Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Think Before You Tweet

   I love listening to audio podcasts. One of my favorites is The Social Hour on the TWIT network. On a recent episode, hosts Sarah Lane and Amber MacArthur started off the show talking about a couple of instances of people using very poor judgement when posting on Twitter.

   First, top Greek triple-jumper and former Olympic team member Voula Papachristou showed very poor judgement, tweeting a racist message in the weeks leading up to the London Olympic games. You can read the tweet as well as some commentary here and here. There are a few things that make this case interesting.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Excellent Service Every Time

   Perhaps you've heard of Seth Godin. He's an author and speaker who usually covers subjects like marketing and leadership. You should follow him on twitter and read his blog.  Watch his TED talks (you do watch TED talks... right?)

   In a recent post entitled "Marketers with Power", Seth discusses situations when we have no choice in an action, such as when:
I have to fill out this form before the doctor will see me

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Customer or the Product?

   The idea has been talked about before here, here and here.

demotivational posters - FACEBOOK & YOU
see more Very Demotivational

   There are many free services out there.  Don't get me wrong... many are quite useful and I use many myself.  But people get upset when there is an outage (like this).  And more than one social network has had issues over changes in privacy policy (I'll talk more about this in a future posting).

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Put that in your Vault
   The other day we were having a family meal (that doesn't happen too often) and the conversation turned to passwords (and that never happens! :-).

   Of course, everyone in the family has accounts on various social media sites as well as other sites.  I've given the parental/security advice about passwords.  In particular, we were discussing not reusing passwords among websites.

   We've all heard about the LinkedIn password breach.  Basically, the LinkedIn hashed password file was stolen via a SQL injection attack.  LinkedIn did not do a good job salting (to add randomization) or hashing the stored password files.  So with the encrypted password file in hand, the attackers can throw all their computing power at cracking passwords.  Included in the value of cracking these passwords is the high odds that many users have reused these same passwords on other sites, such as their online banking.

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Texting and Driving

   Mashable ran a powerful infographic on texting and driving.  Among the scary stats were that 23% of 2011 auto collisions involved cell phones; at 55 MPH you can travel 100 yds while glancing at your phone, and; 27% of adults have sent or received texts while driving (it's not just teens and 20-somethings).

   It's plainly obvious that there are dangers here.  But what are the solutions?

   The infographic suggests three solution areas: 1. laws; 2. tech (including driver-monitoring cameras or anti-texting apps), and/or; 3. education/social-media campaigns.

   But I think all these ideas are missing a key point... they do not take into account the always-connected society in which we live.  It's easy to say that someone should, for example, pull over before texting or making a call, but that's just not practical.