The Messy Entrepreneur and Building a Community on The Social Web

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  • on March 8th, 2013

Once again my friend Fred Wilson was right. When I first showed him Stocktwits in 2009, he said : ‘If you love stocks and markets and love talking about them all day long, Stocktwits is for you.’

Yes, we created the $(ticker) helping create context and organization for the mass of messages being sent to Twitter, but we quickly built our own platform as well so that we could control our own destiny.

Our team went out and focused on curation and financial media partners interested in a curated markets and financial streams. The Stocktwits API is pulled now by CNN Money, Yahoo Finance, Reuters, Bloomberg and thousands of financial websites and apps. A lot of behind the scenes stuff. I love seeing the creativity of financial contributors as they build their own websites with Stocktwits widgets. Here is Bauen Capital’s trading blog.

We have battled the spam and negativity and politics that have plagued the discussions at other financial websites, with some basic common sense ‘house rules‘. We have built tools and processes for scaling these rules and the community now helps as well.

The original vision …a place to check in to find out what is really happening in the markets and a place to be immersed in ideas and education and hopefully some fun and irreverence. A place to both catch up fast or dive in deep.

As of Friday we unplugged twitter as well. Some interesting things have already happened. The most important being ..nothing. Our distribution partners like CNN and Yahoo etc. were never pulling those messages from us anyways. If messages came through from twitter to Stocktwits they died on Stocktwits. Over the years we have built browser extensions and partnerships with Hootsuite to allow easy sharing from Stocktwits and the web to Twitter, Linked In, Facebook and our financial API distribution partners. We are heads down on mobile products that will look, feel and work, like our website with full cross functionality. While we may be a tad behind here over the years, the tools for building mobile frameworks have only gotten better so when our mobile products hit the app stores they will delight our users.

One new member is Jon Boorman. He is a CMT (Chartered Market Technician…one day I will push these people to call themselves Chartered Market Artists). He loves markets. He now loves writing. He uses Stocktwits and has quickly realized the power of the Stocktwits platform. We love hearing this part:

Today was a good day.

I’m laid up after some minor surgery on my back, popping painkillers as I watch the market, and out of nowhere I’ve just had my best ever day for page views. Yeah, I know, I’m not supposed to look at that stuff at this early stage, but sometimes it’s the only way to tell just how well a post or idea was received.

One of the things I’ve noticed is the recent increase in the number of views coming from dedicated financial websites like Yahoo Finance, Reuters, or CNN Money.When you visit their sites these days, they have a section or widget installed where they display social media activity for a given stock. For example, on Yahoo they have a ‘marketpulse’ page for each stock. You can see the one for Green Mountain Coffee ($GMCR) here, and there’s my tweet in the first 7 or 8 entries towards the end of the day. I was surprised there were so few, but then I realized they aren’t pulling the tweets from Twitter, they’re pulling them from the StockTwits stream, so it’s much more about quality than quantity.

It’s a win-win for everyone, in pulling the feed from StockTwits, Yahoo is getting the curation of those ideas, which means a vastly improved signal to noise ratio for Yahoo users than if they had taken the feed direct from Twitter.
It also means bloggers like me have a better chance of having their commentary viewed and received by a wider audience. Contrast this to doing a search of $GMCR in Twitter where my message shows up as being 30-odd messages ago amongst a whole lot of noise.

Stuff like this is new to an old dog like me, so I’m probably not telling you anything you didn’t already know, but it helped explain some of the sources I’ve been seeing recently for a lot of visitors to my blog. Whenever possible now, if i’m making comments specific to a stock, I post it via StockTwits so I know it goes not just to my twitter audience, but also the more select consumers of financial content on Yahoo, Reuters, CNN, amongst others.

By the way, if you want to see a good example of unintended consequences, try to search the ticker for Walgreen $WAG in Twitter and see what results you get.

What a journey. Somedays we feel like plumbers (Joe the web plumber), somedays we feel like artists, but most of the time we are just entrepreneurs building a viable, thriving, self sustaining community of people that love stocks and markets. It is almost always messy.

Excited to work today as usual.

The information in this blog post represents my own opinions and does not contain a recommendation for any particular security or investment. I or my affiliates may hold positions or other interests in securities mentioned in the Blog, please see my Disclaimer page for my full disclaimer.

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