Archive | July, 2011
Jul 22nd 2011 

How to Avoid Being the Next Facebook Hacking Victim

I’m sure that simply writing this post opens me up to be the next Facebook hacking target, but I think this is probably an important post to write. In case you didn’t hear the news, Pfizer’s Facebook page was recently hacked by a splinter group (called Script Kiddies) of the now well-known group called Anonymous. Anonymous has been responsible for some of the high-level hacks you’ve been hearing about on the news over the past few months. There’s a good overview what happened to the page and some insights here if you want more details. In this post, I’m going to share how I believe the Page was hacked and how you can avoid this happening to your Page. Also, at the end of this post, I’ll give my opinion on what happened in this case.

The image at the top of this post shows you what the Pfizer page looked liked post-hack. Not good.
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Jul 19th 2011 

Warning: You’re Not As Smart As You Think

Before you read any further, rest assured that this isn’t another post bashing Netflix for their recent price hike. Instead, since they seem to be in the news I thought I’d use a little bit of data from their business to make another point. And what point is that?

You’re not as smart as you think.

Or you might be too smart.

Or maybe it was the first one.

Now, don’t assume that I’m not smart enough to know I shouldn’t insult all my readers for no reason. I have a point and I’m as guilty of what I’m about to explain as each of you. I realized very recently thanks to a great book called “Everything is Obvious* (*once you know the answer),” that so much of what we devise in our minds as fact is quite the opposite. What our commonsense tells us is probably all wrong when it comes to predicting what’s going to happen in the future. Both the book and a number of challenges we help our clients with each day has helped me see this. So, the bad news is that what you’re predicting (or “forecasting” if you prefer) for the future is almost certainly wrong. The good news is that you can be aware of this and stop placing so much confidence in your judgement and prepare yourself with some contingencies when you’re ultimately wrong.
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Jul 12th 2011 

The Right Way To Publicize Your Facebook and Twitter Accounts

I wasn’t expecting to have to write this post, but apparently there’s some demand for it. Yesterday, I wrote a post called How NOT to Publicize Your Facebook and Twitter Accounts, which was all about why including those little social media icons in your offline advertising is ridiculous. You can check out the full post, but the gist is this: Putting icons in your offline ads to represent your Facebook and Twitter accounts instead of actually listing the URLs is the exact same thing as using an icon of a phone in place of your actual phone number.

This is what I’m talking about. You wouldn’t do this, right?

But that’s what you’re doing if your offline ad has just these  little icons. People don’t know where to find you on Facebook or Twitter and they certainly aren’t going to look for you. For clarification, I’m talking about offline ads such as TV, print, or billboards. You can use the icons online and hyperlink them to the actual accounts, but there are no hyperlinks offline. So, my solution was that you need to put in the URLs or simply not include these icons in your offline ads.
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Jul 11th 2011 

How NOT to Publicize Your Facebook and Twitter Accounts

Okay. I’ve seen this enough to make me annoyed to the point of writing a post about it. I actually noticed this disturbing trend about a year ago, but struggled for a way to describe why it was so wrong, but I’ve  got it thanks to Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee).

As I said, I started noticing this about a year ago when companies decided that it was finally cool to mention in all their ads that you could find them on Facebook and Twitter. Not understanding how social media works, most of these companies did the exact wrong thing. [Just for clarification, I'm talking about offline advertising here.] I know that you’ve all seen this before, but for illustration purposes, here’s what annoys me so much:


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