Content Nation at the Opening Bell: Tweeting the NASDAQ Market Opening Celebration

The NASDAQ stock market is a thoroughly modern financial trading service, providing purely electronic trading of stocks for large and small investors alike through its network of securities dealers who buy and sell stocks on NASDAQ. The day's trading on NASDAQ starts at 9.30 in the morning by New York City's clocks, an occasion that has evolved into a great marketing tool for NASDAQ. Several years ago NASDAQ moved from its downtown digs near Wall Street in New York to the heart of Times Square on Broadway - arguably the center of today's mass-market media industry in the U.S. In doing so NASDAQ built a headquarters that was perfectly adapted to providing a media stage for "opening bell" ceremonies and news commentary on the securities markets. With a street-level studio chockablock with flat panel video displays, television network studios and a video-driven display several stories high wrapping around the corner of its building, NASDAQ created a "there" for its electronic marketplace that rivals the historic New York Stock Exchange's trading floor's opening ceremonies for drama and market impact.

I've been on the trading floor of several major exchanges along the way, so when my friend David Meerman Scott invited me to a "tweetup" of his appearance at the NASDAQ market opening ceremony it sounded like a great opportunity to do some networking in a familiar setting and to reflect on Twitter's impact on financial markets. I arrived a few minutes early to pause in the NASDAQ building's dramatic lobby and then was ushered in to the studio where a crowd of Twitterers and friends of David were congregating. It's an impressive facility, kind of like Disney World for financial markets, with lots of dramatic music, videos, voice-overs and television studio ambiance to heighten the sense of this being a media event as much as a market event. If NASDAQ is trying to build a media brand as much as a securities market brand, they're pushing all of the right buttons.

The ceremony went off without a hitch, with David offering pre-opening thanks to GlobeNewswire and Shareholder.com, two arms of NASDAQ that were backing the event, followed by a big hurrah and an almost-executed "wave" by the crowd surrounding David as the 9.30 mark approached. David then signed his "@dmscott" Twitter moniker on the electronic easel in front of the podium and lead the crowd out to the center of Times Square across from the studio for some photo-ops in front of the massive video displays on the NASDAQ building. As digital photos and videos of David's opening bell ceremony flashed up on the building - including  a nifty photo of me and David at the podium - we all got our few seconds of fame in lights on Broadway, then hustled back into the NASDAQ studio to chat and to say our goodbyes.

Like other "tweetups," the event was as much about the people who came as users of Twitters as it was the messages (and public relations mojo) generated by them on Twitter. A quick scan of NASDAQ-tagged messages from that morning on Twitter shows some of the enthusiasm that people generated online for the event, which seems to focus as much on David and the people who attended as it did for NASDAQ's sponsorhip. One of the tricks of sponsoring a tweetup seems to be that there's no guarantee that you'll get lots of direct collateral in the messages generated by the event. Much of the public relations value of tweetups seems to be in knowing who decided to show up for the event - and, by implication, who was endorsing it with their personal brand. In that sense this was a successful tweetup, with many prominent associates of David providing their personal endorsement of NASDAQ by putting their "boots on the ground" at the opening bell event.

To some degree the event also confirmed that Twitter has the intense interest of public relations professionals at least as much as everyday people. There we were, the supposed "avant garde" of electronic publishing, most of us in our charcoal gray suits and conservative ties, looking as businesslike as most anyone else walking down the streets of Manhattan on a Monday morning. Marketers are intensely interested in getting their brands to connect with people on Twitter, in part because its brief text format allows millions of people to spread messages and trends quickly and in part because the people to whom they send messages are oftentimes key influencers themselves. Twitter may be at the foothills of mass audiences today, but the people using it are oftentimes powerful and highly known people who want to keep their personal, corporate and political brands in the limelight.

As for NASDAQ's role in the Twitter phenomenon, I think that the event was a good move to highlight the NASDAQ brand on a key marketing channel, but it also made me think of NASDAQ's historical roots. In days of yore, the old National Association of Securities Dealers (now subsumed into the FINRA financial markets regulation body) used to print a daily list of prices for publicly traded securities with a profile too small to warrant their listing on a stock market. These "pink sheets" gave small companies a vague shot at reaching investors, but it was hard for them to get the attention that listed stocks were receiving. Today many of the types of companies that were likely to have been on those pink sheet listings are now privately held companies, giving investors fewer options to have a shot at up-and-coming high-growth opportunities for their funds.

In a sense the Twitter phenomenon is, like many social media publishing technologies, reminding us that the "Big Sombrero" economy is there to help individuals to form their own consensus about what's valuable in the marketplaces that matter most to them. With Twitter and other social media publishing platforms there are business transactions as well as social transactions that are executed in real-time, people encouraging and endorsing one another in ways that lead to valuable relationships and, oftentimes, money changing hands. Much of the economic value of the transactions generated by the power of social media will never register on NASDAQ's glowing and flashing displays, much less on the more-humble "pink sheet" listings.

On occasion the economic power of social media can be trained on mass-market brands and economic goals, and when it does it can have an enormous impact on them as well. But for every major corporation hoping to benefit from social media's influential marketplace impact there are millions of invididuals trying to make their own personal mark on one another directly, with or without major brands to underwrite their personal commerce. In doing so we may have entered an era in which personal brands can jump from "pink sheet" status to the strength of full market participants almost overnight - or thrive indefinitely in their own niche markets using the powerful influence of social media to sustain them. Financial markets such as NASDAQ are essential tools for ensuring the health of our economy, but the ability of the Big Sombrero economy to empower its own person-to-person marketing through social media may be giving traditional stock markets a run for their money for the bragging rights to who is ringing the bell of global economic growth.