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Branding, Direct Response, Intent & How Search Made Us Soft

Written on April 14, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, book

The old has become new again. Back in the day, when setting budgets for mailing paper things in bulk to prospective customers, marketers asked themselves crucial questions. “Will the ROI of this direct response mail piece justify the investment of paper, printing, postage and fulfillment?” If not, “is the objective a more cosmic value, in [...]



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Branding, Direct Response, Intent & How Search Made Us Soft

Twitter Wants Your Trust

Written on March 10, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing

Social media or networking or whatever it is you want to call it continues to grow at exponential rates of speed. With the “announcement” of Facebook getting its own location based service in place the concerns over privacy and safety of information continue to grow as well. Twitter realizes this concern and is working to make Twitter free from malicious users especially in light of recent phishing attacks that have created some concern in the Twitter world.

In a Twitter blog post entitled “Trust and Safety” the company says that it is concerned and is working to make the world safer for tweeters of shapes and sizes.

Today, we’re launching a new service to protect users that strikes a major blow against phishing and other deceitful attacks. By routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service, we can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links across all of Twitter. Even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we’ll be able keep that user safe.

Sounds good and this comes on the tail of a recent Biz Stone post that described what had been going on in Twitter due to successful phishing attacks.

The new feature will not be something that most will notice and Twitter is focusing on one main area of the service that is most susceptible currently to this kind of attack.

Since these attacks occur primarily on Direct Messages and email notifications about Direct Messages, this is where we have focused our initial efforts. For the most part, you will not notice this feature because it works behind the scenes but you may notice links shortened to twt.tl in Direct Messages and email notifications.

So Twitter is framing these efforts in trying to earn your trust and improve your safety on a “proactive” basis. I wonder if they are just trying to look like the antithesis of Facebook who throws down tablets off Mt. Facebook and lets the chips fall where they may regarding privacy and other issues. Whatever the reason, it’s the safer way to go in a world where privacy looks to be less available with each passing day.

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Twitter Wants Your Trust

Facebook Readying To Allow Users To Say Where Their Face Is

Written on March 10, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, book, marketing

Facebook is going to be joining the frenzy to help everyone not only know what people are thinking but also where they are thinking it. As we move more toward a world of this total view of another’s life you can be sure that Facebook wants to be involved. With the rising popularity of Foursquare, Gowalla and other location based “services” it makes sense that Facebook be here. In the bigger picture, however, this is likely to be more about taking on Google for local advertising dollars. After all, money has to be made correct?

The New York Times Bits section reports

Starting next month, the more than 400 million Facebook users could begin seeing a new kind of status update flow through their news feed: the current locations of their friends.

Facebook plans to take the wraps off a new location-based feature in late April at f8, the company’s yearly developer conference, according to several people briefed on the project, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss unannounced services.

In preparation for the introduction, Facebook updated its privacy policy last November. The new policy states: “When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post.”

On reports like this where there is the “unauthorized” source that is talking about unannounced services I always have the picture of a clandestine meeting under a gas lamp picture. Two shadowy figures exchange a note and keep walking on a lonely street in the fog kinda thing. Then I wonder who these “sources” are, if they are really unauthorized or are they part of the new age of PR which is more about leaking information than announcing it. Officially Facebook is staying mum.

Meredith Chin, a Facebook spokeswoman, said Tuesday that the company wasn’t ready to discuss any possible location-based features. “We’re constantly experimenting with new things around here, but we don’t have any details to share right now,” she said in an e-mail message.

It appears as if Facebook will remain friendly to the developer community on this one as well according to these “sources”. With estimates that 100 million users access Facebook daily via a mobile device (which represents 1 in 4 total Facebook users) this service is primed for quick adoption for those who like this kind of thing. As a result there is money to be made and allowing a business as usual attitude with the Facebook development community only makes sense.

Of course there will be plenty of concern about security and privacy because Facebook has turned itself into the poster child for how not to do new things and thus open the door to criticism. Maybe this information “leak” is designed to let the air out of any arguments that this new offering will face. I admit, my inner ‘conspiracy theorist’ is strong today.

So what do you think about this new, soon to be (we think), offering by Facebook? Of course, the details are sketchy but you must have an opinion on the general idea, right? Chime in. We’re listening but we’re not telling you from where .

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Facebook Readying To Allow Users To Say Where Their Face Is

Making the Case for Social Media: A Roadmap

Written on August 18, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing, seo

Earlier this summer I gave a presentation in Minneapolis at a ClickZ OMS event on building a social media roadmap with tips on blog marketing and using Twitter. It’s all very introductory if you work in the social media space, but if not, serves as a useful baseline for those that need to make a case for corporate social media participation.

There are more than a few companies out there without much confidence in how to use communication tools like blogs or Twitter and this presentation can serve as a good starting point for those tactics as well as for creating a social media strategy. There was a lot of good feedback at the event and I’ll do my best to turn it into a slidecast in the future.

I should mention for those that have a good feel for the basics of social media or SEO, TopRank has partnered with the Direct Marketing Association to offer a 2 day intensive workshop on social media strategy, tactics and SEO called “Social Media Smarts“.   We focus on building a social media roadmap for participants as well as understanding various social media marketing tools and how SEO fits into the social media marketing mix.  The next workshop is in New York, December 1 & 2 so be sure to check out the Social Media Smarts site and get signed up.

Tags: a-good-feel ,a-social-media ,book ,direct ,into-the-social ,media ,roadmap ,social ,social media ,strategy ,tactics-as-well ,with-the-direct

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