Where’s Bob?
Nasdaq boss Bob Greifeld needs to step out and more aggressively face the press on the high-speed digital meltdown that electronically paralyzed trading in all Nasdaq securities for three hours on Thursday.
That’s the bold advice of onetime Nasdaq communications czar Scott Peterson, who watched the events unfold from his perch as co-founder of Relay Station Social Media, a digital-strategy agency.
“As in any crisis-management situation . . . Greifeld needs to get in front of the press and be clear and open and transparent, and promise to get to the bottom of this,” Peterson, Nasdaq’s former communications director, told The Post.
Greifeld, 56, had lots of explaining to do about the botched May 2012 Facebook initial public offering. And now he’s dealing with this latest disaster, which apparently started with a data-feed mishap.
A Nasdaq spokesman disagrees, saying that Greifeld has been transparent and widely available to the media — he appeared on three network TV shows on Friday, for instance, and conducted a series of interviews with news organizations worldwide, both major and minor.
But Peterson says that’s not enough. “It needs to be a full-court press and not just a few appearances,” Peterson said. “It has to be regular briefings to turn this thing around. The longer he holds off, the worse it is going to be.”
Peterson added, “If Greifeld knew within 30 minutes what went wrong, as he [claimed Friday] on CNBC, he should have shared what he knew up to that moment with America and the world. Those are his constituencies too.”