August 25th, 2010

Who’s Tracking You Online?

Many people don’t realize that when they use the internet, they leave a trail of bread crumbs behind them in the form of their search history. Figuring out how to sell you stuff online is big business and there are hundreds of companies gathering information about you so they can do just that.

The Thursday, August 19th edition of Fresh Air on NPR had Julia Angwin, a senior technology editor at the Wall Street Journal, talking about the companies that track you online. Angwin explains how consumer surveillance works, how users can disable the tracking software — and how advertisers are continually evolving to keep up with the data they receive.

The staff at the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) did a series of articles where they took a look at the 50 most popular websites and what kind of tracking software these websites installed on visitor’s computers. WSJ’s research identified more than 100 tracking companies, data brokers and advertising networks collecting data — which are then sold on a stock market-like exchange to online advertisers.

Important Points from the Show and the Series:

If you don’t have time to listen to the 40 minute show, here’s a rundown of the important points. For some of the points, I have included the minute of the show you can queue up more information.

There are 2 types of tracking software: Cookies and Beacons.

A cookie is small text file a website puts on your computer which gives you an ID number unique to that website. Cookies only know what page you’re on. They don’t monitor what you’re doing on that page. One website can install multiple cookies on your computer.

Beacons are bits of software code that track your movements across a website. Unlike cookies, beacons are not installed on your computer. Beacons are very rare and can do a variety of things including keystroke monitoring. Keystroke monitoring means they can capture what you type into a field. Cookies can’t do that. Websites that are doing keystroke monitoring know they’re doing it and don’t do it for sensitive information like passwords.

It is legal for websites to put Cookies and Beacons on your computer.

Who’s Tracking You and Why?

• Websites owners don’t necessarily know that their website is installing cookies on their visitor’s computers. (Angwin discusses how this works at about the 7 minute mark.) For example Dictionary.com installed the most at 234 but only 11 were installed by Dictionary.com. The other 223 were installed by 3rd party advertisers.
• At minute 11:30 Angwin describes how this information is sold in a stock market like situation and how it’s used.
• Although most information gathering is designed to determine buying preferences, there are concerns about the types of info being gathered. Angwin discusses some of these concerns at about minute 22:00.
• Google is the biggest tracker with Microsoft coming in 2nd.
• Wikipedia is the only of the top 50 sites that doesn’t allow any tracking on its site. (Yay Wikipedia!)
• On average, the top 50 sites installed 64 pieces of tracking software.
• Internet Explorer is the by far the most used browser. Microsoft had an internal debate about whether you had to opt out or opt in to it. (Opt out means you are tracked by default and you have to figure out how to tell it not to track you. Opt in means you have to tell them you want to be tracked.) The Advertising Department won that battle so if you use Internet Explorer, you have to opt out of tracking which is not easy to do. (I use Google Chrome. With Chrome you choose whether or not to allow tracking when you install the browser software.)
• At 33:45 she discusses what you can do to block it. See Resources below.
• While you can see what tracking devices are on your computer you can’t see what tracking devices are on your mobile phone.
• Apple Safari by default blocks 3rd party tracking.

The Points I Think You ought to Know

It’s been my experience that when people first learn that they are being tracked online, they immediately go to worst case scenario and assume the only purpose is to gather personal information that can be used to steal their identity or make charges to their credit card. The vast majority of the time that is not the intent at all. Big companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo aren’t out to get sensitive data such as credit card or social security numbers. They are interested in tracking you online so they can make more money by targeting ads better. They assume that if they know your interests and they target ads to your interests, it will increase the chance that you will buy something.

Virtually any media or shopping site is going to put a cookie on your computer. Cookies aren’t all bad, they make it possible for a website to recognize you when you come back so you don’t have to login every time or re-enter some data. Your computer probably has thousands of them on it right now. If you do a search for “cookies.txt” in your computer’s search function, you can find the folder. To go through them and delete them one at a time would take dozens of hours. You can empty the folder with a few clicks but if you do that, you’re going to spend a lot of time re-logging into various websites.

You Probably Use Cookies Too!

Your website is probably installing them too. At least is should be! Why? If you use Google Analytics (and you should be), you’re installing a cookie to track what pages visitors click on, how long they stay on that page, what browser they used to find you and other statistics. When you look at your Google Analytics data, you don’t know who visited your site but you do get valuable information that in aggregate helps you fine tune your website and hopefully increase sales.

So before you decide to have a no tolerance policy toward cookies, keep in mind that they really are helpful and not necessarily a bad thing.

Links from the Show:

Listen to the show here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129298003

Read the WSJ series here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703940904575395073512989404.html

http://www.getabine.com/ is the software they recommend for blocking tracking.

Learn more about how Google Analytics uses cookies:
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/concepts/gaConceptsCookies.html

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August 3rd, 2010

Watch out for This Sales Newsletter Scam

Talk about a crappy way to start a Monday! I checked my messages this morning and had one from a collections agency looking to collect on a past due invoice for $94.50 assessed against my business. At first I figured the phone call was a scam to get me to call her back so she could give me a sales pitch because I KNOW I don’t owe anybody anything. The vast majority of my expenses I pay via credit card and the only things I pay by check are sub-contractor invoices.

So when the collections agent explained that I signed up for a sales newsletter and it was in collections because I hadn’t paid any of the 5 invoices this company sent. I vaguely remembered getting a call some months ago from a sales guy trying to get me to sign up for a sales newsletter. I remember him because he was kind of obnoxious and wouldn’t take no for an answer. I think at some point I sad “You can send the free one if you want but I’m signing up for it.”  Apparently he took that as authorization.

I’d be less inclined to think it’s a scam versus a miscommunication if I’d ever received a newsletter or any of the supposed 5 invoices they sent. Although the collections agent was polite, she was rather dismissive and kept claiming I probably just threw away the invoices or I didn’t understand that I had to cancel the newsletter.

Finally she said, “Well they always confirm acceptance by getting a birth date.” To which I replied, “Oh really. And what birth date did they give you?” She told me the date she had in her records to which I replied “That’s not even close to my birthday.” That changed her attitude and she closed out the account and assured me I wouldn’t be hearing from them again.  She wouldn’t send me a letter saying the matter was closed so in a few months, I’m going to run my credit report to make sure.

The lesson in this? DO NOT GIVE OUT YOUR BIRTH DATE! I don’t think you should even put it on your Facebook or social network profiles. Most people think they’re safe because they their birth date is “only” visible to their Facebook Friends. That’s not true. All you need is for one of your Friends to take the wrong Facebook quiz and the programmers of that quiz have access to the personal data of the quiz-takers Friends. The collections agent only gave me the month and day so leaving off the year of your birth won’t help either.

I’ve heard of similar scams where they use the last 4 digits of your social security number so don’t give that out either. Legitimate businesses don’t need that kind of “authorization.”

I think another part of the scam was to make the claim for just under $100. Many companies, especially ones with a separate accounting department, will just pay the invoice to make it go away.

I wish I had the name of the scamming company. I would bury them online in negative press. The collections agent wouldn’t give it to me and since they call their product “sales newsletter” I’ve got virtually no chance of finding them. More than likely another deliberate decision in the scamming process.

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June 23rd, 2010

How to Use HARO for Publicity & More! (Part I)

Getting mentioned in the right publication can mean the difference between living hand to mouth and having more work than you can handle. But, public relations is expensive.Sourcing journalists who write about your industry, figuring out what they want to hear and then pitching them takes a lot of work. An experienced PR firm will cost you thousands of dollars a month which is a higher entry point than most small businesses can afford. But! There is a solution. Helpareporter.com is a publicity resource every small business can use.

Help a Reporter Out, commonly known as HARO, is referral service that puts journalists in touch with sources. HARO was started as a Facebook Group by PR guru Peter Shankman in November, 2007. It has since grown to its own website with almost 30,000 journalists and writers submitting over 200 queries a day to over 100,000 sources. HARO was recently purchased by software company Vocus. On his blog, Peter Shankman assures us that HARO will remain a free service and that “We’ll have a kick-ass infrastructure, which will allow us to grow HARO better than ever before. Different countries. More lists. Breaking news queries! You name it. It’s gonna be an AMAZING ride.”

HARO is free but it does require a time commitment. When you sign up as a news source, you get 3 emails a day with a couple of dozen queries in each one. Although the subject line of each HARO email starts with [HARO] which is designed to make them easy to filter into a separate folder, many of the requests are time sensitive so it’s best read them as soon as possible.

How can HARO afford to be free? Each HARO email starts with a paid advertisement about a product or service. Advertising in the masthead of HARO costs $1500. So at 3 emails a day, $4500 a day for a service that is largely automated is a pretty nice passive income stream.

After the masthead, there is a list of the latest queries by industry including:
Biotech and Healthcare
Business and Finance
Education
General
High Tech
Lifestyle and Fitness
Public Policy and Government
Travel

The title of each query contains a one line description and the media outlet. Media outlets can include major print publications, well known websites and blogs, book authors and lesser known websites, blogs and social networks. If the source says “Anonymous” you’re probably dealing with a major news outlet like the Wall Street Journal or Good Morning America.

When you click on a item in the list, you are taken to the expanded description of the query which includes the journalist’s name (unless anonymous), the publication, the due date and a brief description (50 – 100) words of what they are looking for. The description also included an anonymized email address where you can send your reply.

When you come across a query you think you’d be a good source for (and I’m confident you eventually will), keep in mind they are probably getting dozens of not hundreds of responses. If they don’t get back to you don’t take it personally. Also, keep your replies short and to the point. DO NOT promote your products or services. Focus on what you know and how you can help them. This is definitely one of those situations where self-promotion will blow up in your face.

In my next post about HARO, I will show you some other ways I use HARO to find resources and build relationships online.

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March 21st, 2010

How to Find Your Customers Online: A Case Study

The hardest part of building an online audience is getting in front of new people.  Tapping the existing audiences of websites, bloggers and experts is probably the easiest way to get in front of new people. That’s why I’m constantly telling prospects and clients “You need to figure out where your target markets hang out online and be there.”  People quickly see the wisdom of this approach.  But, the hard part is figuring out exactly where people are hanging out online.

A few weeks ago, I did a seminar about the basics of internet marketing.  In it, I asked the attendees to define their target markets.  One target market that emerged was stay at home Moms and it was news to most of the group that “Mommy Bloggers” are a serious force to be reckoned with online.  Just a week later, the New York Times had an article “Honey, Don’t Bother Mommy. I’m Too Busy Building My Brand” about a Mommy Blogger boot camp.

Frankly, if I were trying to reach stay at home moms and new moms, I could build a marketing campaign off this article alone.  By doing some data mining, I was able to collect a couple of good statistics, a bunch of blogs and some marketing ideas.

What Should You Look For?

Before I tell you what I learned, I’ll start with a list of questions I keep in mind as I do data mining for a client.

Questions to ask as you mine blogs for data:

-         Can I follow them on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube?

-         Who follows them? Should I follow their followers?

-         Are the ads on their blog a good source of info?

-         Could I advertise on their site?

-         What products do they review?

-         Would they let me interview them for my blog?

-         What do I have to offer or share that might make them want to interview me?

-         Are there any individual blog posts I should comment on?

This particular article was a gold mine.  It’s rare to come across a single article this helpful but it does happen.  Here’s what I gathered and why it’s helpful.

Juicy Statistics:

One of the hardest parts of writing memorable copy is gathering statistics.  I keep an eye out for them when I’m reading the paper, watching the news or toodling around on the internet. I keep them in a Word doc for future use.  Here are a couple I pulled form this article.

“According to a 2009 study by BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners, 23 million women read, write or comment on blogs weekly.”

“According to eMarketer, advertising on blogs will top $746 million by 2012, more than twice the figure for 2007.”

Blogs with Readers:

It’s not hard to find blogs. The hard part is finding blogs your customers actually read.  That’s where an article like this is helpful. You know the writer did some research and in some cases includes helpful facts about the blogs.  The following is a list of the blogs I culled from the article and some helpful tidbits about them.

hipasiwannabe.com

Written by Jill Smokler whose blog helped her get a full time job with Nickelodeon’s ParentsConnect.com social-networking site.  Her blog gets about 36,000 page views a month. When you go the blog you see that it accepts advertising and the ads are a good source of info too.

dialmforminky.com

Her About page has a list of blogs she follows which is a good source of other blogs.

mommyologist.com/

She sank some serious change into her blog template! This tells me she’s no amateur. She has 326 Friend Connect followers. Could be worthwhile to check them out.

mayhemandmoxie.com/

This blog and a few others link to the site www.thesitsgirls.com/ which has over 1500 Friend Connect Followers. The number of Friend Connect Followers and the content tells me it’s a hub site that will be another good source of information.

momfluential.net

This blog looks like a news hub and could be a good source of ideas for topics stay at home moms are interested in beyond the usual.

resourcefulmommy.com

Run by Amy Lupold who spoke a the Boot Camp. If you can find a resourceful angle to what you’re offering, you could have an “in” on this site.

Now What Do You Do?

Before you get all excited and start firing off emails to blog owners about what a great opportunity you have for them, just stop.  Doing so could quite possibly be fatal to your marketing efforts. Bloggers with a good readership GET PITCHED ALL THE TIME and just about all of them have horror stories.  If you are tempted to ignore this advice and email them any way, spend a few minutes reading The Bad Pitch blog.  If professional screw up this badly and often, imagine how easy it is for newbies to do.

Plenty has been written about how to pitch to bloggers. I won’t go into detail about it here but PRoBlogger has some helpful advice here:
How to Pitch to Bloggers – 21 Tips.

But, before you’re even ready to contact bloggers you have homework to do.

• Read the blog for a while. Get a sense of the tone and the comments.
• Make a list of the topics they write about and “angles” they take.
• Take an inventory of your existing content (articles, white papers, videos, etc.) that might be of interest to them.
• Make a list of existing content you could tweak or new content you could create that would be of interest to their audience.
• Then, make or teak that content. You’ve got to have your ducks lined up before you contact bloggers.

I know this sounds like a lot of work and it is but it gets easier once you’ve got a solid toolkit of content to pull from.  Keep in mind that it only takes a few well placed mentions of your business or product to become the next overnight sensation.

I could easily spend another 10 or 20 hours mining the sites in this article but why deny you the fun?

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March 15th, 2010

My Two Cents: Even if you think a client is pissed, COMMUNICATE!

At the end of November, I hired my lil-bro to burn all my CD’s to a hard drive. He’s really good at this kind of stuff and needed the bucks so it seemed like a good idea. Burning all my CD’s to a hard drive has two benefits: 1) I can make a few bucks selling them after the fact and 2) I won’t have to look at them collecting dust in my living room.

It is now March and lil-bro has been incommunicado for over 2 months. I’ve emailed him twice and all I got back was the sound of crickets.⁽¹⁾ Considering he has over 5k worth of my music collection, I felt it necessary to bring in the big guns – aka his Mom.

Fortunately for me, lil-bro lives with his mother who is easily the most responsible person on the planet. Normally I would eschew parental involvement but like I said, he’s been incommunicado and has over 5k worth of my music.

Yay Mom. She put a fire under his butt and as of today assures me lil-bro is burning CD’s like crazy. ⁽³⁾ The whole kit-and-caboodle should be in the mail within a few days.  But, I still haven’t heard from lil-bro and I’m kind of bummed.  If only to tell him I’m not mad; I just wanted a status update.

TAKE AWAY: Even if you think a client is pissed, COMMUNICATE!

How hard is it to send an email that essentially says “I’m working on it”?  Chances are your customer isn’t as mad as you imagine. And for sure they’re less pissed off today than they will be next week.

Granted “my dog ate my homework” only works once and if you’re a terminal excuse maker you will fail at being a business owner but if I’ve learned anything from working with clients virtually, email updates go a LONG way to making customers happy; especially when projects take longer than you think. A little information goes a long way to preventing clients from filling in the blanks with the worst case scenario.

So. When you screw up and blow a deadline, admit it. Admit it as soon as possible, as accurately as possible and tell them how you will make it right. In the long run you could quite possibly wind up with a happy client.

Foot Notes:

(1) I didn’t call him because I don’t have his cell # and no one ever answers the house line. Why they keep it? I don’t know.

(2) I’m no newbie to project management. I offered him a bonus to complete the job by the end of January.

(3) Sorry Dude. Really didn’t want to bring your Mom into it but hey, you’ve got all my tunes!

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