Social media is for real, it's here to stay, and it could be very helpful to you marketing efforts. But it takes time and effort, which always comes down to money and investment. If you want to make social media work for your business you will need to take it seriously, make it a priority, and apply some of your best resources to the task. This is not a trivial undertaking, but it could be a game changer for your business.

Many executives think that they don't need a professional to help them with their social media activities. They'll just take a student who has a few hours a week and get him to sit on the social networks and play with their company's branding. It's inconceivable to me how on one hand companies can be so cautious regarding beginning to use social media and on the other hand they'll give the work to a mere student who could ruin their branding in a few hours just to save a few bucks.

Read more at SocialMedia.biz

Think you're secure? Think again. Have you tested your important passwords to see if they pass minimum security standards? The likely hood is that your passwords are not as good as they could be, or should be, to protect your data. Here's a great little tool that will guide you to better passwords:

The Password Meter

I tested my current set of passwords and was surprised to learn that they were far from good enough for today's security environment. Minimum security standards are changing fast. The passwords I used to use, only a couple of years ago, are now judged by "The Password Meter" to be completely worthless against a determined attacker.

Let's be honest, passwords are annoying. These days, we need a password or PIN everywhere. We have so many that we can't keep track of them all. We forget to update them; and when we do, it's difficult to come up with effective ones that we can still remember, so we procrastinate changing them for months, even years. We all know this is bad, but the alternative - the painful, irritating password creation and memorization process - is sometimes more than we can tolerate. There is hope! Passwords don't have to be complex cryptograms. A few simple methods can help make living with passwords a little easier.

Read the rest of this article at SecurityFocus.com

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones? .....Bob Dylan

We've heard this before (starting with Radio, TV and Rock-and-Roll), new communications break-outs have always been accused of "rotting" our "brains", and as far as I can see, in hindsight, there has never been much to support these condemnations. Of course our 'brains' have the potential to 'rot' for a wide variety of reasons, most notably due to addictive behavior. And addiction is potential in any activity that is practiced in excess. Twitter is just the most recent human activity to reach the level of intense engagement that we can see becoming an excessive and addictive practice for 'some' individuals. There is no question that some people have become addicted to Twittering, but I'm not sure that this makes Twitter a fundamentally damaging activity. Instead, I think that the net's often excessive enthusiasm about Twitter just highlights the tremendous power and significance of this new medium. As with other such cultural break-outs, the reality is far more interesting than the critique. None-the-less, a Twitter Backlash is growing.

Dr. Tracy Alloway, from the University of Stirling in Scotland, claims that his research shows that using Twitter "diminishes intelligence." Specifically, she says that it weakens "working memory," which is the ability to remember information and to subsequently use it. Dr. Alloway also claims that working memory is far more important to success and happiness than one's IQ measurement.

See: the Twitter Backlash Journal

Read more about Twitter hating: Twitter haters and why they hate

Password security is a tremendously problematic area; it is without question the weakest link in your chain of defense against criminal access to your computer, your email, and your online assets. But it is really pretty easy to defend yourself on this front. See my earlier post about how to create really strong passwords - "Your weakest link", Oct 5th. Passwords are the one thing we each have very good control of; we should be able to make this an area where the bad guys are decisively blocked. Unfortunately many people completely dismiss their responsibility in this area and leave themselves wide open to the most trivial attacks.

1234567 may not be a very secure password, but it's popular on Hotmail.

That's according to Bogdan Calin, a security researcher who got hold of10,000 stolen Windows Live Hotmail usernames and passwords that were posted to the Web site PasteBin late last week.

Other Web mail providers such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and AOL have also been hit by the phishers, according to the BBC, which reported that it had seen a total of 20,000 accounts, half of which were the same ones that Calin analyzed.

After taking a look at the passwords, the security researcher found that two very weak passwords -- 123456 and 123456789 -- were the most common ones used by the victims. Of the 9,843 valid passwords he found, 82 of them used one of these two combinations. 12345678, 1234567 and 111111 also made the top 10 most common passwords.

Read the whole article at ComputerWorld

The inverse of the 'strong' password is when you get tricked into 'voluntarily' giving away your password. The practice of extracting this information from unwilling victims has come to be known as "phishing", and it is a rampant problem on the net today. We've all seen these phishing attempts. But it's not just consumers that are falling for these tricks, it's major corporations and government organizations that are naively giving away their private information to 'phishers'. As many as 4 billion phishing e-mails are sent on the net every day.

The massive phishing scam broken up by federal authorities this week is only a hint at what many say is an insidious and growing problem on the Internet.

Federal authorities on Wednesday indicted 53 people in the U.S on various charges related to a phishing scheme that victimized thousands of customers of two major U.S. banks. Authorities in Egypt arrested another 47 people there on the same charges.

The bust, dubbed "Operation Phish Phry," was described by the FBI as the largest ever cyber-crime investigation and they held it up as a shining example of international cooperation in the realm of cybersecurity.

Read the whole story at ComputerWorld

We had a client who ran an AdWords campaign over the holiday shopping season without monitoring his campaign closely. He got a ton of business from the effort, and was thrilled, until he looked at the cost of ALL of the clicks he was paying for, and did the math with the orders he actually got. In the end it turned out he lost money on every sale. He got the traffic, and he got the sales, but the final accounting showed that he had a completely unsustainable method of getting his sales. To use AdWords successfully you have to pay close attention to the ROI. Here's a great article form the NYT that reviews the potential pitfalls of using AdWords:

"Real-Life Lessons in Using Google AdWords"

Getting your corporate social media presence to actually work for your company is really pretty simple. You simply have to engage your audience and 'interact' with them. It is not enough to 'talk at them', or to just talk about your self and your company. You have to present a bigger picture. And you have to listen to your audience and respond to 'them'. If your internal corporate culture does not allow this kind of listening and responding, your social media efforts are not going to succeed.

Social media isn't complicated. When you boil it down it's about listening to your customers, being helpful by offering your knowledge and giving them interesting content to share and thereby advocate for you. "It's not rocket surgery."

Read the whole article at AmyMengel.com

You may not think that Twitter is for you, or that it is very important in the larger scheme...but...
Titter is becoming a very big deal. The numbers alone make this an important phenomenon, and companies that are using it are seeing a positive impact on sales. The more you know about Twitter the more sense it starts to make. If nothing else, think of Twitter as a mechanism for broadcasting bookmarks, and links to cool stuff on the web. What's not to like?

Microblogging service Twitter topped the 5 billion tweet threshold earlier this week according to a counter posted on the GigaTweet website, which analyzes Twitter messages in real time. GigaTweet notes that Twitter is currently averaging about 23 million tweets per day, down from earlier in October, when users broke the 25 million per day benchmark. Mashable notes that the GigaTweet counter stood at 1.6 billion tweets as of April 2009, meaning Twitter users have posted about 3.4 billion tweets in just the last six months. Twitter currently boasts about 54 million users worldwide, and is valued at about $1 billion despite the absence of a discernible revenue model.

Read more at FierceMobile.com