10 ways to avoid spam in all its forms
Despite all of the tools that are brought to bear in the War on Spam, spammers continue to ply their trade successfully. The most prolific reach millions upon millions of people and are adept at adjusting to new weapons that aim to shut them down.
The truth is that defeating spam doesn't require more technology but changes in human nature. Here are 10 common sense ways to avoid spam that are forgotten or overlooked far more often than we'd like to believe.
WordPress attack catches bloggers off guard, but it shouldn't have
Over the weekend, reports surfaced of a seemingly widespread attack targeting older versions of the popular blogging software WordPress. The attack leaves WordPress installations severely compromised and appears to be part of a campaign to spread spam and malicious code.
Numerous bloggers found themselves victims. One of those bloggers was popular tech personality Robert Scoble. He claims that two months of his blog's content was lost and that his site was booted from Google's index because of malicious code that had been inserted (ouch).
The 5 things Twitter must do to avoid #fail
How popular is Twitter? It's so popular that some would suggest it's worth billions of dollars. But as many of us who lived through the first .com bust know all too well, it's disappointingly easy to take something that looks like it has a future filled with success and turn it into fail.
In the case of Twitter, I think there are 5 things that the company's management needs to do to avoid that fate.
New job postings hint at Twitter's future plans
Love it or hate it, Twitter is hot. So much so that it received $48m in free media coverage over the past 30 days by one estimate.
But Twitter faces some major challenges and not everything is rosy in Twitterville. A flurry of job listings the company posted over the weekend hints that Twitter is looking to hire the talent it needs to keep the company from falling off the tracks.
Does your checkout process deal with shoppers' concerns?
To minimise abandonment rates, a good checkout process should be able to deal smoothly with any unanswered questions before customers pay for their items.
I've been reading an article by Brendan Regan on the FutureNow blog, in which he looks at five questions that customers may have in their minds when they reach the shopping cart, though he is referring to the checkout process as a whole rather than just the shopping basket page.
Online retailers afraid of payment fraud: survey
Two-thirds of online retailers say they feel threatened by payment fraud, something which threatens to hold back e-commerce growth in the UK.
The stats come from payment provider Sagepay, which surveyed 1,000 retailers, also revealed a lack of awareness of what they need to do to meet the industry standards (PCI DSS) on payment security.
Can you trust Web 2.0 companies with your money?
In a post last month, I pointed out that some of the most popular Web 2.0 companies still haven't figured out Customer Service 1.0.
Even though they're related, customer service is one thing and your money is another.
One in three web users afraid of shopping online
Lack of trust and security concerns are still holding people back from shopping online, though consumer confidence has grown significantly over the last few years.
According to a consumer survey (pdf) carried out by the Office of Fair Trading, nearly one in three are put off from shopping online. For 30%, lack of trust was the biggest reason, followed by concerns over personal security (20%) while 15% said they did not trust companies that sell online.
Website security as SEO
If you're putting together a list of all the components of a successful SEO strategy, there's a decent chance website security probably isn't on it.
After all, how is website security going to boost your placement in the SERPs?
Twitter has a really bad weekend
Twitter, the wildly-popular microblogging service that's the topic du jour amongst digital marketers these days, had a really bad weekend.
First, on Friday it came to light that a Twitter-oriented advertising network called Magpie was being used by affiliates to promote spammy affiliate links on Twitter. The affiliate links were presented as 'testimonial' tweets and the users who sent them did not directly disclose that their tweets were paid.
Social media: the best and worst of 2009
Email marketing: six steps to improving customer engagement in 2010
Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
