Ethan Riegelhaupt is senior vice president for corporate and public affairs at Edelman. Previously, he served as vice president for speech writing and internal communications at The New York Times Company. He was also a senior staff member for New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo. Follow him at @Ethanriegelhaup.
I recently wrote a column suggesting that people could use digital tools to help counteract the explosion of negative political advertising coming our way this fall. While readers were generally supportive of the idea, I also sensed a fatalism in their comments about what we could accomplish.
While this mindset is completely understandable, it seems we’ve forgotten the most important lesson from the past twenty years of Internet experience: Profound change is within our grasp if we are able to make the intellectual connection between the power digital provides us and our political aspirations as a community.
Content is a great example of how this can play out. We are quite vocal online about what we want to see and hear. As a result, producers and programmers are responding with innovative new offerings for every imaginable medium. This should make us believe in the potential of our influence, but for too many, a pre-1960s political mentality prevails: What is will always be.
While the dysfunction in Washington, D.C. adds to this dispirited attitude, substantial leaps forward are actually happening. Last week, President Barack Obama decided to come out in favor of same-sex marriage, the day after voters in North Carolina voted in favor of Amendment One, explicitly rejecting the legality of every imaginable relationship outside of the male-female union.
Moments after President Obama told Robin Roberts of ABC News that people of the same sex should be able to get married, social media platforms exploded in excitement. Everyone noticed, including Republicans, who have treated gays and lesbians as a wedge issue for years. The reason they noticed: It was suddenly unclear how this issue would play in the 2012 election cycle.
?
What made the President’s same-sex marriage announcement even more prominent was a news story that recalled an unfortunate episode from Gov. Mitt Romney’s school days, relating to how he and a gang of his friends went after another boy, who may have been gay, and cut off his hair. The details quickly spread across the web and the Governor immediately apologized. Although he added that he could not quite remember the incident.
What we learned from the President’s announcement and the allegations against Gov. Romney is that the Internet is a useful social monitor. In many ways, the views and interests of the community are being expressed and reinforced by what happens on the web. As a result, historical evolution is being compressed. What used to take X amount of time has decreased.
What does this tell us?
If we believe something needs to change, we have the ability to make it happen. Social media is driving attitudes in the midst of a dramatic political moment in history. Because of this, we should be much more optimistic about what we can achieve and how quickly we can achieve it..
The stock, which trades on NASDAQ using the symbol “FB,” was supposed to enter the market at 11:00 a.m. ET. Instead, it was delayed by more than 30 minutes, reportedly due to overloaded demand on NASDAQ’s systems.
Some analysts have remarked that the trading delay ultimately hurt Facebook’s opening day.
While many are quick to point the finger at Facebook’s relatively flat performance as a sign that the company has “failed,” we think Twitter’s Director of Platform, Ryan Sarver put it best:
I love how analysts are saying “facebook disappoints on it’s opening day”. IT’S WORTH $ 105B IN 8 YEARS!! Nothing disappointing about that
Facebook became a $ 104.2 billion company Friday in much the same way it became the world’s biggest social network and a cultural game-changer: by stubbornly forging ahead despite criticism and calls that it couldn’t be done.
Last week, rumors turned into full-blown financial news stories that the initial public offering was getting a lukewarm reception in road-show presentations to investors in New York City, Boston and Palo Alto, Calif. CEO Mark Zuckerberg was criticized for wearing his trademark hoodie to the event in New York and skipping the event altogether in Boston, and some analysts said Facebook could open with a value as low as $ 75 billion.
And yet, by this week Facebook had raised its expected share price and was making more shares available to meet demand. By the close of markets Thursday afternoon, Facebook had set its opening share price at $ 38 (after considering levels as high as $ 40). Whatever happens in trading today, Facebook will be the third-largest IPO in history and will net the company $ 16 billion.
“It shows tremendous confidence in the guy wearing the hoodie,” Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, told Bloomberg. “He hasn’t specified how he’s going to do it, but he’ll have to do it to justify this price.”
Market Cap Now More Important than Number of Registered Users
But share price doesn’t really matter. The most important number for now is that $ 104.2 billion. The $ 100 billion marker is symbolic, as is so much that surrounds Facebook’s evolution into a publicly traded company. Beyond the hoodie, Zuckerberg has been sending all sorts of signals that he’ll be a different kind of CEO, from his decision to not travel to New York to ring today’s opening Nasdaq bell, to celebrating the IPO not with champagne but with Red Bull (the company had one of its famed hackathons last night).
And while $ 104.2 billion can (and will) change as Facebook ebbs and flows through the ups and downs of being a publicly traded company, at least for now it makes the eight-year-old company more valuable than all but a handful of U.S. companies. Facebook is bigger than McDonald’s, bigger than Citigroup and – also symbolically – bigger than Amazon, arguably the biggest success story from the first dot-com boom.
“Facebook is here to stay,” Navin Chaddha, a managing director of the Mayfield Fund, a venture capital firm, told The New York Times. “It’s a virtual economy where people are spending more time than any other Internet property.”
Still, its stock is still highly speculative, leaving investors unsure of what to do. A steady stream of them have been interviewed on cable television and all make the same basic point: Invest in the company and you may see it wither, much as Groupon, last year’s IPO darling, did. Skip putting money down, however, and you may kick yourself if Facebook ends up like Google, which now trades about 100 times higher than its IPO price.
At its open this morning, Facebook was trading at 100 times its earnings for the previous 12 months. By comparison, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index trades at 14 times earnings. People who run the price up today are mainly buying into the hype, and may be too late: The true short-term winners are the company’s early investors, people who bought shares on private exchanges and Zuckerberg (his stake is now worth about $ 19 billion).
“It could take many years to calculate Facebook’s impact,” Martin Sorrell, chief executive of advertising company WPP, told The New York Times. “There’s a lot of pressure for them to monetize their content and demonstrate productivity, but you can’t do it overnight.”
Become knowledgeable of Jewish Law and at the same time inspired in your daily conduct by its eternal wisdom. All, within a minute or two. Guaranteed, only after a short time, implementing these pearls of wisdom you will be a happier more fulfilled person. www.koshercaffeine.com
This VoIP Nugget explains in detail how to setup the tunnel server side. It then shows how to setup the 3CX VoIP Phone to connect from anywhere on the internet to 3CX Phone System
Dieses Video ist ein Schulprojekt, in dem wir erklären, was Web 3.0 ist. Wir vergleichen auch die Unterschiede zwischen Web 1.0, Web 2.0 und Web 3.0. Als Beispiel haben wir ein italienisches Restaurant gewählt. (c) 4BK | HAK Hallein | November 2009 Zeichnung: Glenn P. Kamera: Florian S. Stimme: Stefan S. CONTACTS: Facebook: www.facebook.com Twitter: twitter.com Myspace: www.myspace.com
Visit: sites.google.com For complete and easy guide on Installation and Configuration of Windows Server 2008 Role Services including ADDS, Bulk User Import, DNS, DHCP, Administering File Services and Data Sharing, NAP, EFS, Print Services, WDS, Web Server IIS. Installation and Configuration of IPsec on Windows Server 2008
