Sunday, September 16, 2012

The Value of Social Media Campaigns - ROI


Many businesses consider replacing their marketing department with social media experts.  But as with anything, social media is not 'a pill to fix' marketing. Social media has value if configured properly and maintained in exacting ways for any business.
Since there are sites that sell Facebook Likes, this represents that less ethical social media marketing houses may subject their clients to these likes for the sake of performance auditing.
For instance, if you have been hired to run a social media campaign for a business, it may be a significant measure of work to see how well that campaign is going by the amount of Like that have been generated. Your company may be ethical, but competition that is trying to 'win your accounts' is actually secretly buying Likes to apply to their campaigns, in order to show how well their campaign approach is for a particular client.
Additional benefit may be had through these purchases through search engine optimization, Facebook popularity inside of Facebook and potentially vendors like Apple who are trying to integrate with social media in their hardware products.

Since Likes can now be purchased en mass, through numerous websites, it may be wise to evaluate social media companies to explain HOW they justify success in social media campaigns. Using return on investment (ROI) modeling that truly represents revenue.

Money is better spent, more times than not, discovering your current market and your future markets.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Great Examples of Phishing - At Cornell University

Cornell University Information Technologies Website has a great resource of documented Phishing examples. Please consider clicking on the link and seeing the kinds of exploits that are used to get people to click on or reply to bogus email events.

To view any of these examples in detail, please visit the Cornell University link at the beginning of this post.

These are some examples of phishing emails seen on campus. Do NOT assume a suspect email is safe, just because it is not listed here. There are many variants of each, and new ones are being sent out each day. When in doubt, consult with your IT support staff or the IT Service Desk.

    FW: Chase Bank - Online System Upgrade (9/7/2012)
    Pay your Fedex invoice online (9/6/2012)
    WEBMAIL ADMIN*Quota Limit Exceeded (9/5/2012)
    Your account has been temporarily limited. ID K5008204 (9/1/2012)
    New e-card for you. (8/31/2012)
    for {your_name} (8/29/2012)
    Intuit/Quickbooks (8/28/2012)
    ACCOUNT ADMINISTRATOR (8/25/2012)
    Your Apple ID password has been reset (8/22/2012)
    PHISHING ALERT (8/22/2012)
    RE: Case# 7924236 (8/21/2012)
    Rejected Federal Tax transfer (8/21/2012)
    Your receipt #162013403684048 (8/15/2012)
    Wire Transfer Confirmation (FED REFERENCE 26963QE679) (8/14/2012)
    Bank of America Alert: Your Online Statement Is Ready (8/14/2012)
    Your friend sent you an e-card. (8/13/2012)
    Photos (8/13/2012)
    Your Citi Credit Card Statement (8/13/2012)
    Bank of America Alert: Online Banking Account Suspended? (8/10/2012)
    Microsoft Security Update (8/10/2012)
    You package has been delivered (8/10/2012)
    Schwab Report (8/8/2012)
    LinkedIn Reminder (8/7/2012)
    Welcome to Paypal - Choose your way to pay (8/6/2012)
    ADP Security Management Update (8/2/2012)
    Fwd: Wire Transfer Confirmation (... (8/1/2012)
    Re-Validation of Webmail Account (7/31/2012)
    Message From Micorosoft Helpdesk: Do This Now (7/30/2012)
    password expiration warning (7/26/2012)
    ADP Security Management Update (7/25/2012)
    Order N64950 (7/25/2012)
    ADP Generated Message: First Notice - Digital Certificate Expiration (7/25/2012)
    Fwd: Your Photos (7/25/2012)
    American Express Alert - Personal Security Key Reset (7/23/2012)
    Properties for Sale. (7/23/2012)
    Your Ebay confirmation of your transaction through Paypal. (7/23/2012)
    Your Sprint bill is now available online (7/16/2012)
    Message From I.T Helpdesk Expert (7/16/2012)
    We have received your payroll processing request. (7/16/2012)
    New incoming Intuit payments. (7/16/2012)
    An Issue of Billing... (7/13/2012)
    You have new UPS invoices (7/11/2012)
    You have received a new payment through the Intuit network. (7/10/2012)
    ADP Generated Message: First Notice - Digital Certificate Expiration (7/9/2012)
    USPS postage labels order confirmation. (7/6/2012)
    Your Receipt and Itinerary (7/6/2012)

Monday, September 10, 2012

ChromeBook Series - How To Try Chrome Apps

Here is a quick beginner review video on how to check out Apps in the Google Chrome store.


Sunday, September 9, 2012

QuickBooks Online Will Require Browser Upgrades

Blog post from Intuit, for all Quick Books Online subscribers:
Small heads up for Firefox or Chrome users As we roll out changes to QuickBooks Online in the future, we may use some new HTML5 features like IndexedDB, History, AppCache, WebStorage, GeoLocation etc. We may also look at copy/paste from outside applications into QBO. Few of them will make browsers like Firefox or Chrome ask for extra permissions. It’s your choice to accept or ignore them and in either case your regular usage of QuickBooks Online will be unaffected. However accepting / allowing such features may just help enhance your browsing experience. Such notifications only come up once, till you eventually clear your browser’s cache / cookies / site preferences, which causes a reset. So you can always reset your browser preferences any time in case you want to change your choice. One such page using couple of the above mentioned technologies is our new Sales Receipt page (http://blog.qbo.intuit.com/2012/03/04/new-transaction-page-design-part-2/)

In Firefox 10 on the mac you will see the permission request notification as shown in the image below. Other versions on other platforms might look a bit different visually.

For Chrome users, you can just grab the Chrome Web Store app if you haven’t already done so. This will automatically add the necessary permissions (without the app, the notifications may come as a yellow bar on top). After installing that app, in the future you may notice the QuickBooks Online app shortcut greyed out on your Chrome’s New Tab page as shown below and Chrome should prompt for you to accept some permissions. Click re-enable to get it working again.

ChromeBook Series - Getting Started with Chrome App Store

While this video discusses advantages to BUILDING Chrome Browser Apps, it also reviews what Apps are, how to access them and their advantages. Even for the basic user, this is a helpful review of what this is all about. Thanks to Arne Roomann-Kurrik  for explaining this in detail.

Saturday, September 8, 2012

Chromebook - How to Physically Care for Your New Chromebook

ChromeBook Series - Important Apps NexusFree

This ChromeBook series is presented to help users who are trying to move to the Google cloud as a means of computing.

The Google Drive product is essentially the total Google offering of their cloud services. Previously Google was offering Google Docs, Google Music, Picasa for the Web, etc. Today they are combining all of this into something called Google Drive.  Google Docs are their own formats, but you can import Microsoft Word and Excel documents into it, and you can spit them out as a file or email them as an attachment in GMail in the Microsoft Word, PDF Rich Text Format (RTF) formats.

The Google Developers posted the YouTube channel reviewed NexusFree which is a means for editing Microsoft Office, over using OpenOffice, or to help people who use Google Drive


Chromebooks are excellent, secure and lower cost machines that can be used as alternatives to legacy, traditional workstation PCs within the Microsoft Small Business Server Active Directory environments, especially those within small business environments.

Menlo Technology has been promoting the advantages and value for cloud computing in the Enterprise, to reduce IT costs, security concerns and overall business operations.