Facebook: Where Fraud Isn’t Frauduldent and Privacy Isn’t Private

admin    Web Marketing     Facebook, Fraud, Frauduldent, isn’t, Privacy, Private

Facebook has been making their own rules since they came on the scene. Although they’ve taken more and more heat for their almost-constant privacy changes, it seems like we find a new low every few months. Meanwhile, even the courts are beginning to side with Facebook on advertising issues.

Facebook gained a partial victory in the US District court last week in a case on click fraud. Judge Jeremy Fogel decided that advertisers could sue Facebook for charges resulting from “invalid” clicks&madsh;but not “fraudulent” ones. A clause in Facebook’s advertising contract, tentatively upheld by the court, actually protects them from any suits about fraudulent clicks.

A fraudulent click might include a competitor’s click campaign designed to drive up the advertiser’s costs. Click fraud is a felony in California (where the case was decided). This class-action suit was originally filed last July. The decision does mean that advertisers can subpoena click information to look for “invalid” clicks they were charged for, and sue Facebook for those.

The court did not agree with Facebook’s argument on invalid clicks, though it was quite similar to their argument for fraudulent ones:

Facebook argued that the litigation should be dismissed because all cost-per-click advertisers were required to agree to the company’s terms and conditions, which allegedly included the following language: “I understand that third parties may generate impressions, clicks, or other actions affecting the cost of the advertising for fraudulent or improper purposes, and I accept the risk of any such impressions, clicks, or other actions.”

Facebook’s latest new venture, a Like button for the whole Internet, may also bring them some serious grief. Developers have revealed that Facebook’s new Graph API had at least one serious privacy loophole: the API allowed developers to see and display all public events a person has said they’d attend, regardless of whether that person is a friend or not.

Ka-Ping Yee, a software engineer for Google.org (Google’s charitable arm, as the Guardian describes it), discovered the vulnerability. He was especially concerned that there was no way to block or opt-out of this setting, especially since respondents to events have no control over whether the event is listed as private or public.

Although you could see non-friends who have RSVP’ed to a public event on the event’s page, the API loophole allows everyone to see a full list of a single user’s public events, regardless of their connection to you.

This vulnerability may have actually been inherited from an old API. However, late last night, Facebook corrected the vulnerability.

Shades of Google Buzz, anyone?

Ultimately, I think the Graph API will probably face at least a few more privacy challenges, even before the watchdogs, federal government and litigators start in on it. What do you think?

View full post on Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim

10Percent turns list management over to Macromark

admin    Web Marketing     10Percent, List, Macromark, Management, Over, turns

10Percent.com awarded its buyers list to Macromark on April 27. The previous manager was ALC.

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Google Acquires LabPixies to Tick off Apple

admin    Web Marketing     acquires, Apple, google, LabPixies, Tick

Google has announced its latest acquisition, an Israeli company that builds iGoogle and Android gadgets. The Israeli financial news site TheMarker speculates the deal’s value at $25M. While LabPixies does seem like a natural fit for Google, some speculate this is just the latest volley in the building Apple v. Google war.

Just last week, Google snapped up Agnilux, a startup founded by former Applers. While the LabPixies acquisition will help Google expand further across Europe, Africa and the Middle East, the most direct threat to Apple is that LabPixies also designs widgets and apps for the iPhone. MediaPost reports:

Though a bit player, the fact that LabPixies develops personalized Web gadgets for the iPhone won’t be lost on some analysts who’ve speculated that Google buys companies just to annoy Apple.

Who, Google? No way. Google wouldn’t buy the most popular advertising platform on iPhone apps, or a company that doesn’t even seem to have a product or strategy just to bug Apple, right? I mean, they’d just bring out one of the first real challengers to the iPhone, right?

What do you think? Is this just another jab at Apple, or is Google more motivated by LabPixies’ actual offerings?

View full post on Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim

Easy-to-track ROI Metrics for Social Media

admin    Web Marketing     Easytotrack, Media, Metrics, Social

I often hear that companies have trouble figuring how to track social media ROI. It is being referred to as the “holy grail” in some circles, but what’s the big mystery? ROI from social media is easily tracked if you know how. I am not just talking about buzz levels and sentiment. It is absolutely possible to track clicks, leads, revenue and ROI, same way as everything else we do online. You can also measure the media equivalent value of the actions you create with social media. With a little ingenuity and technology, all these metrics can be brought together. Here’s how.

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Advantages Of Search Engine Web Marketing

admin    Website Marketing Companies     Advantages, Engine, marketing, Search

It is no secret that marketing is an exhausting process for any business owner; it can also be quite frustrating and costly as well. Time, effort and money are the three things you will need in order to successfully market your business. But the truth is how many people can actually afford these three resources? Search engine web marketing also known as SEO (search engine optimization) is truly a very powerful tool for advertising online.

People who own their own businesses need to know that SEO marketing can help them boost their business. Search engine marketing has a lot of advantages over the traditional marketing tactics employed by a lot of business owners. Let us take a closer look at the result of an SEO advertising campaign. When you take out some time and effort to improve your business’ web site search engine visibility, you will notice a pretty huge improvement.  Search engine optimization marketing campaign is inexpensive in comparison to conventional advertising method – which makes it wonderful for small business marketing campaigns. If you are interested in long lasting marketing results, then your best bet is to go for search engine optimization marketing, because it will certainly outlive all the effort that went into creating it.

Online business owners need to understand that one of the most powerful benefits of search engine web marketing over the traditional marketing tactics is that you are kind of reversing the idea of trying to make a lot of individuals purchase what they are not interested in buying. With traditional marketing (also referred to as “push marketing”) such as:

Owners of business are conveying their messages to people who are not even searching for or interested in the information that these advertisers are offering them in the first place. With an SEO campaign, you are in fact placing your business right in front of the people who are actually looking for the kind of goods and or services that your business is offering.

This is truly a major difference, why?  Unlike the traditional marketing strategy, you will not have to bother at all about trying to alter an individual’s way of reasoning by sneakily informing them that they will require a certain type of product or service (when in fact, they really do not).  With a search engine online marketing campaign, you are providing potential clients and customers the exact information that they are looking for – this will help generate traffic to your website.

Here are the main advantages of search engine web marketing campaign:

Cross-channel audience analysis and re-marketing

admin    Web Marketing     Analysis, Audience, Crosschannel, Remarketing

Most e-mail and database marketers do some level of audience analysis on their e-mails lists to find patterns and propensity to convert. Some of them join these databases with the richer demographic datasets provided by companies like BlueKai or eXelate to further improve their models.

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OPA Finds They’re the Best

admin    Web Marketing     Best, Finds, They’re

The Online Publishers Association regularly looks at online advertising effectiveness—and probably not too surprisingly, their members once again see the best rates of ad effectiveness in several measures.

The study examines ads place on OPA member sites (content sites including major news sites, etc.), Dynamic Logic’s MarketNorms industry benchmark, portals, and ad networks, and analyzes their effectiveness at aiding brand awareness, increasing awareness of their ads online, increasing awareness of their brand message, augmenting brand favorability and lifting purchase intent. OPA member sites saw the best rates in all these areas:

These results are fairly similar to the last time they tabulated them, August 2009. Notably, every delta measured has decreased since the last study reporting.

The OPA also broke the results out by demographics. Notably, the purchase intent for ad networks was strongly negative (and about where it was in August):

I suppose the good news for ad networks is that they’re not getting any worse!

The OPA’s bottom line is that content sites perform better for advertising—not a huge surprise, really, especially if the ads have been carefully crafted and tailored to the site. Ad networks seldom have that option, going for the big net theory instead.

The full study is available as a 39-page PDF.

What do you think? Are these results surprising? Do you see a difference between advertising on ad networks and content sites?

View full post on Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim

The Facebook Investigators – “Foursquare Cops” [Episode 3]

admin    Twitter Marketing     Cops, Episode, Facebook, Foursquare, Investigators

In this episode of Foursquare Cops, rival social media crime fighters The Facebook Investigators (FBI for short) and the Foursquare boys duel out who has the right to solve this next case.

To catch the final episode, tune in next Tuesday at 12:00pm EDT here on our blog, or subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Episode #3: “The FBI”

Producer and Director: @WoodyTondorf
Starring:
@KylePaice, @natehinchey
Guest Starring: @WoodyTondorf, @repcor

Webinar: The Science of ReTweets With Dan Zarrella

Connect with HubSpot:

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Online Web Marketing – Valuable Tips

admin    Website Marketing Companies     marketing, Online, Tips, Valuable

First and foremost, you need to know that online web marketing is certainly not for a select few – No Siree! Here are a couple of tips and ideas to help you become the best online marketer that you can possibly be. The tips have proven to be quite effective for those who have tried them in their business, you can use them for your business and you will be glad you did.

In order to be a successful internet marketer, you will have to link up with other websites and link other websites to your web page, it is a very effective marketing strategy. There are lots of web masters who have generated a lot of traffic to their website using this tactic. Ensure that you stay in touch with individuals who have websites that are similar to your site, or sites that fit your field.

Meta tags are necessary for your search engines. Making use of meta tags is very effective when you want your website to show up on search pages, just make sure you use your keywords or key phrases.

In order to get the much needed internet exposure, you will need to be search engine savvy because search engines are known to drive traffic. In order to boost your website’s popularity, you will have to use popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.

In order to be successful at online web marketing, it is very important that you pay adequate attention to your website headers – you need to make the titles very strong. You also need to understand that titles are pretty important because it will indicate how your pages appear in search engine results. Ensure that you come up with a great title else your pages will appear as very weak.

You need to make sure that you keep updating your website in order to keep your visitors coming back for more – 99.9 percent of the online community love fresh content, keep that in mind.

A good online marketer will always offer updates to his or her visitors. You can do this by sending free newsletters and SMS messages to all your browsers.

Online web marketing success usually comes from branding your website – doing this usually has a long lasting effect. Make sure that you keep your logo and main title on each page, this will of course get the message through to your browsers.

The more websites you have, the better! You will get more traffic and as a new online marketer, this is the way to get your name on the lips of everyone in the online community.

If you are too busy to personally answer the e-mails you receive from browsers, get or pay someone to do it for you.

Intelligent Mail lassoes 500 million mail pieces

admin    Web Marketing     Intelligent, lassoes, Mail, Million, Pieces

An interview with Thomas Day, SVP of intelligent mail and address quality at the USPS. “We had definitive data to know not only how many forms they’re supposed to get; we can tell you exactly how many got delivered.”

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