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Protecting Your Privacy while Online

With all the talk about SOPA, VPPA, PIPA and all the other anti-piracy measures being pushed by the various special interest groups and big media conglomerates it is easy to forget how many of these companies make their money by using your information, either for themselves or selling it to 3rd parties.




Shouldn't you have more control over how your information is being used?

Happy New Year 2012

 

As the new year fast approaches, even faster if you live in Samoa, I'd like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very Happy New Year 2012.

It has been a tough year for businesses and no doubt 2012 will be just as tough. However there have been many positive stories and plenty of new opportunities for businesses. It is now the survival of the fittest, and to be honest, that is the way it should be.

Facebook Changes

So Mr Zuckerberg has changed his social media site, yet again! Annoying? Slightly. But the network needs to continue to evolve for fear it would become stagnant and end up in the dusty vaults of social media history along with Bebo and Myspace.

One of the main concerns of people is of course their privacy, which is completely understandable. Changes to the network ultimately means changes to how information is spread.

Below I've outlined a few simple steps you can take to make your Facebook account more private.

Old Advertisements

In the words of Moby, We've come along way baby.

But have we?

Advertising has developed at an astonishing rate and of course regulations have tried to keep pace.

Of course we laugh at the silliness and non p.c. manner of these adverts of old but we do need to look at how we advertise today.

While the adverts below may have stereotyped women as simple domestic beings, since then there has been a trend to basically falsify images and create unachievable aims, again targeted towards women.

Even the so called beautiful women of the world are having every flaw air brushed and fixed to provide the perfect canvass on which products can be sold. If the gorgeous elite are not pretty enough to be seen unedited in magazines, then the mere mortals who are being targeted by the advertisers have no chance.

Six Degrees: The theory

In 1929, Hungarian writer, Frigyes Karinthy, first proposed the idea of six degrees of separation. In his short story 'chains'. The concept is based on the idea that the number of acquaintances grows exponentially with a number of links in the chain. Only a small number of links is required for the set of acquaintances to become the whole human population. By extension, the same term is often used to describe any other setting in which some form of link exists between individual entities in a large set.

His theory could not be proven or disproved by the simple fact that the technology was not available to test it. Fast forward 60 years and the evolution of the internet suddenly made the possibility of such a test seem more achievable.

Protecting your Domain

 

Within the past week I've had two separate businesses contact me with concerns regarding their current hosting and domain set up. Both were independent businesses with nothing in common and both had arrangements with seperate design companies. Their problems, however, were completely identical.

 It seems that some businesses are still leaving the registering of the domains up to the design companies allowing the design companies to register the domains under their names. The result? The businesses are at the mercy of the company, this is particularly true with .com addresses.

So how does this work? Lets say I register www.TheBigHotel.com on behalf of a business called The Big Hotel. All is hunky dory with us. I invoice them each month for services but after 6 months, our relationship turns sour. I can simply divert the domain to a rival hotel or worse. They have absolutely no come back. Legal action would be long and drawn out and near impossible to win.

This may sound a bit extreme, but I have seen it happen first hand to one business and it seems there is potential for it to happen more often.

As a home owner, there is no way you would give the keys and the deeds of your house to the plumber just because he does work on a regular basis yet what I've outlined above seems to be happening on a regular basis.

Domains should be registered in the names of the owner only, no need for the administrator, tech guy or your granny to be named as part of the registration.

To find out who owns your domain, go to .ie domain lookup or here for all other domains. 

Don't say I didn't warn you!

Eric Hennelly Flanagan, Six Degrees

Six Degrees is a marketing agency based in Galway, Ireland. It offers a full range of social media and marketing services tailored to suit the requirements of the client. We not only develop strategies to enhance and develop brands, but offer continued support and advice to maintain the momentum of any brand building exercise. Our focus is to deliver the maximum results to each of our clients, with a friendly personal service.

Website Upgrade

Generally, I've used the blog as an information point and not a sales pitch but I cut a deal with one of my clients, Wiccle, to provide a cheaper licence for those who want to upgrade their website.

Wiccle, for those who have never heard of it, is a Content Management System (CMS) provider. It allows for dynamic, fully functional websites with complete editing facilitates. One of the biggest selling points of Wiccle CMS above anything else is the inbuilt SEO. For those who work in a marketing function, one of the biggest headaches is trying to get your site with top ranking on Google or worse still, trying to explain to a non internet savvy manager, that you cannot simply buy your place on it!

All of the sites using the Wiccle CMS sees a significant jump in ranking and therefore in traffic. The stats speak for themselves. Have a look at  Wiccle Showcase for more details.

For those with a current website with limited functionality, Wiccle will convert your site to their system for only Euro 600 (ex vat).

I cannot praise this software enough, I've used it as a customer and seen the stats (increase in genuine web traffic by 150% in less than a year). I continue to use the CMS for clients.

I'm planning on launching a second identical blog using Wiccle and providing the stats after a 6 month period to prove its power.

For more information or a demo, get in touch with me, blog(at)sixdegrees(dot)ie.

Disclaimer: I've already pointed out above but just to be clear, I do represent Wiccle in a professional capacity. But as with all other clients, I only represent companies I truly believe in and this software is one
has proven results.

Eric Hennelly Flanagan, Six Degrees

Six Degrees is a marketing agency based in Galway, Ireland. It offers a full range of social media and marketing services tailored to suit the requirements of the client. We not only develop strategies to enhance and develop brands, but offer continued support and advice to maintain the momentum of any brand building exercise. Our focus is to deliver the maximum results to each of our clients, with a friendly personal service.

Social Media and Small Businesses

 One question that comes up time and time again from small businesses and start ups is 'do I need facebook if I have twitter?' or 'I have a website, why would I need one of those new sites?'.

As someone who sees the value of engagement in social media I find these questions somewhat frustrating to hear time and time again!

However when businesses adopt a social media strategy and get it right, it makes it all worth while.

Can a Brand survive negative publicity?

Once upon a time, in a dreary public relations department, a stressed out pr assistant muttered the phrase 'there is no such thing as bad publicity' as her fuming boss clutched a typo riddled press release.

Well this is not exactly true, it is actually attributed to the Irish author Brendan Behan, but for the purpose of this article lets stick with my version.