Category Archives: Internet & Web

Chinese Hackers Who Exploited Google Found U.S Government Data Too

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After falling victim of cyber attack from China back in 2010, Google had disclosed to the public about its discovery that the attack was highly sophisticated and a breach to intellectual property.  While the method of hacking wasn’t elaborated at that time, an investigation was launched which gained some notable results.  It turns out that the attack did not only expose the vulnerable nature of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer but also revealed its main target of penetrating the information database of the US Intelligence.  These findings totally negate earlier claims that the attacks were targeting the Gmail user accounts of human rights advocates.

8a6ff google china img1 Chinese Hackers Who Exploited Google Found U.S Government Data Too

At the initial stage of the attack, only a few important individuals were targeted and were led to install malware which paved the way for hackers to infiltrate several other networks aside from Google.  The hackers were smart enough to know very well their desired targets and what they wanted from them.  After successfully leading their targets to click a malware-infested link or file on the Internet Explorer, they were able to gain access to sensitive and confidential intellectual property.

The Washington Post has expressed that the amount of stolen information is not yet clear.  However, they have admitted that the breached database contain information on thousands of court orders in the US which revolve around the country’s surveillance measures.  Once the subjects of surveillance are identified, the hackers can find a way to destroy valuable information and help these subjects avoid investigation by getting them out of the country.

Other sites have also claimed that they were victims of cyberattacks and all of them are blaming the attacks on the Chinese government.  Apple, Facebook, The Wall Street Journal, and others all claimed that their sites were also hacked.  The Wall Street Journal, in particular, has divulged that their journalists were targeted for espionage by the Chinese government.

The Pentagon has released a report which has claimed that the government and military of China have been exercising cyberespionage on a wide scale which has targeted the US government and business-related computer networks as well.

While all evidences are pointing towards China, the Chinese government vehemently denied its involvement with any forms of hacking or cyberespionage.

(source)

Why Irrelevant Giveaways and Games Are Killing Your Facebook Page

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ba069 Irrelevant Giveaways Facebook Why Irrelevant Giveaways and Games Are Killing Your Facebook Page

So, you have a Facebook page for your business. You’re ready to tap into the most powerful social site in the world. You want to get fans, to get people to like your page and hear your messages, to communicate with them in a meaningful way and to help drive more business.

You figure that, “Hey, I’m a business. The only way people are going to like my page is if I have a drawing for a free iPad or give them a game that they can only play if they like my page!”

Nope. It’s the wrong thinking. It’s not just the fact that you’re going to get people liking your page from everywhere around the world rather than the coveted local area Facebook users. What’s worse is that you’re actually going to do damage to your page and prevent locals from seeing your post or engaging with your page.

Here’s why…

 

Their Intentions are Not Good

a4ae4 Mr Krabs Why Irrelevant Giveaways and Games Are Killing Your Facebook Page

Convenience stores don’t make a ton off of lottery tickets, but they get people into the store which is an opportunity for you to buy something else. There’s also a chance that the store can win something if they happen to be the place where the winning tickets were purchased. People don’t go to a convenience store to buy lottery tickets in order to chat with the clerk.

Why do people like your page if you’re offering a chance to win a million dollars? Because they want a chance to win a million dollars. They aren’t interested in what you have to say. They aren’t wanting to engage with you, to use social media as a method to communicate with you in hopes of learning more about what you do and how you can help them. They want a chance at winning. In many ways, it’s a lot like selling lottery tickets, except they aren’t going to buy anything while they’re there and you’re not going to share in their winnings if yours is the Facebook like that ended up winning the money.

Whether through games or giveaways, those who like your page for that reason isn’t going to interact with you. In fact, they’re probably not going to ever see any of your posts in their news feed. If they do, it’s a bad thing because…

 

“Coaxed” Likes Hurt You in the Algorithm

a4ae4 EdgeRank Algorithm Why Irrelevant Giveaways and Games Are Killing Your Facebook Page

I’m not going to bore anyone with the EdgeRank algorithm. Instead, I’m going to focus on the basic concepts of affinity and weight which are the main reasons you’re not seeing a ton of activity on your pages today.

Every interaction is recorded by Facebook. Just about everyone knows this, that when people click through to, like, comment on, or share your posts, that’s a good thing that helps your posts appear higher in their news feed as well as their friends’ news feeds. The reverse is true in that negative sentiment such as hiding or reporting posts will hurt your chances of having your posts seen by people in their news feeds. What many people don’t realize is that no action at all is also a negative.

In other words, when someone sees your posts in their news feeds and scroll right passed it without doing anything, that this hurts the chances of them being presented future posts. This is exactly what’s happening with the majority of your “coaxed” fans. They didn’t care about what you had to say. They liked you page so they could get something. Now that you’re showing up in their news feed, they have no intention of interacting with it in any way.

 

Reach is (Almost) Everything

a4ae4 Tale of the Tape Why Irrelevant Giveaways and Games Are Killing Your Facebook Page

Here are a couple of examples. The top example is a dealership that is coaxing people to like them by giving them a chance to win something as well as to play games. The bottom example is a dealership that is completely transparent with their intentions, that allows us to use localized Facebook ads to build their fan base, and that started off with 26 total fans in February.

In the top example, you see that they have a lot more likes. Over 3k people have liked the page. The games/giveaways are working, right? Wrong. Yes, they’re getting more people to like them, but when you look at the more important number than likes, the “135 talking about this” statistic under their name, you can see that they are not doing well compared to the example on the bottom. The gaming/giveaway dealership has a 3.9% engagement ratio, meaning that under 4% of their fans are actually doing anything with their page such as liking, commenting, or sharing posts.

Keep in mind, this is actually pretty darn high of a ratio for a page that is artificially inflated through games and giveaways.

The way you’re able to reach more people is by getting more of them to interact with your posts. Every interaction increases your chance of getting exposure by moving it up higher in news feeds and increasing the chances that it will appear in additional news feeds. This is how Facebook works best, by reaching people. However, there’s a caveat and it’s the most important reason that you’ll want to avoid giveaways and games…

 

Local Reach is TRULY Everything

a4ae4 Cutter Chevrolet Reach Why Irrelevant Giveaways and Games Are Killing Your Facebook Page

It’s definitely possible through a combination of games, giveaways, amazing content, and properly managed Facebook ads to have a strong reach. It’s not possible, however, to keep your reach hyper-localized with this combination.

Because games and giveaways have a tendency to pull people from across the country or around the world, they taint your following with irrelevant likes and interactions. If you’re a local business, you want to reach the local people only. When your posts are being presented to those outside of the market area, you’re increasing the chances that they will find your posts irrelevant and therefore hurting your chances of the local people actually seeing your posts.

Look at the reach statistics above for Cutter. You’ll see that the vast majority is in the United States and of those, nearly all of the reach is focused on Hawaii itself. There’s a blip – an aggressive internet marketing consultant on my team that lives in Cincinnati started following and liking the posts. As you can see, even a single person engaging can cause more of his own friends and family to see the posts, which can then be liked or not. While some of the content is standard automotive content that can be universally liked, a good portion is localized content. Will someone in Cincinnati like a post about a sales event at a Chevrolet dealership in Honolulu? No.

Reach is important. Local reach is the entirety of the targeting strategy. Your goal with your page should be drive locals to your store or your website. People too distant from the store to actually buy something will not help. They’ll hurt. Just as a Phoenix dealer wouldn’t buy television ads in Indiana, neither should a Phoenix dealer put effort and money into engaging with someone in Indiana.

If you keep it local, keep it transparent, and focus on delivering business-relevant messages to fans who like you because they wanted to receive business-relevant messages, you’ll be able to get exponentially more benefit from Facebook than you ever will if your focus is on helping people win iPads or playing games.

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RapidShare Fires Employees, Company May Die A Horrible Death Soon

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RapidShare, the popular file hosting and sharing site from Switzerland during the early 2000s, has decided to have a mass lay off by reducing its total number of 60 employees to only 15.  The decision was made just months after the site has concocted a new traffic model in its hope to thwart piracy in November 2012.  As a result, a download cap on public site traffic was created and a paid hosting model was established.

5ecdb rapidshare rip RapidShare Fires Employees, Company May Die A Horrible Death Soon

It’s not clear whether such move has led the site to its downfall or it is purely coincidental.  However, it cannot be denied that after November, there was an obvious decrease in the number of its users which makes the Swiss-based company deal with its financial status by exercising cost-cutting actions.

Focusing more on providing B2B cloud storage services, the company is also looking on the prospect of selling personal file storage and backup features to its customers.  However, the mass layoffs and perhaps the ‘rapid’ CEO transition wherein the current one is its 4th CEO since 2010 may show a sign that the company’s targets are not happening as planned.

When it was launched in 2004, RapidShare has become immensely popular particularly to those who are finding ways to store their copyright-infringing materials.  After fighting several legal battles and reinventing its image by implementing strict measures on anti-piracy, the company ended up with a plummeted traffic situation and a 75% decrease in its workforce.

Google H840 Might Become Nexus Q 2G, Leaked From FCC

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Google’s Nexus Q was designed as a media player that can stream video and music content from a smart phone, tablet and the Internet to the TV. Sadly, it had a short lived run. However, it appears that Google might have a new media player on its hands. Called the Google H840, the device made an appearance recently at the FCC and is being hailed as the next-gen version of the Nexus Q.

5a68b Google H840 Google H840 Might Become Nexus Q 2G, Leaked From FCC

Details about the new product are very few on the ground; there are no drawings, photos, manuals or specs found on the FCC site and this might be due to a confidentiality request on Google’s end. But it’s been reported that the H840 works as a media player with an external power source, more or less confirming that the device isn’t a new tablet or smartphone from Google. Aside from that, the only thing that’s clear about the device is that its model number is H2G2-42, which is quite a nice ode to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

There wasn’t any mention of a Nexus Q iteration at the just concluded Google I/O but there have been rumors that Google might have some surprises in store on June 10. It will be quite a coup if Google does unveil the H840, a new Nexus 4 and the Android 4.3 while Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference is ongoing, and a lot of consumers will undoubtedly be eagerly waiting to see if it happens.

The Most Important Social Media Webinar I’ve Ever Presented is Coming Soon

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56750 Important The Most Important Social Media Webinar I’ve Ever Presented is Coming Soon

On June 5th, I will be presenting a webinar called “Beyond the Basics: 5 Myths and 10 Rules for Advanced Social Media Mastery“. It might as well be called, “Stop the madness because the social media world is going down a dark path.”

After delivering a good portion of it at the Automotive Boot Camp last week, the feedback was so tremendous that I decided it was time to do something that I’ve never done before – give a presentation for a second time. The world of digital marketing moves so quickly that I’ve never given a presentation more than once without major changes, but things are different. This only took some minor tweaks (mostly because it will only be 3 weeks between presentations) and some additions to make it worthy.

Here’s the thing. Social media marketing in general, particularly in my arena of automotive, is heading in the wrong direction. Unlike other variations of marketing, the wrong paths and poor strategies seem to persist in social media for longer, much longer, than they would in other arenas. It took me a little while to understand why this is the case, but after talking to dozens of clients and potential clients over the past couple of weeks, I’ve finally figured it out.

The challenges are two-fold. The first is nothing sinister. It’s just that there’s a cloud around what to expect from social media. Facebook in particular is one of those mythical beasts that is simply hard to pin down. It’s not that the statistics aren’t there easily available for anyone to use to track their effectiveness. It’s that Facebook and the digital marketing world make it challenging to understand the numbers properly. Heck, most businesses are still focused on how many fans they have. This is just one example of a misconception that has persisted because the truth is counter-intuitive. I can see why people still hold to this, but I’ve also demonstrated very clearly that a proper strategy applied to a page with 500 fans can be exponentially more effective and reach more potential customers than a standard strategy on a page with 5000 fans.

The second reason for the continued focus in the wrong directions is much more sinister. Without naming names, the social media vendors and service providers that I’ve examined seem to have at least a basic understanding of what needs to be done but they have chosen not to go down the right path because it’s simply too hard.

  • It’s too hard to sell to clients. I’ve had the experience of being looked at like I was casting black magic spells when showing potential clients the difference between their 5000-fan page and one of our clients’ 500-fan pages that is getting 10X the engagement, reach, foot traffic visitors, and website clicks.
  • It’s too hard to make the change. Once you’re down the path of posting “caption this” pictures of cats, it’s hard to switch to relevant content promoted properly through authentic channels and with transparent motives.
  • It’s too hard to do the manual work. There’s a reason why my team averages single-digit clients per employee. The thought of giving an individual 10, 20, or even 50 (yes, some vendors have 50 clients per account manager) never crosses my mind because I understand the amount of work that has to go into finding the highest levels of success on social media.
  • It’s too hard to demonstrate real results. This is arguably the most important reason that most social media vendors do not attempt to go down the path of saying that social media increases business. They aren’t able to prove it. The reality is this – there’s true ROI in social media with the exact right strategy, particularly for localized businesses. You can drive people to the store. You can drive people to the website. Branding is a tertiary goal with the right strategies in place, but it seems to be the primary goal for so many services out there. Branding should be the consolation prize, not the end result.

I strongly encourage everyone, potential clients and even competitors, to watch this webinar on June 5th. I’ll be going over the myths and rules that can and should change the way the industry perceives social media. I’ll be giving real-world examples, not just speaking hypothetically or discussing bogus theories. If you listen to one webinar this year, make it this one. Your competitors may be listening. Don’t let them get the upper hand.