The power of sharing

Posted on 24/04/2013 by Graham Chastney

Just as I was writing my post yesterday – Did you really share that online? – another incident was playing out on the US stock market:

The chart above shows the impact of a single tweet from the Associated Press twitter account on the stock of Apple, Google and Microsoft as well as the NASDAQ and Dow Jones indexes. That dip right in the middle was all caused by a single tweet.

The tweet reported, falsely as it turns out:”Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured.”

This wasn’t news at all, it was a hack, and Associated Press had to move quickly to quash the false information.

What this demonstrates, again, is the power of the tools that we have available to us to communicate information rapidly. The real power that caused the impact wasn’t, however, with Twitter, it’s with Associated Press as a trusted source of news. The tweet only had an impact because of where it appeared to come from, but it only had an immediate impact because of Twitter’s ability to communicate broadly and quickly.

The problem for Associated Press now is that the level of trust in its Twitter feed has been diminished and the current embarrassment is in danger of having a last impact. It’s the same for us as individuals. If our Twitter (or Facebook, or any other site you’d like to choose) gets hacked the level of trust from others goes down. Associated Press responded decisively and with clarity, it’s a good strategy. We will have to do the same if we are ever in that situation our reputation may depend upon it.

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.

Warren Buffett

Cisco Connected World Techology Report

Posted on 13/12/2012 by Graham Chastney

Over the last few years Cisco have produced a report on the changing attitude of people to being permanently connected.

This years report – 2012 Cisco Connected World Technology Report - has just been released. The report is based on two surveys, one looking into the attitudes of Gen Y, and the other looking at the attitude of IT Professionals.

At the heart of this year’s study is the smartphone and the constant connectivity it provides to work, entertainment, shopping, and friends. There are 206 bones in the human body, and the smartphone should be considered the 207th bone for Generation Y. They view smartphones as an appendage to their beings — an indispensable part of their lives, and yet they are concerned about data management and Internet security.

Who knew that 43% of British Gen Y always check there smart-phone as part of their morning ritual alongside brushing there teeth? It wasn’t much of a surprise to me having seen how many of them check their smart phone while stood at the latrine at work! The French are far less bothered about such things with only 29% always checking. It’s interesting that women are significantly more driven to be connected with 85% of them being compulsive checkers; it’s only 63% of men.

There’s a fun visualisation that enables you to calculate your data footprint, I apparently have a highly connected lifestyle. As you might expect there’s also a report highlighting some of the statistics and drawing some conclusions along with the seemingly mandatory set of Infographics including an interactive one showing the results for the different countries that took part.

The world is changing fast, there are a lot of people who don’t realise how fast.