So earlier today I tweeted about Second Harvest’s Lunch Money Day – it’s this year on February 16th. Basically LMD is a grassroots campaign that asks us to support Second Harvest, Canada’s largest food rescue organization.

The idea is simple: donate your “lunch money” so others can enjoy what many of us take for granted … food. Every $10 donated provides enough food for 20 nutritious meals.

Please visit http://SecondHarvest.ca and http://LunchMoneyDay.com to pledge your support.

*** BRIBE ALERT ***

Now you can donate and never tell a soul … or if you want, you can donate and tell me.

If you forward a copy of the email receipt (you get one after donating) and tell me your Twitter userid (mine’s @jamesburchill), I will tell the Twitterverse what a good egg you are!

Look, all kidding aside … being hungry sucks. I can’t feed everyone and I can only do so much alone. But if sharing your twitter ID with my ~15K followers helps you help the hungry, I’ll do it.

PS. And don’t over think this “should I or shouldn’t I?” … “what will people think of me?” Seriously folks … many smart businesses help charities and announce it. It’s not about bragging, it’s just smart to let people know you actually care enough about others to give a damn and do something about it

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For complete details goto http://bfmp.kajabi.com/

Or click the image…

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Here’s something I wrote called the Whistleblower Report: A Short Story of Success With A Long Tail

It ruffled a few feathers when I published it because it outlines my approach to marketing and how I convinced CAA clients that aliens were responsible for a rash of dead car batteries at Christmas.

I even explain why eBay staff thought they had a corporate mole they heard about my special coupon marketing idea. All fun stuff.

No opt-in required. You can download it from Scribd. Enjoy, and remember if you like it – share the link on your social network.

Thanks!

James

PS. If you like this content, SUBSCRIBE to my email list for more.

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The Internet is abuzz with talk of ‘SOPA’ and ‘PROTECT IP’ and how these laws could/will/can’t/won’t hurt the Internet. Like anything in politics, it’s all in who you ask. In this case, the legislation being considered is actually secondary. Should they pass, their ramifications are already known. That’s a rare thing in politics.

SOPA? PROTECT IP? Huh?

These are two pieces of legislation being considered in the United States Congress. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives (HR 3261) that is ostensibly to strengthen piracy laws and allow for better handling of copyrights in the new, digital, online world.

The Protecting Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property (PROTECT) Act of 2011. This is the U.S. Senate’s version of the SOPA bill, but being the Senate, they came up with a more pronounced acronym.

Both of these bills are hotly debated and have supporters and detractors just like any other galvanizing piece of legislation. They both give new powers to the U.S. Justice Department for combating online piracy. It’s those new powers that are the crux of most argument.

Why we already know the outcome.

This time around, we do not have to make guesses as to what SOPA and PROTECT IP would do were they to become law in the U.S. There is already a team of people in the Justice Department whose job revolves around internet piracy.

In response to heavy lobbying by the Recording Industry and Artists Association (RIAA), Justice created a task force inside the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement arm (ICE) specifically to target online piracy. ICE has now notoriously gone after alleged pirate websites which are said to be offering illegal downloads and access to copyright protected content.

ICE does this, now famously, through domain seizures. They go to the site’s registrar with a court order (usually a temporary seizure order, which allows them to take the domain for 60 days) and then put up a wall with a now-famous graphic stating that the site has been seized under suspicion of piracy.

The red-bordered graphic has become a calling card on political activist sites everywhere, touting the over-reaching arm of government. Within 60 days of seizure, the government can then go to forfeiture proceedings, which are in civil court. These proceedings give the site’s owner 35 days to file to get their site back, at which point it goes into court – a costly process for the site owner. If the government can show due cause for the forfeiture, the judge allows the site to remain in their hands. Otherwise, it is handed back to its original owner, who now is likely out many thousands of dollars in legal fees. In the mean time, the value of the site has plummeted to nearly nothing because it’s been seized and shown with a big ‘thieves own this site’ banner for months.

In the next part of this two-part series, I’ll show you how it is that we already know what will happen should SOPA and PROTECT IP become law in the U.S. It will affect Canadians and much of the Internet itself, for that matter – anyone with a dot com, net or org site is potentially a part of this, no matter where you live.

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I was teased as a child. I was slight, sensitive, and wore braces on my teeth. When I smiled, my canines showed clearly and because I wore prescription sunglasses I earned the nickname “Drak.”

Back then, to avoid the taunting I escaped into my own world of words. I drank them up, became addicted to their influence, to their power to persuade.

To a teased young boy, the promise of freedom offered by words was to much to ignore. So I began studying professional wordsmithing – more commonly called copywriting.

But one more element was needed to create the formula for my future: a computer – and fortunately for me I got one for Christmas. I was hooked.

To this day I can still remember closing my eyes at night and seeing the green cursor blinking because I’d spent too long staring at the screen! I taught myself to program, to speak ‘geek’ and to connect with others online.

In the late 80′s there was no internet – just dialup bulletin boards. Email was just starting to catch on and I was hooked once more.

With email technology I realized words could be amplified in their power and reach. I could connect with more people than ever before and share information and communicate more effectively than any other way available to me.

It was glorious.

I began to share my enthusiasm for technology and communication with my family and friends and because of it earned my first paid commission to create software – a database program to manage client mailing lists.

It was official, my course was set.

All through school and college I continued writing and programming. Later I moved into corporate still committed to the application of technology to help us communicate and share information.

I spent 17 years doing that for some of the largest companies around the world before branching out on my own in 2000.

Today I still work with words, I still constantly explore new and exciting technologies that help us communicate and share, and today I want to encourage you to explore the next evolution in communication: video.

You’ve probably noticed I’ve been using video more in my messaging lately – that’s because it works. TV and movies didn’t get to where they are today by chance – it’s the power of presence, the added visual dimension they offer. With modern point-n-click methods for creating and sharing video – now it’s easier than ever to do.

Here’s my video marketing platform.

Remember, whether the words are written or spoken matters little, the words themselves are key. Cast the right ones and you’ll literally enchant your audience.

And when you add the power of visual presence by letting your audience see you, you elevate your communication to all new levels.

So now you know what drives me to do what I do…

What’s your story?

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I recently read about a marketing firm that convinced a company to rework their brand. Apparently they did an excellent job on the brand makeover. The end result was flawless. The strategy amazing.

The outcome – NOTHING. The client decided they liked their original brand better. They agreed the newly created branding was excellent, however they simply felt the current brand was still working for them and it didn’t need changing. Net result — a waste of time, money and resources.

Attract Don’t Chase

This is a typical example of chasing a client and convincing (selling) them on an idea or project. It’s far better to attract a client because when you do, the client does the convincing – not you. With a self-convinced client, they tend to be more committed to your ideas and programs.

Butterflies

Do you remember catching butterflies as a kid? I do. If you were patient, stood still and offered them some fruit or other special treat, the butterflies would come to you. Ironically the same is true of clients

So… are you attracting clients or chasing them?

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The impact will be mainly on marketers who use incoming search data to analyze how organic searches are impacting their visitor rates. This means that nearly every SEO marketer will see a big change in their incoming data stream for popular search analytics software (including Google’s own, which is the most-used).

What exactly this switch to encryption means.

What Google has done is switch on data encryption for logged in Google users by default. So unless someone who is logged into Google (say they use Gmail and leave themselves logged in on their browser while surfing) specifically opts out of the encryption (not likely), then their information will not be passed to analysis software when they search Google.com and click through to a website. The only exception will be when they click on a paid advertisement through the Google AdWords program.

Here’s an example:

Bob is online and logged into his Google account where he is a Google+ and Gmail user. He goes to Google.com and searches for ‘widgets’. Before this change, Jane, who owns WidgetsRus.com, would have seen Bob as a unique user to her site who arrived there from a Google search for the term ‘widgets’. Now, with the encryption, she sees only that she got a unique visitor and gets no pass-through data from Google.com on how he got there.

Seem like no big deal? Well, it is.

How this impacts ‘organic’ Internet marketing.

Internet Marketers know that there are many ways to get website exposure on the Web. One of the most long-term, powerful, and cheapest is SEO – search engine optimization. SEO, however, is a long hard road and requires a lot of effort and continued analysis of how your marketing is performing and what needs to change.

That analysis just took a big blow because an estimated 10% of users will not be giving data when they arrive at a marketer’s website of interest.

If you’re an SEO marketer like Jane above, then you likely have many, many keywords and phrases targeted for your website. Her site might have ‘widgets’ as well as ‘wholesale widgets,’ ‘cheap widgets,’ ‘great widgets’ and so forth targeted. Now she’ll not only not know where Bob came from when he entered her site, but she won’t know which keyword he used to get there. That means she has no data on which keyword is working better to get people like Bob to visit her site.

Google cites privacy concerns, but many question that.

Google says that this change is to better protect its users’ privacy, but since there was no way before this to tie a specific user to a specific website visit, that claim seems a little dubious to many. Whether logged into Google or not, a user is just another visitor on a website’s log and no personal data beyond an IP address is shared. So those who are questioning Google’s motives have good reason.

So is there another reason? Well, the most likely is that Google is moving to limit the amount of data that is given away for free – especially to websites that ‘spam’ target keywords in order to game Google’s search algorithms. Whether or not this will help is questionable, but it is one way that the search giant had to control the information being given to those website owners.

The trouble is, a lot of legitimate SEO marketers are also going to take a blow because of this. Given the fluid nature of the business, however, I suspect that most will adapt and survive.

*Sidebar* Interested in beating Google at their own game? Checkout this solution.

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Newsflash

Hundreds of top U.S. government officials had their personal Gmail accounts compromised. The problem wasn’t due to any security problem at Google, but with the way that these email accounts themselves were kept by their owners. The hacks were entirely avoidable and weren’t even really ‘hacks’, to be technical, but were phishing attacks that required the complicity (albeit unknowing) of the email accounts’ owners.

This is not a rant against government officials or bureaucrats, but is instead going to be a lesson in how this very simple phishing scam worked and how you can avoid it happening to your account (wherever it’s hosted, be it Gmail or Yahoo or whatever).

How the Hook Was Baited

The first step in any targeted phishing attack is to bait the target so they’ll bite the scam. The first step is to set up a legitimate email server that is not being blocked by other email servers on the Net. This is relatively easy to do and can be done for just a few bucks a month in rental fees.

The next step is to use the server for legitimate emails – in this case, the scammers were paying for hosting at a service provider who is well-trusted, so the emails coming from the server would be considered legitimate by the Internet at large (no blacklisting).

The next step is to bait the hook by sending false emails to your targets and (semi-legitimately) masking the ‘from’ address so it looks like it’s legitimate. These phishers sent emails with a simple subject line that would be relevant to the majority of their targets (‘Fw: Darft US-China Joint Statement’ was one sent to State Department officials). Attached to this is what appears to be a file attachment and a simple message that goes along with the subject. Most of the targets took the bait and clicked on the ‘file attachment.’

The attachment was actually a cleverly-named link that only appeared to be a file, but actually lead to a web page that mimicked Google’s Gmail login screen, prompting the target to log into Google to verify their account and download the attachment. The login, of course, would be accepted no matter what it was and stored, sending the user back to the email in question, sometimes with a false ‘file download error’ popup.

Thus, the scammers now have the Google login for that user. Mission accomplished.

Masking the Emails ‘Legitimately’

Anyone can forward emails with a different ‘from’ address than the email address sending the message. This is allowed by nearly all email servers and is possible because some email systems have multiple email addresses associated with one account. A quick look at the headers of the email (visible in Gmail by clicking the down arrow next to ‘Reply’ on the top-right of a Gmail mail and choosing ‘Show Original.’) shows the true email address, but most people don’t know to look for it.

This mask will work so long as the email server sending and receiving mails is considered legitimate by other servers on the Internet (i.e. is not blacklisted). Since this targeted phishing attack went to only a relatively few number of emails, that was not difficult.

How This Could Have Been Avoided

Obviously, the first indicator to the victims was when the email attachment popped up a new Gmail login screen. Google never does this in the middle of emails, only when in your general boxes (such as Inbox, Sent, etc.) and only when current sessions have timed out. The login dialogue never appears when downloading a file or when an active email is opened.

Even then, it will never open a new tab or browser window, but will ask for the login directly on the same screen by moving the user away from their Gmail and to Google’s login. At no time are new windows opened or popped up.

So, if an email prompts you to do something that makes you suspicious, go back to the email and open the full headers (Show Original) and check them out. You’ll see the ‘original sender’ listed and if it doesn’t match the ‘from’ address, delete the email and forget it or contact the supposed sender in a new email or by non-email means to verify that they are the ones who sent it.

That’s it. Simple. Those are the simple precautions that would have negated this whole scam that potentially breached hundreds of top U.S. officials’ private emails.

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One third of female respondents have increased the amount of time they dedicate to searching for coupons through social media, compared with just under 20% of men. The survey found both genders have increased their use of social media for comparison shopping purposes. Among men, 37% have done so, compared with 36% of women.

Gary Edwards, Epathica’s executive vice president of client services, says that “People are looking for… an opportunity to find something that intrigues them through the convenience of a social media site… the consumer mindset (is) that ‘I’m going to find a deal’.”

Edwards continues “… women are more intentional and thoughtful shoppers… (and) still hold heavier responsibility for household organization, kids, dinner and homework… (but don’t) find social media much more entertaining or interesting than men… (not a) greater draw based on entertainment.”

Women are more likely to recommend a brand, product or service through a social network, with 35% doing so, compared with 28% of men. And women were twice as likely to appear among the highest level of recommenders, having offered their opinions 10 or more times within the past three months.

Just over 2% of women indicated they were most likely to use social media to register a complaint or seek resolution to a problem, compared with 4% of men.

Brands have had reservations about jumping into the social arena, notes Edwards.  ”It becomes a management issue,” he says. “… the reality for many businesses is that it is one more thing for them to manage.”

Edwards concedes that the culture of social media is one of promotion. That said, “[a marketer doesn't] need to heavily discount. Promotions aren’t just about reducing the cost of a good or service. Keeping a customer base informed about what is new, trendy or novel is an enticement. That remains an important element of social media, not just how much you can discount. That is a rat hole to avoid.”

The report say that, for brands, the goal of using social media marketing should be driving behavior changes over time, using consumer behavior and motivation cues that influence its messaging.

That said, Edwards concludes that “… it’s (not about) pink versus blue, (but) about relevance to the buyer… “

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Successful SM sites engage visitors as active participants in the web experience. Remember, “The best tool is often not the most advanced or cleverest but the tool that’s understood and used daily.” Successful SM sites are like engines: they need a spark to get them started — and continuous content to keep running. But is that all a successful social media site needs: people, content and some cool technology?

NO. The most important factor is much older and simpler, buried deep within the shadowy past of our primitive nature. Social Media’s success is contained within something called a meme, or if you prefer a more dramatic image, a “mind virus.”

Richard Dawkins introduced the concept of the “meme” and “memetics” in his book ‘The Selfish Gene’ referring to the imitative process whereby humans transmit ideas, values, beliefs, and practices to each other. The memes that catch on are conditioned by repetition and continued by subsequent generations.

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by a process similar to how an infection spreads – ergo a mind virus.

The most successful social sites leverage our oldest, most ancient memes as well as our newest, and this allows us to embrace these darker, base natures in a socially acceptable, and even productive fashion. Consider how many social sites pander to aspects of our nature — that as children we were discouraged from participating in: gossiping, time-wasting, forming cliques and more.

I’m not saying all social sites succeed because we want to express our darker nature, but the sites that gained the most traction and momentum have done so by allowing us free rein over our basic human nature…

Something to consider isn’t it?

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