Internet dating. So we think its a good idea to get your head around Asia, and this is a great new book to help you do that. More than half of humanity lives in Asia! Most Western megacities are 10-12 million people strong, but the Asian super urban areas are pushing 60-70 million people!

Esquire magazine calls Parag Khanna one of the 75 people most influential people of the 21st century. He thinks the world is going through the kind of significant change that only happens every 400-500 years. In short, the 'complete reorganization of the human species.'

In his book 'The Future is Asian' Parag Khanna defines Asia multi-civilization order as spanning from Saudi Arabia to Japan, Russia, thru to Australia, Turkey and Indonesia. The 19th century featured the Europeanization of the world. The 20th century saw the Americanization of the world. Now the 21st century is the time of Asianization. Look to this book to build your historical and economic awareness of Asia.

You might also enjoy Parag Khanna's previous book, Connectography which charts the way the world is connecting across lines of infrastructure development into super urban areas, and beyond. Also, he co-wrote Hybrid Reality, which seems quite on-topic for the dating industry. The book talks about how we'll meld and co-develop with technology. Ray Kurzweil also talked about this at TED in 2014.

Thanks to Net Galley for early access to The Future is Asian.

(Books purchased through the above Smile.Amazon books links benefit Amnesty International)

The Top Internet Dating Reporters in 2018, According to Online Personals Watch

COURTLAND BROOKS - Jan 26 - Every day we review the news to bubble up and summarize the most strategically important and interesting news for dating industry leaders. Each year we run an analysis to see who the reporters are that we've most gravitated towards. Here's the top dating industry reporters for 2018, in our humble opinion.

#1 - Sarah Perez, Tech Crunch
A Tech Crunch writer since 2011, before that she worked for Read Write Web. This is our sixth annual review of top internet dating reporters and she made it to the top 10 list fourth times, in 2017 she ended up on 2nd place and she is our winner for 2018 with 19 of her articles used on OPW in 2018. She covered various topics, a lot of her articles described new features of dating apps.

#2 - Shana Lebowitz, Business Insider
Another new, that is not new on this list, she already appear on 2017's list. She is a stategy reporter for Business Insideer since 2015 and we used 11 of her articles on a wide range of topics on OPW last year.

#3 - JP Mangalindan, Yahoo Finance
A new name on our list. Chief Tech Correspondent at Yahoo Finance, who he wrote for Mashable and Fortune Magazine before. We used 8 of his articles published in 2018, he interviewed the CEOs of Tinder and Match Group multiple times and mostly covered big companies news.

#4 - Emily Bary, MarketWatch
She is a tech reporter for MarketWatch and we used 6 of her articles on OPW last year, they all covered Match Group news.

#5 - Ashley Carman, The Verge
Another new name on the list, tech reporter at The verge since 2015. We used 5 of her articles last year. She mainly covered the lawsuits related to Match Group.

#6/7/8 - Kurt Wagner, Re/code
And yet another new name, but only to this list. A senior reporter focused on business of tech industry. He wrote for Mashable and Fortune magazine before. Last year, we used 4 of his articles, all of them covered Match Group news.

#6/7/8 - Josh Constine, Tech Crunch
Another long term Tech Crunch technology writer, who specializes in deep analysis of social products. We used a number of his articles over the years, this year, there were 4, two of them on the topic of Facebook Dating feature.

#6/7/8 - Margi Murphy, The Telegraph
Margi is a US technology reporter for The Telegraph and a new name to us. We used 4 of her articles from last year, mostly covering new features, she also interviewed the new chief of Ashley Madison back in April.

There were 6 people who wrote 3 article that we used on OPW, but the two names we picked from them and ended up on the shared 9/10th place are people who wrote about internet dating in the previous years too and coincidentally, they both made it to this list before, one in 2015-2016, the other one last year.

#9/10 - Georgia Wells, Wall Street Journal
A long term WSJ reporter coverig technology. As we mentioned above, we summarized 3 of her articles on OPW in 2018, one on Facebook Dating, one on Tinder India and the last one on Bumble's plans IPO.

9/10 - Rachel Thompson, Mashable
Surprisingly, the first and only writer from Mashable who made the list last year. Rachel is the Senior Culture Reporter at Mashable. She writes about gender, sex, bodies, tech, and the internet. We listed 3 of her articles last year. They were more end user oriented, but still interesting for our readers, in our opinion.

And here's the rankings for top reporters in 2017 so you can compare. And for 2016.