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THE SECRETS IN THE NAME
July 9th 2008
I am amazed at how many marketers just see the 'media' part of Social Media and forget the 'social' bit. Luckily Jupiter research thinks the same.
MEASUREMENT CAMP #2
May 14th 2008
Trying to formulate some best practice and benchmarks for measuring Social Media campaigns.
KEEP IT SIMPLE BUT KEEP IT SAFE
May 12th 2008
As Social Media CRM gets ever nearer, there are some simple strategies you can use to protect access to your social media profiles and ensure you maintain the conversation you are creating with your customers.
MARKETING 2.0 PARIS - PART 1.0
May 7th 2008
Marketing 2.0 Paris - how was it for you?
For me.and brands it was exciting and inspiring and challenging... and it's the future.
TWITTERING FOR FREEDOM
April 29th 2008
Web 2.0 rescues man from jail
KEEP IT SIMPLE BUT KEEP IT SAFE
May 12th 2008, by Simon Quance
If you are in the business of establishing your own profiles for Social Media campaigns or customer engagement and dialogue, its worth implementing a simple strategy for protecting each account with some decent security.
At present I hold down a rather bewildering 112 Social Media profiles (all up to date of course!) - and as this number has grown steadily it's become obvious that there is a lot of basic personal and business critical data out there that needs protecting.
Whilst the majority of the info is safe under rigorous privacy policies that I trust can be legally enforced, there is always the potential for one account to be accessed using passwords from another, especially if you have used a "copy and paste" approach to your user name and password account set up's - replicating what you use on one account for another for the sake of convience.
An example of the risks here is revealed by that fact that some of our more active client's MySpace accounts get regularly "phished" for their account details despite MySpace's security and the use of best practice by the clients.
It's obvious that if our clients use the same user name and password for their other social media accounts then all those profiles are also compromised by any such security breach and in a similar way to changing the locks on all the doors if you lose your house keys - we would reccommend that our client change all the passwords on all their accounts at the same time - which can be a time consuming pain.
You can mitigate for this with the right set up and process from day one - saving yourself time and hassle should a breach occur.
My own pollcy is to use a central webmail or office email account for initial registrations, offering me some ease of management with all profile update notifications feeding to one visible account.
The security comes in by substantialy varying your user name and password per account. I use a mixture of lower and upper case alpha numeric formulations to
build a secure network of user details.
Thus an example registration for a Facebook product page might look like this:
Email: simonq@yahoo.co.uk
Username: simonq
Password: S1moNQF4c3bo0K
...and a Flickr account might look like this:
Email: simonq@yahoo.co.uk
Username: simonq
Password: S1M0nqfL1K7
Once you have established this process it's then simple to vary the formula adding your own basic form of encryption to your accounts.
Then it's a simple matter of being organised and keeping a central record of all these logins in a private location on your own company network and replicating it on at least one more secure computer.
With the increasing volume of customer engagements businesses are going to have to make through Social Media channels, I think it is wise to ensure you have a strategy to maintain secure control over the network of profiles you create to facilitate such engagement.