A $136 Billion Dip in the Road

On April 23rd, a fake AP tweet caused $136 billion in stock value to disappear.

For those of you who aren't familiar with this story, I will summarize.  A fake AP tweet indicated that President Obama had been injured in a White House explosion.  Despite the fact that AP quickly flagged the tweet as fake, the S&P 500 dropped 0.9 percent, briefly erasing $136 billion in stock market wealth.

Even though the market recovered quickly upon the realization that the tweet was a hoax, a lot of money changed hands over a very short time frame.  There were undoubtedly winners and losers.

The response to this incident was as fast as it was varied.  On either end of the spectrum, there were calls to end the computerized trading that caused thousands and maybe millions of shares to be sold in milliseconds. On the other hand, some are looking to the equally swift correction the system enacted and feel that it is an example of things working like they should.

I think that this is another example of how our technological abilities are advancing ahead of our social abilities to deal with the consequences.  I put significantly underutilized smartphones, the Cloud, and Facebook into this category.  All with differing degrees of consequences.

I do not mean to paint some sort of Terminator scenario where the technology is going to take over our lives and rule the world.  Technology can change must faster than society can change.  That just means that for a while after a period of rapid technology change, society has to struggle to catch up.  I think we are in that type of period now.

It manifests itself in things like some social and emotional upheaval.  When automobiles first were commercially available, automobile drivers were seen as rude, impudent upstarts by those who chose to still travel by horse and buggy.  Today, we have people making blanket indictments about technology.  It is, according to them, a travesty to invest so much into technology.

This disconnect between our technological abilities and our social ability to assimilate to it can also be clearly seen in business.  For example, businesses sense that social media is important and will continue to be important.  Yet most companies have struggled to figure out how to make social media work for them.  The few companies that seem to be having success tend to be newer companies that don't have to assimilate traditional media thinking into a new media world.

I think that the lesson of the fake tweet is neither that the world is coming to an end nor that there is nothing wrong here so don't bother looking into it.  I think we need to try to understand how technology changes the traditional paradigms we are working in.  In the case of this incident, it isn't only that the stock market can react incredibly fast to changing market situations, but also that we must learn when we can trust our media sources and how easily things like fake tweets can be generated.

I agree with some of the commentators I have read that this incident was not a crash of the system but rather a minor dip.  But like a dip in the road, if you aren't prepared and don't know how to drive through it, that little dip can knock your trailer off it's hitch and cause a lot of problems.

It's best that we mind the dips in the road, at least until we can catch up to our technology.

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• Stocks Plunge On Fake AP Tweet
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Leadership Lost

"Being a leader is like being a lady.  If you have to go around telling people you are one, you aren't."
-  Margaret Thatcher, 1925-2013

 "I begin to feel like most Americans don't understand the First Amendment, don't understand the idea of freedom of speech, and don't understand that it's the responsibility of the citizen to speak out."           - Roger Ebert, 1942-2013

In the last two week we lost two groundbreaking leaders.  Both of them cleared new territory for those who came after them.  Both of them paid little heed to what had been done before but rather looked forward and acted on the possibilities of what could be.  I am talking about Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, and Roger Ebert, the film critic for the Chicago Sun Times.

I am pretty sure that there won't be too many articles or blogs that will discuss the passing of both of these two rather unique individuals.  However, to my mind, they had much in common.  Both Thatcher and Ebert broke new ground in their respective fields.  Both were divisive leaders, loved by some, despised by others.

Whatever you thought of her politics, it is hard to deny that Margaret Thatcher was a leader.  The first and only woman to serve as Prime Minister in the United Kingdom, I also believe that she had one of the longest tenures in recent history.  She was a towering figure in history and an impressive leader.

Articles and books have been and will continue to be written about Margaret Thatcher and her leadership style.  Margaret Thatcher, if only because of the historic nature and length of her tenure as Prime Minister and her very visible style of decisive leadership will be a subject of study for some time.

Roger Ebert was a leader of a different ilk.  An early adopter of new media, Roger expanded the perception of what a journalist is or could be.  He took one of the more mundane parts of the newspaper, movie reviews, and created an empire.  He teamed up with Gene Siskel to talk about the big screen on the little screen.  He was an early and voracious blogger.  When he lost his jaw to cancer and could no longer speak normally, he found numerous other ways to make sure his voice was heard.

Like Thatcher, there were many who despised Ebert for his showmanship, for his insistence on writing his own rules.  Like Ebert, Thatcher paid less attention to critics than to the voice driving her to break new ground and achieve great things.

Leaders begets other leaders.  Martin Luther King wouldn't have had the success or visibility he had without Rosa Parks and Malcolm X.  Mark Zuckerberg might have been just another Harvard dropout without Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.  Some have postulated that without the walls (and ceilings) that Margaret Thatcher knocked down, we wouldn't have had Angela Merckel in Germany or Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama in the US.  Without Roger Ebert, would we have had the early adoption of the internet by critics?  Would we have cared whether or not movie reviews were on the internet?  Would we have understood the Facebook thumbs up symbol?

The point is that tomorrow's leaders are in the wings, watching what today's leaders are doing and learning from their triumphs and their failures.  As each new generation of leader breaks new ground in style or inclusiveness or social consciousness, the leaders who follow find it easier to do so.  They can do this because they are standing on the shoulders of the generation that went before.  And hanging onto the shoulders of the other leaders of their generation.

As Margaret Thatcher indicates in her quote at the start of this blog, most lessons in leadership are better shown than talked about.  The world has been shown a lot by the two leaders we lost this month.

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The recent tragic events at the Boston Marathon leave me in a quandry as to how to respond or whether I should respond.  I will simply say to the people that were there and to those who were impacted by what happened there, the thoughts and prayers of a nation are with you.  I would also make a plea that as a society we work harder to find less violent ways to express ourselves.  Thank you.

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• Knowing Why

Is Voter Turnout a Communications Issue?

Yesterday,  someone commented on my March 21st post on local elections with this question:
"I am active politically at the local/state level. We have had declining voter turn-out over the years so that the last city council election garnered less than 10%. I used to think that those elections would have higher participation for exactly the reasons you mention - council & school boards being so close to home. any thoughts on this?"

After responding, I continued to think about this issue.  I suspect that low voter turnout, in part, is a communication issue.  Venturing a risky step into political blogging (just for today, I promise!) I wanted to expound on some of my thoughts.  Please join in on this discussion if you want to add to the discourse!

I suspect that there are several reasons for the decline in voter turnout.  

• I think that many "could be" voters stay away from the polls because they question whether or not their vote makes a difference.  I suspect we will see a significant drop in the percentage of people voting in the national election this fall (as most states saw during the primaries) because there has been a lot of attention paid to Citizen's United issues.  "I don't have millions to contribute so how can I change things" is how many individuals are viewing things this political season. 
• Related to that, many erstwhile voters question what impact, if any, one candidate will have over another.  If you view all politicians with the same suspicion-colored glasses, they all look the same and then why take the time to go to the polls?  
• While they were set up to make it easier for people to vote, I suspect that the preponderance of options like Early voting and Absentee voting can be intimidating and confusing for those not fully engaged in the process. It also has the impact of lessening the special aspect of Election Day. 
• When I was growing up, I remember hearing leaders of all shapes, sizes and political flavors talk about the importance of getting out to vote.  I grew up believing it was EVERYONE'S civic duty to vote.  I don't hear that from our leaders nearly as much.  Voting no longer is held out as a sacred duty of citizenship.  
• It is harder and harder for politicians and political parties to cut through the communications barrage we are all subjected to every day.  With an ever-increasing number of communications venues and an exponentially increasing number of message that most of us have to contend with every day, it is hard for your voice to be heard.  It is hard for McDonald's and Chevy, who can market 24/7/365.  Imagine competing with that with an uncertain source of funds and a limited time frame.  On top of that, try communicating complicated policy issues and positions in a 30 second ad or a two minute "news" story.  Perhaps that is why candidates and PACs turn toward negative ads.
• Negative ads.  Proponents say they work.  But they work not by bringing out your voters but by discouraging the voters of the other guy.  

More specifically on local elections, 

• I think it comes down to people not realizing the impact that local elected officials have on their day-to-day lives. There are fewer and fewer independent, local media sources to tell us the value of those local elected officials.  When all you have is national and regional media, who is covering the city council meeting?

As any good marketer knows, in order to get people to act, you have to move a prospect through certain steps of interest and affiliation before you get them to consider taking action.  I suspect that our political system, used to a bygone era when stronger party affiliations provided automatic interest and affiliation to a candidate.  They still have to adjust to a new political reality in which more and more voters identify themselves as being independent and even those who identify with a party are more willing to cross over to vote for a candidate or an issue that captures their imagination, their interest and their affiliation.

In the end, voter turnout is tied to interest in the candidate and the system.  For some of the reasons I suggested above and many others, eligible voters have lost, or never obtained, that interest.  From time to time an issue or a candidate will fan those flames and generate new interest, and new voters.  Ronald Reagan  in the 80s and Barack Obama in 2008 both come to mind.  And both of those candidates were touted as being Great Communicators.