A collection of thoughts. » General

Facebook and your privacy.

Max — Sun, 23 May 2010 08:35:07 +0000

Dear Candy.. Not all your 12,643 Facebook friends really care that you top scored in Bedazzler, or that your farmville farm is thriving, in fact, a very small number of your perceived ‘followers’ couldn’t really give a shit about you at all.

Anthropological Studies have shown that it’s difficult to maintain stable social relationships with groups larger than 150 people. That limit being a direct function of neocortex size, apparently, our brains can’t conceptualise stable inter-personal relationships with large groups of people.

Are we so narcissistic as a society that we strive to value ourselves by the numbers of ‘virtual’ friends we have? The whole time ignoring privacy and security.. Recent events notwithstanding, do you honestly believe that within the ‘virtual social circle’ you have painstakingly built that all your ‘friends’ have your best intentions at heart? What about so called ‘friends’ of your friends, the third party freaks that given default Facebook options can see your personal details.

Sure, Facebook has sufficient options that allow a savvy user to filter out freaks, no argument there, however, how many people on your friend’s list do you honestly believe are capable of understanding the ramifications of Facebook’s complex privacy settings. Add to that Facebook’s regular changes to their privacy settings and the average user has no hope of maintaining stealth from the freaks.

Think about the personal information you are currently divulging on your Facebook profile page, chances are you’re divulging your date of birth, mobile number, place of work, interest, etc. Certainly enough information for a freak to build a detailed profile which can be used for nefarious means or worse, as was the case recently.

Should you delete your Facebook account?

Recently, several groups have pushed for a large scale deletion of Facebook pages, there’s even entire websites dedicated to it, with countdown timers ticking down to ‘D’ day. Given Facebook’s continued lack of respect for your privacy, one has to argue they have it coming to them..

“Facebook has 500 million users, so what if a couple thousand paranoid hermits delete their accounts, Facebook won’t miss them.” I hear you say, I tend to agree with you in the short term, however, I feel that in several year’s time when Facebook has become the new MySpace we’ll look back to this time and realise that it was the beginning of the end for Zuck’s megalomaniacal visions.

No matter where you stand on the argument that Facebook is becoming the new MySpace, I urge you at the very least to delete your personal information from your Facebook profile page. Let’s face it, your ‘real’ friends already have those details.

Computer Security. Watch out for Ninja!

Max — Tue, 04 May 2010 19:05:41 +0000

I recently presented to the Southwest Networking Group, my presentation outlined basic security techniques we can all use to pretect our digital identities.

Here’s a link to the presentation.

Powerpoint presentation on computer security

Presentation on productivity tools

Max — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 20:56:09 +0000

I recently presented to the Southwest Networking Group, my presentation outlined several productivity tools available that could streamline your working day.

Here’s a link to the presentation.

Powerpoint presentation on productivity

Productivity tool Links:
www.rememberthemilk.com

www.evernote.com

www.livescribe.com

connect.microsoft.com/site94

Guaranteed conversion rates?

Max — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 13:42:02 +0000

A client of mine recently engaged a marketing company to develop a campaign for a new product launch, the eventual outcome of the campaign was not quite what my client had bargained for.

In order to protect the innocent, I can’t name my unsuspecting client, nor will I name the marketing company who duped them into spending a large sum of money on an ineffective marketing campaign.

Here’s how the story played out…
My client approached several marketing companies to craft a campaign for a new product launch.
The marketing company that eventually won the job provided a mail campaign to 10,000 leads which were sourced from a rented list.
The marketing company GUARANTEED 25% conversion rate back to the website. (Bells start ringing at this point for me)

So off they went, arm in arm, skipping down the yellow brick road, singing songs about a wizard, life was grande, sales were going to skyrocket…

Over the course of the next week, the client in fact measured in excess of 3000 clicks back to the website.. An astounding 30% conversion rate from a DL card.
They made 2 sales..

Upon querying the marketing company they were met with all sorts of excuses…
“Obviously, there’s something wrong with the website”
“The colours you used on the landing page were not conducive to selling”
“Copy is bad”
Blah, blah, blah…

Enter Max..
We took a look at the web server logs and noticed some very interesting anomalies, in excess of 95% of the clicks originated from IP Addresses outside of Australia. Surely the marketing company couldn’t have been that stupid, i mean heck.. I can buy clicks which emanate from within Australia, why would these morons buy clicks from Baltic states?
Summary:
Client blew $20K on a marketing campaign that was ill conceived, ill managed, poorly executed and included metrics that were questionable at best.

My advice to anyone who’s thinking of engaging a marketing company that guarantees any sort of conversion rates back to your website is to do your due diligence, speak with clients of the company and see what sort of hard conversion rates they got. Were the clicks legitimate clicks or were they purchased from one of the many suppliers who offer that ‘service’..