It has been really fun working with Nasdaq on real-time marketing and promotional ideas that bring our community together. Without the power of social media, we could not have come so far so fast.

One thing I would like to do – that Nasdaq can actually make possible – is ring the opening/closing bell…something seen every day around the world. The NASDAQ MarketSite in New York is an exciting place. To recognize how much Nasdaq appreciates our Data Junkies support, NASDAQ is excited to announce a contest to give you a shot at visiting the MarketSite to ring the closing bell with the StockTwits team on August 25th, 2009. Here’s how it works:

1) Send an @ message in Twitter to @DataJunkies that shows your enthusiasm for wanting to close the market.

2) You must include #ringthebell and @DataJunkies in your message so we can track it

3) You can send as many messages of that type between now and August 20th to enter

4) We’ll use an algorithm to randomly choose 30 winners to come to the NASDAQ MarketSite to ring the closing bell

5) You can only win one spot

Now, if you’re not familiar with what happens at the NASDAQ Closing Bell Ceremony, here is some cool stuff that will happen:

-Live video of you and your fellow NASDAQ Data Junkies on the MarketSite tower; your tweets will be streamed to the 7-story video tower in Times Square.

-The NASDAQ Closing Bell Ceremony is broadcast on CNBC and other networks around the world, so dress up and call/tweet your friends and family to say you’ll be on the air.

-You’ll have some great pictures taken of you.

-We’ll have some other NASDAQ Data Junkies and Stocktwits goodies

Hang with some fun Nasdaq and Stocktwits community members for the rest of the evening. I look forward to hanging out.

Note – You WILL need to get to Manhattan on your own dime :)