Make Money Online

Ever get the feeling that marketers don’t really understand social media – or at least don’t effectively utilize it?

That’s the premise of Steve Rubel’s article on Forbes.com, and he makes an important observation worthy of discussion. Rubel is a well-known member of the digerati who is Director of Insights for Edelman Digital, the digital division of the world’s largest independent PR firm.

Rubel says marketers are making a massive shift to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, sometimes to the exclusion of mentioning their own corporate websites. He wonders whether the corporate URL is a dying breed.

But Rubel sees the potential for this strategy to backfire. He says consumers could “perceive corporate real estate on Facebook as a lame attempt to appear cool and hip.” “Many brands are just using their Twitter and Facebook presences to spew out updates, without any thought to how consumers will benefit by essentially opting in,” says Rubel. And most important, he says, “very few businesses treat social networks as personal, conversational spaces. Hardly any feature real employees. And a scant few aim to advance shared interests.”

I think Steve Rubel has given voice to something the big traditional marketers are missing – something savvy online marketers surely understand: social media is not just another channel for ads. As I mentioned in my post about Twitter going commercial, ads on Facebook and Twitter need to be a good fit with those platforms for them to be viewed as authentic.

In fact, authenticity may be the real issue here. Rubel’s observations point to the fact that some big marketers may be viewing social media in an entirely wrong context. Their quick fix answer is to muscle their way into Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube – but once they get there, they have no clue what to do. Think of it as a bully on the basketball court who has no shooting skill. He may be able to take the ball away from the other kids, but he’ll have a heck of a time scoring a basket.

I’m reminded of a time when marketers wanted to convert their messages to another medium called direct marketing. It was a sometimes painful transition: The marketers had to speak in a different voice that put the emphasis on “you” instead of “me.” That’s not easy when you have a corporate ego. Marketers had to learn that direct marketing was at its heart a correspondence relationship. The promotional approach had to be engaging. Copy had to be loaded with benefits, not just features. There had to be a compelling offer. And marketers had to have a strong call to action and numerous response paths – they’d get nowhere without asking for the order and providing specific ways to respond.

In the same way, marketers can’t just stumble blindly into social media. They need to learn the same kind of lesson they were forced to learn when they embraced direct marketing.

Social media is a different animal. Marketers have to engage in a two-way dialogue with consumers to make it work, and they have to be willing to expose themselves to possible negative feedback and open criticism. They have to budget and staff for social media. They need people whose responsibility includes engaging, responding to, and following up with consumers.

All of this takes a commitment to using social media on its own terms. If you want to play on someone’s field, you have to use their ball. Sorry, but social media doesn’t fit into that comfortable little box called traditional marketing. When you look at the way some marketers are approaching social media, you have to wonder if they will ever understand its potential.

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Do Marketers Understand Social Media?

Over the past few months the industry has seemed to gone through some slight changes. Rebill offers for the most part are not run like they were before. I know this because of what’s happened to my own traffic, getting approval on my own offer, and then friends that I’ve talked to who have had to go back to “legit” affiliate offers.

So now what? Some food for thought…

Oldies but Goodies

Offers like credit reports, auto insurance, dating, etc. These are the classics but they’re offers that have been running strong this entire time for a reason…they convert. Some of the very first offers I ran back in the day were all 3 of those I listed above, and all 3 were profitable. I also see Google ads as well as Facebook ads for all 3 of those, which tells me that it looks like they’re converting just like the old days.

Mobile/IQ

Mobile used to be the hot “shady” thing to do, when rebilling people for $9.99 was unethical. My oh my if we only knew we would rebill for 10x that amount and go to bed with a smile on our faces (’our’ just referring to the entire industry). Mobile offers are doing well from what I hear. I see some ads on Myspace and other teenage oriented sites, and I also hear incenting these offers on app traffic is working nicely.

Edu

If you take a closer peek at Facebook and a few other places, you’ll see a few people running education offers. These have been kind of a “sleeper” for a while now, I ran them a while ago with some success. The only thing you have to watch out for is quality, they can end up nailing you on it. But other than that it’s a nice leadgen with a good payout for just completing a form with no credit card.

Good Ole Fashioned Business

Maybe it’s time for you to take some of those rebill profits and pour them into a business idea you’ve had in your mind for the past year. Don’t forget that affiliate marketing is just one of the ways to make money online. Build a site that people want to visit every day or a service that they don’t mind paying to use. In the age of Facebook/Digg/Reddit/etc, sharing has never been easier. This makes viral sites all the more easier to go viral.

Just some things to think about in case you’re a deer in headlights now that the FTC truck is speeding at you.

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Uh-oh. Just when it seems social media can do no wrong, Yelp gets hit with a class-action lawsuit that essentially accuses the local review heavyweight of extortion. Yelp of course fired back, but the end result of such cases is that some element of consumer trust has been inevitably lost. A new study suggest that consumers trust in social media’s most valued properties is waning.

Public relations firm Edelman just released its 2010 “Trust Barometer.” It indicates that only 25 percent of the public thinks their friends and peers “are credible information sources about companies,” down from 45 percent the previous year.

Such a study can strike fear into the hearts of marketers who increasingly siphon budget dollars into Facebook, MySpace and Twitter; one of the reasons they do so is to take advantage of a social environment that encourages sharing opinions with friends. If three-quarters of those opinions aren’t viewed as credible, however, that could mean a marketing investment in social media isn’t such a great investment after all.

Edelman’s CEO, Richard Edelman, thinks the fact that consumers are less reliant on each other’s opinions suggests that “it’s a more skeptical time. … People have to see messages in different places and from different people. That means experts as well as peers or company employees.”

In Ad Age magazine, Michael Bush observes:

In some cases, social networks themselves may be contributing to the decline in trust. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have allowed people to maintain larger circles of casual associates, which may be diluting the credibility of peer-to-peer networks. In short, the more acquaintances a person has, the harder it can be to trust him or her.

This, it seems to me, is a core problem. In the pre-social media days, each consumer had a relatively small circle of friends and their opinions meant something. Now the meaning of “friend” has morphed into nothing more than an online contact. Such a contact hasn’t necessarily built up trust with the consumer over time. These “friends” couldn’t possibly have the same kind of influence as a closely knit group of personal friends with whom a relationship has been built.

If there’s a silver lining in the results, it appears that the credibility of friends outweighs the trustworthiness of television news, according to the Trust Barometer. But consumer trust is down across the board. Newspapers and radio news were trusted only slightly more than friends.

So what should marketers who are still enamored with social media do? Global brand strategist Jonathan Salem Baskin has a provocative answer:  Take a long hard look at where to spend your marketing dollars. “Nobody with responsibility for a bottom line has ever felt comfortable with social media as a replacement for traditional advertising,” Baskin says. In fact, Baskin thinks too many marketers may have gotten into social media because of “the allure of cost savings and glib convenience.”

Baskin thinks part of the reason consumers may have driven the popularity of social media in the first place is because “they ran away from commercial speech because advertising had proven to be so irritatingly useless. … If we renewed our commitment to selling based on credibility, authenticity and utility, maybe people would trust what we tell them, respect our corporate reputations, and give us their purchasing loyalty.”

If Baskin is right, marketers need to examine their own promotional strategy and make sure they are meeting the informational needs of consumers. They can’t abdicate responsibility for traditional marketing simply by picking social media over another form of communication. Sounds like marketers have some soul searching to do.

Still, it leaves open the question of the apparent decline in consumer trust. Consumers may just be feeling a general malaise about the economy. Or they may be telling us that they are less confident in the advice they receive from their friends – and the information they obtain from media channels. If the latter is the case, it’s something we should all be concerned about.

The rest is here:
Is Consumer Trust Waning?

Unless they are prefaced by dollar signs, numbers are not sexy, which is why social media experts have spent years avoiding them. Like the cool kids, they often seem more interested in being invited to the party than delving into what the party is for. The argument is often that numbers and metrics only serve as distractions to engagement and dialogue.

As a model matures in order for it to maintain a business role, make no mistake social media is about business, its impact needs to be quantifiable. Forrester Research estimates that social media will make up 3% of overall interactive marketing spend in the US in 2010 with the highest delta of growth in any channel over the next four years. As social media’s channel grows so will the pressure to quantify.

Brian Solis, author and principal of the FurtureWorks agency, recently posted a well written piece about the Maturation of Social Media ROI on Mashable. In it he tackles the main crux behind the issue that many CMOs are spending against social media without being able to quantify a return on those efforts. Brian believes this is:

“A direct result of not tying activity to an end game, the ability to know what it is we want to measure before we engage. Doing so, allows us to define a strategy and a tactical plan to support activity that helps us reach our goals and objectives.”

Warm and Fuzzy Metrics

It used to be that simply being invited to or crashing the social media party was enough. Companies hired interns to catalog content and rushed to create Facebook Fan Pages and Twitter accounts, often because everyone else was doing it.

Then came what I like to call “warm and fuzzy metrics”. Words like engagement, participation, and involvement became key terms for defining online interactions with consumers. Similar to views in CPM, these terms are measured in volume of followers or retweets. Influencers sprouted from this tactic as a way to amplify that volume; after all you wanted to have the best DJ at your party.

Then came terms like trust and affinity; these were less fuzzy in nature and involved a brand’s core group of followers.

Of the warm and fuzzy metrics of social media ROI, only customer service is tangible. Both in terms of the increased ability for people to rate and review products, as well as the opportunity for customer service teams to engage and provide proactive response.

If your company is just participating in social media than maybe the fuzzy metrics are enough. If your company is running social media campaigns and considers social media a marketing channel than fuzzy metrics are a great way to get your budget slashed. It is no coincidence that, according to MarketingSherpa, inability to measure ROI, lack of budget funding, and management resistance are barriers to companies implementing social media campaigns:

For those who insist that “marketing is not sales”, I invite you to use that exact statement with your CMO and see how quickly your budget is diverted elsewhere. As David Vellante, co-founder of ITCentrix, Barometrix, and The Wikibon Project, cautions:

“I’ve seen multimillion-dollar print and television advertising initiatives get the green light because CMOs understood the media — and I’ve seen $10,000 social-media efforts scratched because execs didn’t get it.”

The Key is Return on Ad Spend

ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) is what many CMOs will look at when considering budget allocation against a marketing channel. By definition it has a tighter set of parameters than ROI because it doesn’t consider less fuzzy elements like branding or engagement. This metric for success is specifically looking for a direct dollar value generated as compared to the actual budget being spent.

If, as a study by Bazaarvoice indicates, 80% of CMOs expect upwards of 5% of their revenue to come through the social media channel then the spend against generating revenue better be tracked.

According to Fast Company, Dell made over $3 million in revenue through the Dell Outlet account on Twitter.  But, considering much of what happens in Dell’s Twitter account is coupon or offer driven, what was the true ROAS of hitting that $3 million? Never mind the additional cost of coordinating social media tactics and messaging within a company as big as Dell which, as Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger for Dell Inc says is challenging, “Executing against all those [social media] strategies will take a lot more effort and collaboration between many departments within the company.”

More telling is a recent report by Omniture on the impact of a social media campaign for National Geographic. While the campaign was seen as a success, in the report the Omniture analyst states that traffic from social media is 20x less likely to purchase than average visitor.

Laying the Foundation

What rings true for Dell is true for both large and small business interested in participating in social media.  Collaboration between all stakeholders is necessary in order for a campaign to reach its potential.  Here are the steps you need to take to lay a proper foundation for launch.

1. Know Your End Game: As Brian Solis said defining your end game is necessary in order to be able to quantify results.  Know what are you trying to accomplish and how you want to try keep track of it all.
2. Define Your Metrics: What metrics do you need to track to quantify results: Leads, Registration, Sales?
3. Check Your Tracking: I can’t tell you how often a new client doesn’t have the right pixel/cookie set on the right confirmation page. If your success metric is sales make sure you’re not just tracking leads. This requires testing.
4. Set Expectations: Benchmarking is great way for you and your CMO to have realistic expectations from a campaign. Fireclick and Coremetrics are two tools that can provide benchmarks based on industry averages related to conversion rates, cart abandonment, and other valuable data. They also allow you to pull data from a specific vertical.

Intelligence Gathering

This is where you gather the numbers that will let you know how your campaign is doing and where the dollars are. There are a lot of tools out there that will provide pretty dashboards but few that provide useful data. Here are some of the tools I recommend:

1. Google Analytics: Google Analytics is the defacto analytics system in most companies. You can track visits, page views, bounce rates, etc. Be sure, if sales are a key metric, that the ecommerce portion is activated.
2. Hitwise: Owned by Experian, Hitwise relies on ISP data of approximately 10 million users in the United States alone. Although an expensive solution, their Clickstream data provides some of the best intelligence on upstream and downstream traffic to your website.
3. Coremetrics: Along with their benchmarking services Coremetrics offers an analytics suite whose main differentiator rests in what they call their LIVE (Lifetime Individual Visitor Experience) Profiles. This is essentially an analytics expansion on the concept of customer types.
4. Fireclick: Owned by Digital River, is a streamlined version of many of the tools available for free through Google Analytics but in an easier to customize interface. The main advantage here is their Advanced Marketing Suite which ties you into other vendors and components in the Digital River portfolio.
5. Radian6: Radian6 is a buzz monitoring software that allows you to monitor certain keyword sets and capture data round them. The data includes such things sentiment, engagement, reach, and inbound links. It also allows you to port that data to your CRM.
6. HubSpot: In some ways HubSpot is more of a site optimization tool than an analytics tool. It does compile interesting sets of data around competitors and around reach as well as lead identification tools.
7. Omniture: I have a love/hate relationship with Omniture. Used correctly, with sufficient internal technical resources as well as buy-off from the marketing team on consistent use of campaign hierarchy, SiteCatalyst along with the other Omniture, is an amazing if overly complicated resource. It is however a very expensive one and there is a reason that Omniture holds yearly conferences on how to use their product.  They have a great Facebook app measuring toolset.

Making Sense of it All

Having the tools to capture the data you need is great but numbers are of little value if they are not actionable.  Here are some guidelines to avoid drowning in the data:

1. What to Do When the Numbers Don’t Match: First of all get the notion of the numbers matching out of your head. The numbers between two analytics systems will rarely, if ever, produce an exact match. The objective is to look for trends in the data and ignore anomalies that are not statistically relevant. If the data matches within 10% or less variable then consider the data to be inline. If the variant is 11%-49% then it might be worth doing some due diligence. For instance are all the pages that should be tagged, tagged correctly? If the variant is greater than 50% then something is wrong with the setup itself or with one of the systems you are using.
2. Spotting Trends is Vital: One of the most common mistakes I see is when business get excited about high sales numbers while completely ignoring the fact they overspent to get those numbers. Sales matter little if ROAS is in the negative. Trends are a great way to spot deltas which often provide indicators of the health of campaign. Sample key trends are:
   1. number of new to file customers
   2. number of transactions
   3. changes in repeat customers
   4. number of customer referrals
   5. uplift in other marketing channels
3. 3) Looks for Wildcards and Outliers: Sometimes you are so focused on the campaign data that you become blind to important clues. My favorite personal example of this was during the measurement of a campaign that Jones Soda ran with I Can Has Cheezburger in 2008. If you looked just at the number of sales that directly came from the I Can Has Cheezburger website the campaign numbers barely broke even.  However, when we looked closer at the analytics data we saw 12,000 additional posts created because of the campaign. When attributable sales from those posts were factored in sales showed 172% month-over-month growth and 42% year-over-year growth!With the amount of distribution sources available in social media always take time to see if elements of your campaign have been distributed beyond the initial sites you targeted. It will allow you to spot new opportunities to expand your campaigns.
4. Cross-channel Cannibalization and the Last Cookie in Debate: Most advertisers use cookies to know which ad network to pay and which marketing channel to credit for sales. Shannon Paul, community manager for PEAK6 Online and OptionsNewsNetwork, had a great post on this debate here. Cross-channel cannibalization is when the marketing costs/efforts of one marketing channel are not considered because a different marketing channel is being given credit for them. This impacts both budget allocation and proper allocation of costs. Since social media buzz often serves to uplift other marketing efforts they are most impacted by improper allocation.For example, a social media click originating from a Twitter focused campaign refers a customer to the site but a coupon affiliate closes the sale by providing a coupon to the customer. In a “last cookie in” system only the affiliate in this example would get credit for the sale. In an ideal world both the first and last referrer of a customer would be cookied so that you would know which channel is referring new customers and which is closing them, thus properly giving credit to both channels and minimizing cannibalization. Awareness of the complexities of tracking multi-channel efforts is key in order to properly coordinate award of credit to all involved channels.

Final Thoughts

If you are managing a social media campaign or are a business eager to launch into social media, remember to embrace the numbers. Numbers are sexy -they help spot costs and inefficiencies you could avoid; help identify opportunities you could be missing; and often determine which budgets will be renewed.   The dollar signs are there, you just have to know where to look.

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Sexy Numbers: Measuring ROI in Social Media Campaigns

The Winter Olympics kicked off just days ago in Vancouver, Canada. As always, the primary media coverage is traditional television, but there’s a new and essential spin this year – social media.

As Alexandra Samuel points out in her blog for Harvard Business Review,  the Winter Olympics is “a living social media experiment.” While social media was used during the Summer Games in Beijing, “this is the first time it will be deployed in a free and democratic regime,” says Samuel.

Social media is having an impact that goes beyond the Olympics Games themselves. For example, the city of Vancouver became a hotbed of social media activity well before the games even started. Vancouver’s local media coverage of the Olympics has also changed dramatically, according to Samuel. Citizen journalists, she says, “have provided an alternate – and often critical – take on the Games.” Linda Solomon, publisher of the Vancouver Observer, an online news magazine that recruited over 150 contributors, tells Samuel, “It’s not about crafting a story anymore, which is an art that takes many years to master. It’s about telling what you see and think, something anybody can do. This levels the playing field.”

Another area that is depending heavily on social media is the “Cultural Olympiad” – an entire series of multi-disciplinary festivals running before, during, and after the Games. The Cultural Olympiad showcases Canadian and international music, dance, theatre, visual arts, and film.

In addition to making early use of Twitter and Facebook, the Cultural Olympiad launched Canada CODE, a giant digital project that, for a year before the Olympics, provided Canadians with an online platform for “connecting, creating and collaborating” with the people of the world to present “an ever-evolving portrait” of Canadians. The culmination of CODE is an invitation to enter the “Virtual Stadium” and upload a personal photo for a chance to be a virtual part of the Olympics Closing Ceremony.

The International Olympics Committee has had to deal with the impact of social media by establishing regulations for its use. The IOC allows athletes to use Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools as well as blogs, but requires that they limit any posts to personal experiences. “You can’t act as a journalist if you aren’t,” said Bob Condron, director of media services for the United States Olympic Committee. “You need to do things in a first person way.” Athletes are also forbidden to reference any sponsor or advertiser that is not an official Olympic partner. Condron told Wired, “These are going to be the Twitter Olympics.”

Whatever happens during the Olympics, it seems clear that social media has changed the ground rules. Says Samuel, “On the one hand, the Olympic narrative of global community seems like a natural fit for social media… On the other hand the complexity and business model behind the Games make the prospect of grassroots storytelling a huge challenge.”

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Winter Olympics a Test Case for Power of Social Media

Hey guys and girls. I just want to write a little message, and I want other affiliates to comment on this issue as well. This is kind of aimed towards affiliate networks.

This post is coming because of something that has happened to me many times. If it’s once or twice at one or two networks, okay maybe those are legit. But when it’s happened at almost every network I’ve been at, some have to be true. This actual post is because I’m planning on running smorgasbord of offers with 1 network. They gave me the heads up that 1 of the offers I requested was no good to run. So my response was basically what the rest of this post says, and a ‘thank you’ to that network.

How many times have you asked “So what are your top converting offers to run for Vertical X?” and got a list back, ran those offers, only to find out that it’s converting worse than what you’re running now?

This has happened to me quite a few times. I’ll get a list of the top offers, and then I’ll ask my AM what the offer is converting at for most affiliates. They usually say very nice things, like “It’s converting at 13% for affiliates with a $5-6 EPC”. Now I’ll be getting like a $3.50-4 EPC now so this sounds amazing, almost double my revenue. So I run the offer and guess what, it’s a $2 EPC and I’m now almost losing money. It’s just happened too many times for them all to be my fault (I know my traffic is good because I’ve run it fine on other offers that look exactly the same).

For an affiliate like me, who doesn’t even want to talk to networks anymore unless they’re going to be honest, I propose this :

Instead of telling me what offers “your affiliates are running great right now”, give me some REAL numbers I can look at. If you have 1 affiliate running at a $6 EPC and 10 affiliates running it at a $2 EPC…tell me the offer has a $2.50 EPC. If that doesn’t beat what I’m running now, that’s just the way it works and I won’t run the offer. But if you’re honest about it and you get an offer in a month that has a $3.50 EPC overall, when you come to me I’ll actually run the offer. It’s annoying to run the offer, not see the $6 EPC, and lose money half the time just to find out that it’s a bad offer.

There was 1 vertical where I literally ran at least 20 different offers where every time I was told were the best offers at the time with great EPCs, only to find out that they all sucked. Lost at least $10,000 just to learn that anything an AM tells me about this offer is going to be a lie, and I should just call it quits.

Anyone with me?

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Jeff Molander wrote a post on his blog about social media. I decided to write a response at ReveNews instead of my own blog because, frankly, it is more provocative here. Plus, this is the community that introduced us. And that is the point Jeff misses about social media: it’s about the community.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary

In his post Jeff wrote about Mary, a woman who chose not to hire Jeff or attend one of his speaking engagements. Jeff humbly accepted that Mary was right to reject Jeff based on her logic. Mary thought that Jeff did not tweet enough and, therefore, could not provide value to her on the topic of social media.

Jeff called out Mary for looking at the quantity of tweets which is a statistic and does not denote value. On this, I think that Mary is more correct than Jeff, even if she cannot or did not express why.

Well, there’s this Guy

Jeff gave a little detail on Guy Kawasaki’s use of Twitter. What he left out is that @guykawasaki is really just @alltop with each item tweeted and retweeted at least 3 times (often and unfortunately more). Guy added the @alltop account after I asked about his self-retweeting and started a heated debate that continues today.

@guykawasaki is widely followed. While it started out with stories that Guy himself probably found interesting, it now appears to be operated by the Alltop staff. It links to Alltop articles that give an inferior summary and often make it difficult to find the link to the information that sounded interesting in the tweet that got a follower to the page. Which begs the question if/when Guy leaves Alltop, who keeps @guykawasaki?

Guy’s third Twitter account is @guysreplies. This is the account that Guy tweets from. If you reply to @guykawasaki, oddly the reply back to you is from @guysreplies.

The problem here is that Guy isn’t present. He is not a part of his own community. His blog post that is the heated debate is a debate in the community but Guy is not a part of it. This is what Jeff should be talking about. Regardless of the amount of tweet volume, Guy is absent from his own twitter account, in his own community, on his own article.

It’s in the conversation

So why was Mary right and Jeff wrong about the quantity of Jeff’s tweets? Jeff lectures on social media but he is not a member of the community. He does not take part in the conversation. If Jeff finds articles that others have written, he rarely tells his Twitter followers about them. If Jeff is active in commenting on a blog post he thinks is provocative, he doesn’t tweet about it. To me (and I think to Mary), that shows that Jeff doesn’t get social media.

Jeff tweeted a link to an article about what 1-800-Flowers has done wrong on Facebook. That post criticizes 1-800-Flowers for not taking an active role in its community. The author writes that 1-800-Flowers has little more than Facebook posts of Monday, Wednesday and Friday contests and a stock answer to anyone who has a complaint. That is not showing your community that you care. That is not taking leading the conversation, let alone even taking part in it.

We can discuss metrics to measure success of a retailer’s social media campaign another time. The real issue Jeff should be looking at in order to counsel retailers is how a retailer can be an active member of its own community whether on its own pages or that of others.

The beginning & end

The tweet that got me going on this was your ability to create meaningful biz outcomes w/ social media rests in your ability to act on this single realization. The single realization that I think you need is that to succeed in social media, you need to be active, proactive and a leader in your community. Hey, that’s no different than how people used to succeed in the brick-and-mortar world of days past.

[Author's note: I found Jeff's article via a tweet as I follow him on Twitter and then I read the article on his blog with a domain I used to own.]

More:
Taking an Active Role in Social Media for Your Business

The recent attack on RockYou.com’s database opened many people’s eyes to a number of security flaws that exist on even some of the more popular web sites. To begin with, the RockYou social network’s database was susceptible to a Structured Query Language (SQL) injection exploit.

According to Jeremiah Grossman of WhiteHat Security, at least “16 percent of websites are vulnerable to SQL Injection” so while sad, it is not surprising. Jeremiah also sites Verizon’s Data Breach Incident Report (DBIR), which says that “SQL injection attacks, cross-site scripting, authentication bypass and exploitation of session variables contributed to nearly half of the cases investigated that involved hacking.”

More shocking is that the user account data that was stolen was stored in clear text – plain text that has not been encrypted. For a site as large as RockYou, this is unacceptable. Still, it is not the most frightening thing that is exposed by this attack.

When igigi, the hacker responsible for the attack, harvested over 32 million username and password combinations from the site, the passwords – not the usernames – were posted online for all to see. After the collection of passwords was analyzed by the Imperva Application Defense Center, the results were a bit astonishing.

Password findings

After looking at the collection of passwords, it was found that:

• 30 percent of users chose passwords whose length is equal to, or below six characters
• Roughly 60 percent of passwords came from a limited set of alpha-numeric characters
• Almost 50 percent of users used names, slang words, dictionary words or trivial passwords (consecutive digits, adjacent keyboard keys, etc)

And what were the most common passwords? The following table shows the top ten passwords in the first column. The second column shows the number of users who selected that as their password.

According to their findings, Imperva reported that in 17 minutes an attacker could compromise 1000 different accounts using a brute-force password cracking tool.

“Everyone needs to understand what the combination of poor passwords means in today’s world of automated cyberattacks: with only minimal effort, a hacker can gain access to one new account every second — or 1000 accounts every 17 minutes,” said Amichai Shulman, CTO of Imperva.

Combine this with the findings from the British firm Trusteer that “73 percent of Internet bank clients share online banking password with non-financial sites, and 47 percent re-use both their online banking user name and password” and you have a potential for disaster.

Strong passwords

While there is no excuse for the mistakes made by RockYou, any efforts made by them to protect their database would do nothing to prevent a brute-force attack from cracking some of these passwords in a matter of mere seconds.

To make things more difficult on attackers looking to steal your passwords, a few basic rules need to be followed:

• A password must be at least 8 characters
• A password needs to consist of at least 4 different types of characters – upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, and special characters
• A password should not be a name, a slang word, or any word in the dictionary. It should not include any part of your name or your e-mail address

A common complaint about the strong password requirements is that they are impossible to remember. After all, Aghe83#Qs@ can be quite difficult to rattle off when logging in first thing in the morning. Rather than writing down a complex password like this on a post-it note stuck to the monitor, opt for a passphrase. HisBirthd@yisJune12 is pretty easy to remember and it abides by all three of the strong password rules.

See the original post here:
RockYou is Latest Reminder Not to Neglect Your Passwords

A fascinating article by the CEO of The Barbarian Group, a digital marketing agency, speaks to an intriguing notion – that the Application Programming Interface (API) may be the best weapon an Internet marketer has in their arsenal.

Benjamin Palmer points out that the increased linkages and compatibilities between websites and web services is the result of open APIs. In fact, the whole social media scene is, in part, facilitated by the API. In some ways, says Palmer, “Twitter is actually only in the API business.” That’s because , as Palmer states “most of its traffic doesn’t come from anything it owns – it’s all from other apps (desktop or mobile) or through integration with other web applications”.

The reason companies offer developers open APIs is to encourage them to build third-party applications. Developers can be a product’s best friend, as Apple has proven with its iPhone. While the smartphone itself was a technological breakthrough, it wouldn’t have been nearly as popular or valuable if it weren’t for the tens of thousands of applications available through the iPhone App Store. Some developers are making a very nice living simply by bringing iPhone applications to the marketplace.

Of course, developing applications is a big business – and soliciting application ideas from the public is currently in vogue. Witness the Netflix contest to come up with an alternative that could potentially beat the Netflix movie recommendation system called Cinematch. A team of developers did just that and walked away with $1 million last September.

Application development doesn’t have to take place on such a big stage. According to Palmer, every brand can benefit from APIs in two potential ways: a marketer can use “existing APIs to make new brand experiences” or create “something that has its own open API”.

It’s legitimate to ask why a marketer would want to take the time and effort to actually create an open API. Well, think of it as another more sophisticated form of social media. If you create an open API that relates to your product, your product suddenly becomes desirable. Maybe someone will want to incorporate a feature of your product into their own application. Palmer says “…they just use yours and give you some credit. Instead of just trying to connect to other people in one direction, you make something where people are actively trying to connect to you.”

According to Palmer, it’s all about “interdependencies.” APIs leverage what the web was created for in the first place: collaboration. In the end, Palmer says, “…your brand should be trying its hardest to play well with other Internet features and, when possible, make something new that the rest of the Internet wants to play with as well.” And that’s why APIs may give marketers the biggest bang yet for their promotional bucks.

Continued here:

Although the Google Caffeine algorithm still isn’t live, it was scheduled to be released sometime after the holidays; with the holidays long behind us, a lot of search marketers are wondering what they can do to prepare for the new algorithm when it does finally arrive.

Well, Google offered a public preview of Caffeine back in August 2009, and marketers were given a few important clues as to how to adjust their SEO strategy in preparation for the full Caffeine roll-out. First, frequent content production and social media participation seem crucial to the Caffeine algorithm. In fact, this is reflected in how Caffeine indexes and stores results more quickly. This makes Caffeine seem designed to deal with how the web has evolved from a being a more passive medium to a more interactive and social one.

In this respect, Caffeine looks a lot like an evolved blended search. So if marketers hope to rank well as Caffeine is rolled out, they need a content strategy to help them (1) produce a variety of social branded content, and (2) update that content on a regular basis. What seems to herald is the need to add the optimization of offsite branded content to SEO strategy.

Park Your Profiles

If your business is going to participate on social sites, it needs to choose those that are most appropriate for its business model and target market. This way, your efforts won’t be spread too thin.  As part of that strategy you’ll also want to ensure that no one squats on or spoofs your brand on one of the sites you decide is not a priority. For this reason, you should register/park/squat-on your brand’s username on the majority of popular social media sites.

With over 350 social sites out there, protecting your brand name from squatters can be challenging. However, by using a service such a KnowEm, you can easily secure your brand name on all the top social sites. Essentially, KnowEm is a service that:

Allows you to check for the use of your brand, product, personal name or username instantly on over 350 popular and emerging social media websites [and then register] your name and secure your brand before someone else does.

Of course, once you’ve secured your brand name on social media sites, you’re going to have to (1) participate on the ones that make the most sense for your business model, and (2) employ a content strategy to ensure that your participation on these sites is regular and consistent.

Content Strategy

The main reason to have a content strategy, is that social media profiles shouldn’t be left idle. Idle profiles will not only reflect poorly on a brand, but they won’t rank.

Since Caffeine seems much like an evolved kind of blended search, the first step to optimizing for the new algorithm is in optimizing for blended search. Google generates blended search results based on what ranks well in each of its search verticals — i.e. web, images, news, video, etc. So optimizing for blended search (and possibly Caffeine) means that you have to have a content strategy to participate in each of these verticals.

Social Networks

Since by all indications Google Caffeine prefers participation the first step to your brand securing added real-estate in the SERPs is by participating on the most popular social networks, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

On Twitter, you can share company news and product promotions, as well as engage existing and potential customers in conversation. Indeed, Twitter has proven to be a great customer relations tool for many brands, both large and small.

Similarly, on LinkedIn, your brand can secure a company listing and engage employees and industry piers through conversation threads. This will connect your branded content to a niche, industry network, and Google will recognize that network and index your content accordingly.

Through Facebook, your brand can engage employees, industry piers, and potential customers by sharing company news and organizing events. In fact, your brand’s Facebook page is probably the one place where your content can be made to rank through other peoples’ participation — i.e. the more people that become a fan and/or join your brand’s Facebook group, and leave comments and develop user generated content around your brand the better those pages will rank.

As a final touch, make sure to link to all of your active social media profiles from your actual site, and use appropriate anchor text – i.e. “my brand on Twitter.” The footer of your site and sidebar of your blog are great places to do this.

Image Content

Your brand should also look at how to distribute its branded content on popular photo sharing sites such as Flickr and Facebook. When uploading to your content to these site, you should make sure to use appropriate keywords wherever possible. You have two opportunities to do so:

1. Before uploading your images, rename all the image files to include whatever keywords you want to rank for before uploading them — e.g. Brand _Name_at_Industry_Conference.jpeg
2. During the uploading process, add keyword rich tags and image descriptions

You can also help this content gain additional traction by embedding these hosted images in a photo gallery or on your blog and use title tags and alt attributes when you do so. This will tell Google that the images are, indeed, relevant to your brand.

Finally, like other social platforms you should engage users as much as possible on these sites. Add friends and leave comments to encourage other to leave you comments. The more you participate, the more relevant your brand’s profile will appear to Google.

Video Content

Optimizing video for blended search is similar optimizing images. It involves (1) renaming the actual files to include targeted keywords, (2) uploading them to popular sites, such as YouTube, (3) describing and tagging them appropriately, (4) embedding them on your site and/or in your blog posts so that they can gain additional relevancy from an authority source – i.e. your own brand, and then (5) use the social networking features to add friends and subscribers, and generate comments on your content.

All this being said, many businesses wonder just what kind of video content they could possibly produce without breaking the bank on a video production studio. Well, there are actually 5 online video formats for businesses that are both simple and cost-effective to produce. These include:

1. Product Demos
2. User Generated Content (UGC) Videos
3. Previously Aired TV Commercials
4. Expert Interviews (with either staff or industry piers)
5. and the Business Vlog (for team members that are both savvy and enthusiastic about social media)

By using a blend of these, your brand can ensure that it increases its brand profile in the Google Video SERPs and, thus Google Caffeine.

News Content

Although news content is not exactly social, per se, it is a big part of blended search, and seems to have factored into Caffeine results. Of course, the best way to have news results in the SERPs is by getting mainstream news media coverage. But you can also issue press releases through major online newswires.

While many of the free newswires are spammy and don’t rank well, there are few reputable that offer affordable distribution rates and rank well with Google News. One of the better ranking services is PR Web. They offer four different levels of releases, including an SEO release and a social media visibility package.

And when it comes to getting your press releases ranked in Google News, there are a few things you can do. First, you should avoid bullet lists because Google regards them as “fragmented content.” But you should also consider including images and video in your press release, because (1) it’s more content for Google to index, and (2) Caffeine seems to prefer such multi-media content.

Search & Social Content

Until Caffeine is actually live for a few months, it’s going to be impossible to determine what the new algorithm will mean for your brand and the keywords you’re targeting. What is certain, the web has changed from a more passive medium to a more interactive one, and if Google intends to continue to deliver the most relevant results to users, those results will have to be more interactive.

So no matter how you look at it, brands need to look at offering users more interactive experiences to users, and this means taking their content to where users are already interacting. Deploying a social media content strategy may or may not be the secret for ranking well with Caffeine, but it will have a clear and definitive impact on your brand’s search profile.

After all, the first page of search engine results has become ground-zero for managing your brand’s reputation. So, in the least, a social media content strategy will help your brand influence what both users and search engines say about you. And this, in turn, can help you (1) capture more of real-estate in the SERPs, and (2) make your own results more appealing to users.

Clues for Ranking with Google Caffeine

In the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) world, when Procter & Gamble (P&G) makes a move, every one of its competitors take notice. That’s because P&G is the world’s branding powerhouse, owner of 300 brands with such legendary names as Crest, Gillette, Ivory and Tide.

P&G has long been known as a marketing innovator. The company was, of course, among the first sponsors of “soap operas,” but more recently, P&G has used every media imaginable to relentlessly push its brands. That’s why it’s more than curious that P&G has been somewhat late to the social media party.

In fact, in November 2008, Ted McConnell, P&G’s general manager of interactive and innovation, told a conference in Cincinnati, P&G’s hometown, that he was anything but enthusiastic about Facebook. “What in heaven’s name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend? …I don’t think everything every consumer says to someone else and writes down is somehow monetizable by the media industry,” McConnell said.

My, Ted, how things have changed. Little more than a year later, P&G just announced that it has opened a Silicon Valley office specifically to “help develop social-networking systems and digital-marketing capabilities,” according to Advertising Age. Venture capitalist David Hornik, who met with P&G executives, reported that “P&G’s explicit goal for 2010 is to assure that each of its brands has a meaningful presence on Facebook, and they are willing to pay dearly for that. …[P&G leaders] view Facebook as a must-have for digital advertising and brand building.”

When P&G does anything, it does it in a very big way, so this latest move is clearly signaling that social media is to be taken seriously by P&G – and therefore by the whole marketing industry, which follows its every move.

Interestingly, on the very same day that the P&G story broke, Advertising Age also  reported that Clorox (a P&G arch-rival) was seeking a full-time in-house legal counsel to focus on social media. This is yet another sign of how important social media has become to big marketers. A Clorox spokesman told Advertising Age:

“Social-media channels are a growing focus for consumer communication and stakeholder engagement for our brands and company. As a newer communication channel, the application of existing laws to this medium is evolving. For those reasons and the rapid pace of communication in the Web 2.0 world, we’re seeking an attorney to focus on social media as well as talent rights.”

Maybe it doesn’t seem like such big news to hear that Procter & Gamble and Clorox are finally focusing on social media, but it matters. These guys are now drinking the social media Kool-aid. When you see companies of this size and stature going full-speed ahead with the likes of Facebook, you know mass adoption of Facebook as a business marketing medium for all CPG companies, and all marketers for that matter, is just around the corner.

Read the original post:
P&G Finally Embraces Facebook

At various times I, and my ReveNews colleagues have talked about Twitter as a sleeping giant when it comes to business usage. Google “Twitter business usage” and you’ll see that it’s a topic worthy of hundreds of articles and posts.

As 2010 unfolds, it seems likely that the business usage of Twitter will skyrocket. Why? For one thing it’s a way to reach huge numbers of people – Nielsen says Twitter had over 18 million visitors in December alone, a 579 percent increase from December 2008. For another, it’s one of the easiest, quickest, least expensive ways to get disseminate information, and that could mean gaining a significant competitive advantage.

A recent article in ADWEEK  gives us some inkling of where the business use of Twitter is headed. In the article, Brian Morrissey says businesses are now using Twitter as “a default content-syndication channel, pop-culture icon and real-time content source.” As a “real-time source of consumer-to-consumer recommendations,” says Morrissey, Twitter excels, and brands could leverage that ability to their benefit. “Retweets” have become the preferred virtual pass-along mechanism, meaning that a brand’s messaging can extend well beyond the original tweet.

We all know that the Coca-Colas of the world discovered Twitter long ago, but now the lesser-known brands are jumping on the Twitter-wagon. Morrissey cites the fact that even the most pedestrian brands have discovered the business benefits of Twitter. Two examples he mentions are Sweethearts candies and Tasti D-Lite.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, NECCO (New England Confectionary Company) is adding “Tweet me” to its collection of imprinted sayings on Sweethearts, those silly little candy hearts. The best-selling Valentine candy has been around since the 1860s, so it’s nice to know Sweethearts can keep up with the times. NECCO has gone social, too, creating iPhone and web applications so users can tweet Sweethearts messages to friends.

Tasti D-Lite is a chain of low-fat frozen dessert treat stores that started in New York City and has expanded to New Jersey, Florida, Tennessee, Texas and just recently, Arizona. Morrissey says Tasti D-Lite has made Twitter “the backbone of a customer loyalty program. It lets users earn extra rewards points for broadcasting their purchasing activity on Twitter and mobile social network Foursquare.”

You wouldn’t necessarily associate candy or frozen desserts with Twitter – but that’s the point. Twitter is everywhere, and businesses large and small have figured out how to use it. Morrissey points out another key fact in the Twitter business usage explosion: “Twitter’s decision to open its application programming interface (API) has allowed brands to weave Twitter into campaigns, rather than have stand-alone Twitter strategies.” Aha, interactive integration – it’s just what every advertiser wants, isn’t it?

So now’s the time to ask yourself if you are making the best use of Twitter for your business.

Read more here:

Facebook announced on their blog that they will be partnering with security giant McAfee to help protect their 350 million users from malware by offering quite a few perks to registered users of the social networking site.

To begin with, each Facebook user will be able to use the McAfee security suite free for six months. After this period is up, they will be offered continued protection at a discounted rate. Additionally, they will be adding a great deal of security related content to their site to help educate their users about security related issues.

To round out their new security policy, users who have had their accounts compromised will be required to go through a remediation process where their computer is scanned for malware. Any infections found through this process will be cleaned before the user is able to access Facebook. This is an attempt to prevent further disasters such as the recent embarrassment from FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s  Facebook page being hijacked to send out spam to all his “friends”.

Getting the software

As a Facebook user, you can take advantage of this offer for the free six month subscription by logging into Facebook and visiting their security page. From here, click on the “Protect your PC” tab in the upper right hand corner. From here, you simply become a fan of McAfee and you can download the security suite.

However, before you can download this software you will need to provide a credit card because the subscription will automatically renew at the end of the six month period and charge you at a discounted rate, 30% of the standard McAfee subscription price. You can cancel at any time, but you will no longer be able to update the software with the latest signature files that identify malware.

Of course this is quite  marketing boon for McAfee with Facebook handing them truckloads of potential customers on a silver platter.

Secure computing?

Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s VP of global communications, marketing and public policy made the statement that, “Keeping the Internet secure requires that users, security vendors and Internet companies all work together.” Nothing could be further from the truth.  Although I do think that Facebook has made great strides towards holding the user accountable for making sure that their computer does not infect, or attack, others. So in a way, my hat goes off to them.

Unfortunately, Facebook hasn’t been completely unscrupulous with their user base when it comes to protecting their personal content. It wasn’t too long ago that the terms and conditions were rewritten to state that Facebook could use any content on their network in any way they saw fit. This was quickly amended when their users revolted, however just recently they opened up their users’ lives again by permitting Google to search the status updates of public profiles. Again, they found themselves backtracking.

So while I applaud their efforts to make the Internet a safer place, the requirement to scan a computer as part of the remediation process is a cause for concern. True, I don’t want someone spreading malware and spam over a network of over 300 million people, but I also don’t want to put more power in the hands of a company whose track record for user privacy hasn’t quite been exemplary.

See the original post:
Facebook Teams with McAfee, Offers Users Security

When was the last time you corresponded via a personalized letter? Remember when you actually had to pick up the phone and call someone? With texting, Twitter, Facebook and e-mail replacing everyday communication, the New Year may be a time to take a step back from all of today’s technology and remember that you can’t always express yourself in 140 characters.

Yesterday, John Mayer urged his Twitter followers to take part in a New Year’s Digital Cleanse in an effort to “defrag” our technologically overloaded minds. Mayer suggests a one-week cleanse, beginning January 1st and ending on January 8th, which doesn’t require you to completely remove technology from your life, only take a step back. Here’s the recipe:

• email only from laptop or desktop computers.

• cell phones can only be used to make calls, and no text messages or e-mails are allowed – if you receive a text, you must reply in voice over the phone.

• no use of Twitter or any other social networking site – including reading as well as posting.

• no visiting of any entertainment or gossip sites.

Following these guidelines should be manageable for even the most connected individuals. Work commitments may prevent you from participating in the cleanse, but it is still refreshing to think about how far communication has come, even just over the last year.

Continued here:
John Mayer Calls for a Digital Cleanse to Bring in the New Year

Just wanted to say congrats to Jeremy on rolling out The ShoeMoney Sytem. As much hate as he gets (which the hate has died down tremendously because a) people realized that fat jokes are only funny for so long and b) plenty of legitimate trolls have entered the industry that are actually worth the negative attention), the man knows how to launch and run a successful web-based business.

Can you believe all the self-hype about it? I’m sure many people read “how to make money step by step” and are a bit skeptical, after all that’s what every shittyscammy bizopp promises. Will it lead you step by step to making money? Probably, if you actually digest the information properly. You can check out one of the free videos to kind of get a feel for it (I just watched about half of one of them). You can also read about it on his blog. If you’re just getting started into the industry or have some O.K. businesses running online, Shoe is a guy that’s worth listening too. If you’re just a shady aff raking it in on rebills trying to stay cloaked, you’ll probably find this boring.

I don’t want to plug it too hard because I don’t know the full system and I don’t know how much it’s going to cost, but it looks like Shoemoney put a lot of work into this and so far it looks like he did a pretty good job. So, nice one dude.

P.S. This isn’t a paid review.

P.P.S. Like the category I put this in whoop whoop :p

Excerpted from:
ShoeMoney System, Cool Beans