TheWayoftheWeb

Content and Digital Marketing Specialists

social networking

The aftermath of Twitters biggest phishing scam

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Over the last week, many people have fallen foul of the latest phishing scam to do the rounds of Twitter. And an unusual number of high profile individuals have been included in the list of users affected, including the Press Complaints Commission, BBC correspondent Nick Higham, the Guardian’s Head of Audio Matt Wells, bank First Direct, and environment minister Ed Milliband.

Environment Minister Ed Milliband caught by phishing scam
Environment Minister Ed Milliband caught by phishing scam

Phishing scams have long been endured by most internet users – the traditional mechanism has been via email, but as social networks have becoming hugely popular, they’ve become the vector of choice. And Twitter is particularly attractive as the speed with which messages can spread is combined with the use of short urls, which help to mask the malevolence of the message.

While this is just another example of the huge amount of phishing attempts which exist, the higher profile of these attacks as they affect prominent politicians will hopefully lead to a better awareness and response by governments.

It’s probably a forlorn hope, but for example, here are some things which might change:

  • More education about phishing and spam to the ‘general public’ – how about a public awareness campaign?
  • More understanding about how normal users can have accounts compromised very easily – for instance, with ‘Three Strikes Rules’.
  • More people using offline backups of any content that is valuable or useful to them
  • More of a move towards data privacy, and Vendor Relationship Management, to allow users to only share the information they choose with any service provider under strict controls.
  • A rethink of the UK Identity Card scheme which includes private businesses taking fingerprint and photos.

Importantly, it should place the risks of Social Engineering alongside those of teenage cyberwarfare specialists taking down defence satellites from their bedroom. If a private company was, for example, storing fingerprint data, you wouldn’t need to target their infrastructure (Although I’m not sure most chemists have a particularly high level of internet security) – you’d use social engineering on their employees via Facebook, Twitter, or offline in person to gain information and access.

Of course, technology can play a part, and I’m sure Twitter will increase their response to phishers in future, particularly as a high profile attack via any platform is never good for PR. But any measures will always be part of a never-ending arms race, and only when every individual is educated enough will there be any noticeable difference…

Making millions on Twitter

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If you’re looking for an example of a significant financial return on Twitter, then Dell has long been used as an example – and you can expect it to be quoted even more often after revealing revenues have now risen to $6.5 million globally via Twitter.

Of course that requires almost 1.5 million followers for their main @DellOutlet account, Dell Canada, the $800,000 from @DellnoBrasil and over $150,000 from @DellHomeSalesCA , but it’s still a mightily impressive amount.

Key points for the future from Dell Chief Blogger Lionel Menchaca?

  • Streamline our presence in social media networks, create meaningful content for customers and continue to increase our connections with them in those places
  • Focus on building a tighter integration between Dell.com, Support.Dell.com, our Dell Community sites with our presence in social networks
  • Continue our focus on scaling support of social media initiatives into the Dell business units

There’s a few more bits on the Dell post worth reading.

A Friday lunch inspired plea

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Trying to arrange lunch with the wonderful @angusfarquhar today at short notice somehow managed to involve the use of Twitter, GTalk,  and our mobiles simultaneously in a great example of male geeks communicating in three mediums but still struggling to decide a location and time effectively.

But eventually we finally managed to make it to TheBreakfastClubSoho, which proved to be a good choice.

So microblogging, IM’ing, chatting on the phone, and talking in person, in the space of 20 minutes.

And that just emphasised the fact that the actual technology we were using was fairly irrelevant – being able to share links, locations and maps virtually made life slightly easier, but at the end of the day it all comes down to humans communicating to be able to achieve whatever task they require.

Please don’t forget that when new technology appears.

Does social media really increase your emails?

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Social Media leads to more time spent on emails, according to a new study by Nielsen (Found via Mashable).

Apparently heavy social media users spend much more time consuming email each day, and it seems to only be increasing judging by the study. There’s no inference whether this is a good or bad thing, but the question I’d be asking is whether it’s also affected the amount of time spent on the telephone, in meetings etc. I probably spend less time on the telephone now than at any point in my life, and yet I’m keeping in contact with far more people on a far more regular basis than ever before.

How to tackle the email increase:

Nielsen and Mashable both point to the sign-up and notification emails as being the biggest cause of the email influx – but there’s a really, really simple solution.

In addition to my two main email accounts (work and personal), I have an account at OtherInbox which has been utterly fantastic at keeping all the notifications etc out of my way unless I actually need them.

Put simply, Other Inbox is web-based mail, but rather than the normal email address, you get an @username.otherinbox.com address (so mine is @badgergravling.otherinbox.com or @badgergravling.oib.com – cheers for the tip Tim). All I then do is insert the name of the social media site (or anything else I fancy) as my email address – so thewayoftheweb@badgergravling.otherinbox.com.

When that address is emailed by the site, Other Inbox automatically creates a folder of the same name and files every email from the site in the right folder.

So anything likely to clog your inbox gets filtered, filed, and saved for 30 days with a free account (paid accounts are really cheap and worthwhile for permanent archives). And you can integrate it with Gmail, access via IMAP etc, etc.

End result – a far less cluttered inbox every day, and storage for those set-up emails you’ll realise you need in two year’s time.

New research states the obvious for advertising on social networks

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In a shocking revelation, research has revealed that adverts running on non-social media sites get better click-through rates than on sites such as Bebo and Flixter.

Via Brand Republic, social advertising network Lotame compared figures with Google’s Doubleclick – although interaction with ‘advertising communication’ was higher on social networks.

There are a stack of reasons why this is the case – the fact that conversion rates and click-throughs can be monumentally different due to designs, ad placement and topics means that these types of comparison are never particularly useful.

But the main one is that when I want to communicate with my friends and family, I don’t give a monkeys about any product unless I’m actively asking about it, or my network are actively recommending it.

When I’m viewing non-social sites, I’m more likely to be possibly searching for something related to my browsing.

If you’re monetising something via social networking, surely the best way is to remove advertising, and just go straight from recommendation to purchase?

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