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Posts from the Archives

• November 8, 2007 -- World Usability Day 2007 (0)
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• August 31, 2005 -- The Button Of Doom (0)
• April 13, 2004 -- Helicopter Vision on IMC 2004 (0)
• September 2, 2006 -- The BlogSearch Dilemma (0)

Topics can sometimes grow organically as you write about them and do a little research.  The topic here was to throw out a challenge to develop the best 125px x 125px ad since I had developed one today that I thought was pretty good.  I still would be interested to hear whether you can do better than the ad on the right here.  However there’s more to all this than meets the eye.

The History Of 125 X 125 Pixels Ads

I always like to do a little research to flesh out any blog post.  It appears that the 125 X 125 Pixels Ad was invented by Nik Cubrilovic of TechCrunch probably in 2006.  That comes from a very recent blog post of Michael Arrington,  founder of TechCrunch, who should be an authoritative source.  Hat tip to Todd Garland for that.

That ad format was a real winner as you can see in a 2007 blog post that Darren Rowse wrote:

Over the past 6 to 12 months the 125 x 125 pixel advertisement has emerged onto the blogging scene as a fairly common means of advertising.  I don’t know who did it first – but there are hundreds (if not thousands) of blogs using it. Some of the more prominent ones include TechCrunch, Read/WriteWeb, CopyBlogger and John Chow – but there are many hundreds others. In fact over at b5media we have them on all of our 250+ blogs.

The ad format is so versatile that it is not surprising to see the explosive growth that has occurred since then.  It provides a reasonable amount of visibility for a more economic price than larger display ads.

What A 125Px X 125Px Should Do For You

The ad may be economic but the challenge is how best to use such a small space. It is interesting to consider that question in terms of that simple marketing view of how sales occur.  You may have heard the acronym, AIDA.  That stands for:

  Awareness >> Interest >>  Desire  >> Action.

Prospective customers must be moved through these different phases as they change from ignorance of the product through to making the purchase.

The 125 x 125 pixels ad has a link attached so the action is clear.  How far up the AIDA scale can that small parcel of screen real estate move the visitor?  If done well, as the visitor clicks through to another web page, ideally there is a desire to buy.  Does your 125 x 125 pixels ad achieve that?

Post from: BPWrap

125 x 125 Pixels Ad Challenge

Technorati Tags: 125 pixels, 125px, ad, TechCrunch

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The Google Quality Guidelines Violation

The penalty for violating Quality Guidelines occurred when Google hired two top marketing agencies to promote the Chrome web browser using video content. 

Google reportedly bought online video ads from a digital media agency called Essence Digital. Essence then reportedly hired another company called Unruly to carry out Google’s video ad campaign. The end result was that a number of blogs wrote positive posts (with the video embedded) about Google Chrome for compensation – the reward was apparently Amazon gift cards.

These blog posts were of inferior quality, said little about Google Chrome but did include links back to Chrome web pages.. Google then issued a statement that addressed the issue:

Google never agreed to anything more than online ads. We have consistently avoided paid sponsorships, including paying bloggers to promote our products, because these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users. We’re now looking at what changes we need to make to ensure that this never happens again.

The Google Wrist-Slapping

Google has now slapped its own wrist over this Chrome pay-for-blogging flap. It is downgrading the search result ranking of the company’s own Web browser, Google Chrome, for 60 days.  The punishment imposed on Chrome will significantly lower the results ranking of the main download page for the browser.

According to Matt Cutts, Google’s head of webspam, the webspam team has taken manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome for at least 60 days. After that, someone on the Chrome side will need to  submit a reconsideration request documenting their clean-up just like any other company would. During the 60 days, the PageRank of www.google.com/chrome will also be lowered to reflect the fact that we also won’t trust outgoing links from that page.

The Irony of this Google Wrist-Slapping

Ignoring any Google internal politics that may be involved here, there is a certain irony in the events here.  This involves the following steps:

1. Google builds a search engine based on an algorithm that puts weight on the number of back links to web pages
2. The Online world reacts to this as everyone tries to create massive numbers of back links to their web pages sometimes by paying
3. Google attempts to stop this tsunami of back links by adopting quality guide lines to ‘outlaw’ paid links
4. Google inadvertently violates its own quality guidelines as many others innocently do
5. Google penalizes itself to set an example

Google is behaving like King Canute here and its action will have no long term effect.  Better by far than taking step 5 when step 4 occurred, would be to rethink step 1 when step 2 occurred.  Google continues to promote the PageRank concept as if it has marketing effectiveness.  Most knowledgeable observers of this scene suggest it should be buried.  That would be the way to avoid embarrassing wrist-slapping incidents like this.

Post from: BPWrap

The Irony Of Google Slapping Its Own Wrist Over Chrome Paid Links

Technorati Tags: browser, Chrome, download, PageRank, penalty, quality guidelines

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The biggest rage in the world of social media is Tumblr. People equipped with smartphones are taking to the streets, collecting images, and posting them to the specialized blogging service – all while gaining massive amounts of followers.

The use of visual marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach consumers and Tumblr features everything. From cinemagraphs to infographics, what you post on Tumblr has the potential to reach millions of people almost instantly. Here are some ways to make your Tumblr marketing attempts more effective:

Create a Brand Based Meme

In genetic terms, a meme is an idea or learned behavior that quickly spreads from person to person within a society. An Internet meme acts in the same way by catching on with a certain group and then making its mark on the rest of society. Tumblr is one of the best ways to create memes and get them to go viral quickly.

Quirk it Up

Some of the most popular Tumblr pages are “Kim Jong Il Looking at Stuff,” “The Comic Sans Project,” and anything that has to do with a meme. Attention spans on the site are miniscule and if you do not stand out no one is going to give your site the time of day. Just like the rest of your marketing, make your Tumblr efforts interesting and creative.

Seek Elsewhere for Authority Links

The major drawback to posting marketing content on a Tumblr blog is the fact that no one takes it seriously. According to Huffington Post, Tumblr is the least authoritative blogging platform on the Internet. This means that the site should be used for fun and novelty instead of serious discussion and debate. Leave the heavy topics to your own personal website or blog.

Don’t Get Caught

If you get caught marketing on Tumblr, you’ll probably be ostracized and blackballed from the community. Tumblr acts as an open sourced place for the dissemination of information. If paid advertising is present and not fully disclosed, you could end up receiving a tribute page just like this guy made.

Manage Your Resources

While you may think that it is an effective strategy to get your brand onto as many social media networks as possible, sometimes your efforts can be better in other places. If you do not have the time to effectively manage a Tumblr account, put the time you do have into other social networks. That way you will remain effective and not spread yourself out too thin.

The best thing about Tumblr is that it is fun, sharing, and entertaining by nature. If you feel that your brand can contribute to the openness of the social network, then get yourself an account and start adding to the massive database. 

Author Bio: Sam Peters is a blogger who frequently writes for entrepreneurial and tech blogs covering topics from online marketing to the newest gadget and mobile web news.

Related: The Other Bloke’s Mini-Blog – ramblings and rants from a Brit in British Columbia (a Tumblr blog)

Post from: BPWrap

Effectively Market Your Brand With Tumblr

Technorati Tags: brand, gif, tumblr

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I read an interesting article the other day about how frictionless online sharing is causing information overload and thus decreasing the practical value of social media. This not only affects the casual users of social media, it also affects the marketers.

How Frictionless Sharing Is Making Facebook Meaningless

The article had an interesting point: Many online applications (such as Spotify, which updates every song you play onto Facebook) have made online sharing so automated and omnipresent that the practical value of information on social media sites like Facebook has diminished severely. Essentially, we are being spammed by our friends every second of the day with information about what they are reading, what they are listening to, and even where they are.

How Friction Can Be Created Beyond Just Direct Communication

While I think the article brings up some interesting points, I believe it places too much criticism on the automated applications that instantly share the most mundane activity to the world. The author contrasts these auto-updates with frictional social contact like direct messaging.

However, I believe that a lot of communication in real life is done without direct language communication. Consider, for example, when you enter a friends’ house and look at their bookshelf. You take note of which books or movies or music they have that you find interesting, but you don’t necessarily have to talk to them about it.

If I don’t have to go out of my way to let people see what music I hear in my own home, why would I need to go out of my way to tell a friend online, “Hey, I’m listening to Kanye West right now, and it’s awesome.” Sure, it is a more meaningful way of sharing my music with others, but what if I want a casual way to share to not every one of my Facebook friends, but the select few I would invite into my home?

Facebook Actually Allows Filtered Sharing … But It’s Tedious

I was actually surprised when I found out the level of customization that Facebook allows, even through third party web applications like Spotify. Not only can you specify who (if anyone) will see what you listen to through Spotify, you can also specify whether Spotify information on your friends will show up your own feed.

However, specifying both your outbound and inbound information filters is hardly intuitive. For instance, to change how you broadcast your Spotify updates, you have to do the following:

1. Click the options arrow in the top-right corner of Facebook
2. Click on “Apps” on the left menu bar
3. Find Spotify, and click “Edit”
4. Under “App activity privacy,” you can change it from “Friends” to “Public” or any other custom list of Facebook friends.

Of course, you still have to decide which of your friends you actually care to share your music listening habits with, and then you have to make a list of these friends. A little too much effort for most, so it seems likely that most people either share to all or none.

Specifying who you want to receive Spotify feeds is relatively simple, yet it can still be somewhat clunky. If you want to disable Spotify feeds altogether, you just need to click a Spotify update in your live ticker (top far right column), click the options arrow in the top right corner of the box that opens, and click “Hide all be Spotify.”

However, specifying a selective Spotify feed is somewhat cumbersome. You are automatically subscribed to all of your friends, so to specify your feed you have to unsubscribe to select people. You always have the option of clicking on someone’s Facebook profile, hovering your mouse over “Subscribed,” and unchecking “Music and Videos.” You can also do this from the live ticker by hovering over a friend’s name, and changing what subscriptions you have to their feed. Still, this is all one-friend-at-a-time filtering, and is hardly practical if you have 500 or so friends.

From what I can tell, there is no way to subscribe only to a select list of friends’ Spotify updates, and have only that limited selection feed your live ticker and Facebook main feed page. If you create a list of select friends, you can alter feed specifications for that list’s feed, but it won’t impact your universal feed. There is no way to filter certain criteria (like Spotify updates) from groups or “lists” of friends away from your central feed. You can only update filters within the list’s feed view, meaning you have to look on each list’s feed in order to get the specific criteria you filter from each list of friends.

Implications

I realize that I am asking for a lot of detailed and technical feed control that most users don’t even bother to use, but the fact that Facebook makes it so cumbersome and ineffective seems negligent. Furthermore, the ultimate level of “usability” for all of Facebook’s new online sharing applications seems to force users to share everything or share nothing, see everything of the app on your feed or see nothing.

I fear this current trend on Facebook of “oversharing” will result in less people utilizing these applications that have large communication potential. They just need more customization over who sees your feed and which feeds for which applications you want to see. Until that level of customization happens, I worry that most people will decide to either not use these applications or choose to hide them in their feed.

Byline:

This is a guest post by Kimberly Wilson. Kimberly is from accredited online colleges, she writes on topics including career, education, student life, college life, home improvement, time management etc.

Post from: BPWrap

Why Facebook Should Make Filters Easier

Technorati Tags: Facebook, filter, sharing, spotify

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Many may find this title, Social Media Forces Customer-Centric Marketing, somewhat puzzling.  To understand what is meant, we should look at a few definitions.

Social Media Are

Here are a few definitions:

• The term Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue.
• A Dictionary Definition of Social Media – forms of electronic communication (as Web sites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (as videos)
• Social media has clearly set a higher standard in people sharing and discovering each other. Think of it as a cross between sociology and technology, transforming one way broadcasting into comprehensive two way communication. It’s personal. It’s human.

In summary, social media provide a venue for one-to-one dialogue between persons.

Social Media Are Not

Social Media is a bit of a misnomer since it does not fit the traditional definition of media.  It could encourage marketers to regard these as additional channels of communication with customers and prospects.  In other words, new tools that parallel the existing media such as newspapers, TV and print magazines. 

There is partial truth in that but the arrival of social media signals a much more profound change. This notion has major implications for the way companies do business.

What is Marketing

In times past, the word marketing was synonymous with mass marketing.  It was concerned with beaming out messages about products and services by whatever means would get brand awareness among potential customers.  Some of the more powerful channels were expensive, such as TV or luxury magazines, but they were cost-effective in getting the message across.

Rarely was this permission marketing where the target prospect could refuse to hear the message.  It was one-way communication.  The hope was that once the seed had been planted in this way, prospects would wish to sample the product and then buy on a repeat basis.

The Internet is a massive change agent

The big factor which changed all this is the Internet and the relatively modest costs for users to have access.  It is still possible to beam out messages but they must be welcome and convincing.  However this overlooks  one aspect of the Internet which is that it can support two-way communication.  People do not wish to be talked at but may be willing to enter into a dialogue with a company.

This dialogue is now made much easier by the entry of social media.  The most popular of these is Facebook and Twitter has a sizable following too.  The new one on the scene is Google Plus which seems to be growing rapidly.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing, a name dreamed up by Hubspot, focuses on earning, not buying, a person’s attention, which is done through social media and engaging content, such as blogs, podcasts and white papers. This content is interesting, informative and adds value, creating a positive connection in the eyes of the consumer, thus making her more likely to engage your brand and buy the product.

It is interesting how this is expressed.  There does not seem any attempt to establish a two-way dialogue.  Rather the aim is to create content which is so appealing that customers will wish to see it and accept its message.

Social media at its best provides a stage on which genuine person-to-person communication can take lace.  Inbound Marketing seems to work on this same stage merely with the intent of getting attention.

Customer Expectations

What is missing in this explanation is the realisation that consumers now feel more empowered since they can make their voices heard via the Internet.  Given this new power, they expect that businesses will be more welcoming and less controlling than they used to be.  Customers expect that products and services will be provided with better customer service than was provided in the past.

Customer-centric Marketing

Given these heightened customer expectations, it is more effective to try to envision how the customer is seeing what is on offer from the company.  In other words to see things through the customers eyes.  That process is described as customer-centric Marketing

The Customer Experience

One definition of customer experience runs as follows:

the sum-totality of how customers engage with your company and brand, not just in a snapshot in time, but throughout the entire arc of being a customer. 

Ensuring that the customer experience is optimal so that they will stay loyal to our brand and make repeat purchases is very challenging.  Customers may interact with many members of the organization, some of whom may not realize the importance of delivering the best possible total customer experience.  This requires a new rallying cry for all members of the organization.

We’re All Marketers Now

The McKinsey Quarterly suggests that new rallying cry: We’re All Marketers Now.

We’ve entered an era where customers no longer separate marketing from the online, in-store or face-to-face sales experience – it is the experience. In this era of engagement, marketing is the company and it’s far too important to be left to the marketing department. You’ve likely heard this before, but it’s never been so true, real, and in your face as it is today.

The process suggested involves 3 steps:

1. Design – Designing a great customer-engagement strategy and experience depends on understanding exactly how people interact with a company throughout their decision journey.
2. Build – Once a company designs how it will engage with customers, it needs the organizational capabilities to deliver: adding staff, building a social-media network infrastructure, retooling customer care operations, or altering reporting structures.
3. Operate and renew – Digital technology has upended the engagement expectations of customers, who, for example, want one Web site to visit and a relationship seamlessly integrated across touch points.

This involves a new look for the marketing organization, involving initiatives such as:

• Distribute more activities around the organization
• Promote more councils and partnerships
• and most important of all, elevate the role of customer insights

In other words, they too are promoting the notion of customer-centric marketing.  The customer is Queen (or King) and you must make sure you give them the royal treatment.

Marketing Right Now

The advice to apply Customer-Centric Marketing is not new.  The term was first used in 2000.  SMM has a free e-book, Marketing Right Now (PDF), that spells out the implications of this approach.  As social media become ever more important, marketing right is essential and that means customer-centric marketing.  The book is relatively compact and well worth reading.  You may well find it brings out some aspects of marketing you have never considered before.

Post from: BPWrap

Social Media Forces Customer-Centric Marketing

Technorati Tags: customer experience, customer-centric, hubspot, inbound marketing

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Inbound Marketing Versus Outbound Marketing

One of the latest buzzwords is inbound marketing, which is contrasted with outbound marketing.  Outbound marketing is the old traditional approach which is to ensure that people will see your advertisements and messages by spending large sums of money to get their attention.

Inbound marketing on the other hand has become a two-way dialogue, much of which is played out in social media such as Facebook or even Twitter.

Inbound marketing focuses on earning, not buying, a person’s attention, which is done through social media and engaging content, such as blogs, podcasts and white papers. This content is interesting, informative and adds value, creating a positive connection in the eyes of the consumer, thus making her more likely to engage your brand and buy the product

The link above shows an infographic created by Voltier Digital, which highlights the differences between the two kinds of marketing.  Here is the lead-in to that infographic.  The infographic is of course another device used in inbound marketing to earn the viewers interest.

Inbound Marketing Is The Future

The term Inbound Marketing was created by Hubspot and they are persuasive on its merits as the way of the future.

Instead of interrupting people with television ads, they create videos that potential customers want to see. Instead of buying display ads in print publications, they create their own business blog that people subscribe to and look forward to reading. Instead of cold calling, they create useful content and tools so that prospects contact them looking for more information.

Instead of driving their message into a crowd over and over again like a sledgehammer, they attract highly qualified customers to their business like a magnet.

Companies Should Look In Before Looking Out

That  all sounds fine but others are raising a warning that getting involved with social media may be opening a can of worms.  Social media are just that: social.  Whatever surfaces is there (for ever) for all the world to see.

The advice here is to look inwards and make sure that there are no skeletons in the cupboard.  Products and services should be ones that customers find satisfactory and indeed might wish to recommend to their friends.  Only when a company is operating at this level can you expect that individuals in social media such as Facebook may share details of new promotions with their friends in a way which will be helpful to your future growth targets..

The Outside In Look Is The Best

Looking inwards is fine but we would urge you to go one step further.  The important view of the products and services is not what company employees believe but more importantly what customers and potential customers may believe.

They are on the outside looking in.  They also compare your products and services with similar offerings from the competition.  It is worth investing time and effort in getting honest feedback from potential customers as to how your products and services really stack up against the competition.  For over ten years, this approach has been around and sometimes is labeled being customer-centric.

Perhaps even better is to listen to those dissatisfied customers and hear what they have to say about the company and its products and services.  They are certainly on the outside looking in but they may provide the most honest appraisals you will get.

People in general do not like to complain and there is also the factor of cognitive dissonance.  When someone has bought a product they may not choose to comment on slight dissatisfactions they may feel because they really want the world to know that they were astute purchasers.  Those who decided not to buy may give much more revealing comments.

Certainly that outside in look may well teach you something about your products and services that you had never realized.  With that information you can be on a path to improvement and to success.  Without that information you may be attempting the impossible in getting potential customers to test out your products.

Post from: BPWrap

Inbound Marketing and Marketing Outside In

Technorati Tags: Facebook, hubspot, inbound marketing, Outside.in

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The question is could that momentum drive it to emulate in size the Facebook empire? There were rumors that the number of active users of Google Plus was dropping.  Was there a fatal flaw in the way Google Plus had been conceived?

One Google engineer inadvertently went public with his concerns about this fatal flaw.  However Steve Yegge is an engineer and sees things very much from the technical standpoint.  He felt that the lack of a platform which would encourage many developers to provide content was the fatal flaw of Google Plus.

It is certainly true if you wish to copy the Facebook model that the platform should exist.  However Google is tapping in to different aspects of social activity.  Here in Google Plus we are talking entirely about the sharing aspect of any digital content including video.  Social activity is very much about communicating and thus the two go together hand in hand.  Google has yet to show all the ways that sharing can be enriched and complemented by other data and information that Google can easily provide.

This positive view is shared by Jon Evans.

I think Google+ is a hit in the making. I hardly use it myself any more — indeed, my last post there, more than a month ago, was “Sadly, it seems G+ has degenerated in my mind into little more than the place I go to complain that Twitter seems to be down” – but I’m no representative sample. Heck, I don’t really use Facebook either, except to mindlessly echo my Twitter stream.

He and I hold very similar views.  Although the present version of Google Plus is very much a work in progress, I think early signs indicate that this all is heading in the right direction.  I use social media to stay in touch with others.  I rarely get involved in games.  Already I am finding that Google Plus is the most likely way I can be aware of important things that are happening among Internet aficionados.

Post from: BPWrap

Can Google Plus Get There From Here

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The social networking tool Twitter can be instrumental in expanding your business’s presence, whether you want to bring your enterprise online or diversify an already existing online portion of your business. By setting up an account with your business, you will have access to the hundred million-plus people using Twitter every day for casual and professional purposes. If you follow the right people and cater your tweets to your potential online clientele, you’re bound to build a sizeable following.

How to use Twitter: the Basics

To set up a profile for your business, simply go to Twitter’s website and follow their instructions, filling out your company’s information when prompted. Remember that you don’t need to share any information you don’t want to share; your company’s Twitter can be as spare as you want it to be. At the very least include a link to your business’s website (if you have one) so people who follow you know where to go for more information.

Once you’ve set up a fitting handle and profile for your business’s Twitter account, start sifting through Twitter’s website for potential followers. Click the “Who to Follow” tab at the top of the website for tips on what big names to follow in your industry. Type keywords that describe the nature of your business: “shipping” or “retail” if you run a wholesale business, for example, or “insurance quotes” if you’re in insurance and so on. The search engine should produce a list of people who post frequently on the term you entered. Make it a point to follow as many people as possible so you can get a feel for what type of tweeters best benefit your research-remember you can always unfollow people later. These followers could be potential customers, other businesses with networking potential, or news outlets related to your business’s field. If your business is solely local, enter the name of your city/state in the search bar to find tweeters specific to your area.

Tweet Etiquette/Tweeting Well

Make your business’s Twitter a hub for all things pertaining to your business; imagine that you’re explaining your business to people who’ve never before heard of it and tweet from that perspective. Tweet helpful and informative tidbits about your business; whatever it is, keep your content short and interesting. Before you send tweets out, write down methods you might capture the attention of followers who would be interested in your business. Ask yourself how you market your business offline and how you can translate that into 140 characters or less? If you need inspiration, there’s a twitter for Top Business Tweets that features daily tweets from top business tweeters!

Once you accrue a healthy following, try to respond to people who RT (retweet) your tweets or those who send you a DM (direct message). You may have difficulty distinguishing genuine questions from those asked by spam twitter accounts, but over time you’ll learn how to tell between the two. It’s important to maintain a dynamic report with your followers so as to stay engaged with your audience. Above all, make sure that you keep a professional tone on your tweets. Don’t be drawn into petty arguments fomented by spamming/trolling tweeters, and certainly don’t start any tweet-brawls yourself.

Hashtags

Be sure to take advantage of hashtags when you tweet. Hashtags in a nutshell increase the visibility of your tweets to those who might not otherwise find your tweets. They provide a tweeter the means of categorizing their tweets. For example, if you tweet “Check out our site for the latest figures on summer gas prices,” you could add the hashtag “#gasprices” or “#transportation” to give your tweet some categorization. This way anyone looking for tweets relating to gas prices or transportation will come across your tweet. You can also search out similarly themed twitter accounts using hashtags that you’d expect to be used by businesses in your industry.

License for photo: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

By-line: This guest post is contributed by Lauren Bailey, who regularly writes for best online colleges. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: blauren99 @gmail.com.

Post from: BPWrap

Marketing and Business Networking With Twitter

Technorati Tags: follow, hashtag, social media, Twitter

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The outcome was headlined as follows: Hackers shame Oracle, Apple, Delta and more as part of the DefCon corporate hacking contest

Hackers taking part in the competition on Friday and Saturday found it ridiculously easy in some cases to trick employees at some of the largest U.S. companies to reveal information that can be used in planning cyber attacks against them.

The contestants also managed to get employees to use their corporate computers to browse websites the hackers suggested. Had these been criminal hackers, the websites could have loaded malicious software onto the PCs.

Defcon is organized by benevolent hackers, partly to promote research on security vulnerabilities in order to pressure companies to fix them. The contest was sponsored by so-called white-hat hackers to show companies how weak their security is and encourage them to better educate their employees about the risks of hacking.  It was the second year that Defcon has held a contest in "social engineering," or the practice where hackers con people into handing over information or taking actions such as downloading malicious software.

Social engineering is frequently used in attacks where the hackers send a "spear phishing" e-mail in which they impersonate a friend of the recipient and ask him or her to open a tainted file or visit a malicious website.  Security experts say spear phishing have led to many hacks over the past year, including ones on U.S. defense contractors, the IMF, EMC Corp’s RSA Security division and government agencies around the world.

This is not a new topic but does not receive the attention it should.  One of the earliest examples on the record dates back to 1999 when Moore Publishing was the corporate hacking target for the prestigious law firm of Steptoe and Johnson.

Moore Publishing charged that, among other things, Steptoe employees cracked into Dig Dirt and other Moore Publishing sites some 750 times, posted defamatory messages about Moore on Usenet, and tried to cover it all up by doing their evil deeds under an e-identity swiped from an Alexandria, Virginia, furniture store owner.  Dig Dirt was a site that fronted an enormous database of personal data gleaned from public records. Dig Dirt then sold the data to private investigators, lawyers, and law enforcement agencies.

Corporate hacking does not affect only corporations and indeed we are all now aware of documents and information that governments might not wish to reveal through the actions of WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks is a non-profit media organization dedicated to bringing important news and information to the public. It provides an innovative, secure and anonymous way for independent sources around the world to leak information to journalists. It publishes material of ethical, political and historical significance while keeping the identity of their sources anonymous, thus providing a universal way for the revealing of suppressed and censored injustices.

WikiLeaks relies on its supporters in order to stay strong. Since 2007, when the organisation was officially launched, WikiLeaks has worked to report on and publish important information. It also develops and adapts technologies to support these activities.

If you need any further reminder of the major impact such corporate hacking can have, then just read a short history of corporate hacking as published by the Guardian in 2009.  This shows some major intrusions into private data banks.

The scale of hacking activity from China and Russia has started to emerge through a series of frantic announcements. Rumours of the activities of Russian hackers and their involvement with organised crime had circulated since 2000 but it was not until 2003 that the Chinese emerged as big players.

Protracted attacks targeted networks at Lockheed Martin, Sandia National Laboratories, Redstone Arsenal and NASA, and came to light in 2005. At around the same time the Russian Business Network, a cybercrime organisation that specialises in identity theft, denial of service, computer extortion and child pornography, emerged. The RBN established itself as prepared to do anything for a price.

Undoubtedly the scale of corporate hacking has continued to grow ceaselessly since then using ever more sophisticated technologies.

Post from: BPWrap

Corporate Hacking

Technorati Tags: business, corporate, hacking, wikileaks

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