DC Interactive Group’s SmartMarketing Blog

I just had a birthday this week (thank you). Actually, as somebody who never talks about his birthday I sure got a lot of really nice comments from people — in fact, more than I ever have. Do people like me that much or did they just get a little advance notice on Facebook? I’m betting on the latter.

I think it’s pretty nice that Facebook lets you know about upcoming birthdays. It’s the closest thing we have to the type of crawl that appeared on the lower third of a TV during a video call in the 1985 film Back to the Future. In the movie, the video call listed the caller’s spouse, kids, career, hobbies and more — and I thought it was genius. Anyway, to risk being obvious I feel the need to remind you not to use your birthday or anniversary as a password for anything. I mention it because there have been increasing reports of personal data being stolen because a bad guy found someone’s birthday.

When setting up new accounts and are asked for a security question be sure to choose the one that’s the most difficult to answer — or even better, has a trick answer.  Trying your birthday or anniversary is one of the first things a hacker will try to gain access to your accounts. But there’s something even more insidious out there, and something far easier to fall prey to:

Bogus login screens

Phishing with fake login pages have been around for years, but there have been increasing reports that they’re being used more widely — including for major websites including Yahoo and Microsoft. Frighteningly, there’s plenty of tutorials online that show you how to create one. These pages look like the real deal. Some even have a URL that looks close — but isn’t correct. You can tell if a website’s login screen is authentic by always keeping an eye on the URL bar. For example, if you’re signing into Yahoo then make sure the URL looks legitimate. The fake login screens prompt you to enter your username and password, capture the data and will sometimes return an error that looks as if you typed your password in incorrectly and then bounce you back to the real login screen. You would just think you made a typo and try again, this time into the real site.

Bogus social media tools

Hackers are getting more and more creative and are using social media tools in order to get the information they want. We stay on the leading edge of technology with social media, and we know probably better than most how many new social media tools are coming out every day. Hackers have discovered the concept of creating bogus social media tools which are basically just elaborate bogus login screens. Users eager to try out new tools are duped into entering their passwords and smart hackers then try to use those passwords on other real websites to see if they can gain access.

Using Common Sense

As with everything else in this world, your best defense is common sense.

• Use passwords that combine numbers, letters and punctuation

• Never enter your username or password into sites you don’t completely trust

• Always verify the URL in the address bar in your browser

• If you see a fake login page, say something to the true owner

• If are concerned you entered your details in a fake login page change your password immediately

• Use a password manager like LastPass, a recommended plugin for Firefox which can generate complex random alphanumeric passwords and then securely enter them into sites for you. This tool eliminates the worry of entering your data into bogus login pages

If you’re heading to Orlando for the SHSMD conference, I suggest you join me Friday, October 2 at 1:45 for my presentation on “The Stickiness of a Social Media Marketing Campaign”. SHSMD has told me that this is session has the highest advance sign up of any speech at that time, so register online at SHSMD CONFERENCE to make certain you get a seat. Here’s what I’ll cover:

Social media and Web 2.0 strategies are often explained in individual pieces that rarely get put together, leaving marketers and senior management unsure of what they are, how they work, and how their organizations can benefit. However, when these tools are applied, the results are nothing short of amazing. Through case study, explore all aspects of social media and Web 2.0, and learn how these tools can be used to create an easy-to-understand-and-implement program that will help senior management make social media part of the organization’s communications program.

If you have any questions or difficulty finding the site, just let me know.

See you in Orlando Friday.

Last week I wrote about the need for companies to get on board the Social Media bus now before it leaves marketers so far behind that the cost to start and show immediate results will be so high that executives will not want to “experiment”.  Judging by the emails I’ve received about the post, the problem is not the marketers don’t agree, but rather that they cannot get others above them to allocate any budget to Social Media because they’ve heard that it cannot show a direct correlation to ROI.

While I had no problem answering each one and gave clear examples of how to measure the ROI of Social Media, I just came across this slide presentation by Olivier Blanchard that sums it up rather nicely and with some much needed humor.  While his presentation is different than mine, this is pretty much exactly what we advise others to do and what my company does for our clients.  Enjoy.

TV killed the radio star and the Internet killed…well maybe both. Audiences on TV are shrinking in favor of the Internet for a variety of reasons. What better way to deal with something uncomfortable than to poke some serious fun at it?

Last night something horrible happened. The Emmy Awards broadcast was interrupted by Dr. Horrible (actor and Emmy host Neil Patrick Harris). For the uninitiated, Dr. Horrible is an aspiring mad scientist, trying to be accepted into the League of Evil, who posts periodic updates of his Horribleness in his Sing Along Blog — and in my opinion is funniest thing to come out of the 2007-2008 writers strike.

“The Magnificent Ambersons” is a Pulitzer Prize winning book written in the early 1900’s by Booth Tarkington that chronicles the demise of one of the wealthiest families in the town. George, the saturnine grandson, simply refuses to adjust with the changing times, preferring to shout “Git a horse” to those who drive their new motorized cars past him rather than understand what makes these cars so desirable.  Its lesson holds true today –  embrace change or risk becoming irrelevant.

In his blog “CFO Strategist“, Chris Muccio sums up why Social Media is here to stay and why you should embrace it.  According to Chris, “until the day we stop having business conversations, social media will be around, although it will always be in a constantly changing form.”  Here are Chris’ thoughts from his blog:

“Is there a right way and wrong way to “converse”?

There are no “right ways” but there are a lot of wrong ways.  For instance, if you and I were conversing and I stopped talking, what would you do?  Probably walk away, right?  Same thing in social media.  If you begin to engage your customers, prospects, etc, and then all of sudden stop communicating with them, the odds are they will simply walk away.  This is very bad considering these are the very people that are most interested in your business and now they’ve moved away from you.  What to do?  Here’s a simple strategy - set a social media participation schedule that you can keep up (i.e. 15 minutes per day or what you can handle) and stick to it!  This way you will be able to sustain your conversations with those that matter most to your business.

We are not generating sales yet we are participating, what’s wrong?

Lets answer this question with a question - In your non social media tactics, are you focused on a hard sell and not relationship building?  Basically, do you just talk to people to see if they want to buy something from you without having a relationship with you first?  Probably not, right?

Yet that is what some business leaders are inadvertently doing with social media.  They are simply trying to “sell” without establishing a relationship first.  In terms of the buying cycle, they are expecting social media to be a magic pill that attracts late stage buyers without relationships, and expect them to immediately make purchases.   However, no relationship = no purchase potential.   This is no different than what we face in real life.  Businesses spend vast amounts of money to build relationships through branding, customer relations, etc and then over time, those relationships convert to sales.  Interestingly, the spot that social media is very powerful is in connecting with early and mid stage buyers and building exponential amounts of relationships.

I can’t participate because my customers aren’t on social media.

Well, that can be true, but typically businesses have more than one type of customer.  Perhaps the end customer is not on social media, but perhaps a referral sources or connector is.  Alter your thinking slightly, wouldn’t it make sense to build social media relationships with those “customers” vs then ultimate end user?
I am worried about customer reaction and it spreading negatively on the web, so I don’t participate.
Well, the bad news is that it is not up to you whether you want to participate or not.  In a recent study conducted by Edleman, they stated that roughly 6 out of 10 people between 25-64 were willing to share their experiences on the web and roughly 8 out of 10 people in those same age brackets, trusted their peer’s recommendations.   For a case in point, let’s look at the viral video, United Breaks Guitars. It is a little ditty about how United broke one guy’s guitar and then didn’t remedy the situation.  Well he shared his story on the web and received about 5 million hits in the first 6 weeks.  If you do the math on the length of his video along with all those views, it equates to roughly 44 MILLION negative 30 second commercials against United. (Granted not everyone watches it from beginning to end but this is the extreme to show a point).  Now no matter what United does now, it will be extremely difficult to undo all that negative attention.  The only strategy here should have been a proactive one and to address all customer issues from the start.

We can talk about this for 3 hours (and we usually do during our presentations) but let’s turn it back to you and hear your perspectives.  The key takeaway here is that social media at its core is about a “conversation” and we have hundreds of those in our businesses daily.  The challenge is to determine how to leverage social media tools to plug into online conversations and relationship build.”

Well done Chris.  Well done.