How a fake Justin Bieber “sextorted” hundreds of girls through Facebook

 Internet News, Law  298 Responses »
May 022012
 

Police in Biloxi, Mississippi received a disturbing report in the summer of 2011: someone using the e-mail address dalton.powers1@yahoo.com had been contacting young girls in the area through Facebook. “Dalton” said he was new to Biloxi and was looking for friends. When girls aged 9-16 responded, he struck up conversations. These led quickly to a question game in which he asked the girls about their bra sizes, sexual experiences, and bodily imperfections.

When girls responded, Dalton then demanded that they go further and send him topless images. If they did not, he would take the information provided by the girls themselves and send it to their parents, friends, and school officials. Numerous girls complied, though some could only bring themselves to pose in their underwear. Nearly every shot came from the cameras on the cell phones each girl owned.

Of course, a single picture wasn’t enough. Dalton demanded that those in their underwear send him topless shots, that those already topless send him fully nude shots, and that those who had posed nude send him live webcam footage of sexual activity. Some girls, even very young ones, did so in order to avoid further embarrassment.

Parents complained to police after several girls revealed what had been happening. “They didn’t want to play his game anymore,” Biloxi police Detective Donnie Dobbs told a local paper recently.

Connecting Facebook accounts and e-mail addresses to an IP address is trivial; connecting those IP addresses to real-world Internet subscribers is no harder. So the Biloxi police had little difficulty tracing Dalton to a house on Melbourne Circle in Montgomery, Alabama.

The only problem: while IP address lookups may be accurate, they never identify people. And the family living in the house on Melbourne Circle certainly hadn’t been conducting criminal extortion on Facebook. So what was going on?

SOURCE: How a fake Justin Bieber “sextorted” hundreds of girls through Facebook.

 

8 social curation tricks for Pinterest and beyond

 Internet News, Marketing, Your Brand  405 Responses »
May 022012
 

Today’s web does not limit the act of curation to those with a doctorate degree. Anyone and everyone can, and do, curate using everything from bookmarking sites to social networks. “Social curation,” as we call it, is simply the act of sharing, categorizing, and spreading content to others. The content can be your own or someone else’s. And, because you are sharing content that lives in its place of origin via linking, it is not considered stealing.

Why do people spend hours online bookmarking, pinning, and reposting? The answer is different for everyone, but we can be sure that it’s for the same reason a woman might show off her shoe closet to a friend to hear, “OMG, those are so cute where did you find these?!” Or, a man might sit through an entire dinner carefully talking through the history of aviation and the ins and outs of his profession. We all want to be recognized for our expertise, talents, and savvy. Posting content we care about displays our creativity, interests, opinions, and personality. Being social creatures, we naturally want to share the best of things with our circles and get recognition for the good find. On the receiving end, people enjoy discovering and exploring things that are highly relevant and interesting.

Of course, when human behavior shifts, brands are quick to follow suit. In this article, we’ll discuss how marketers can get in on the social curation boom in a meaningful way.

There are a lot of websites out there offering curation-type services. They crop up and disappear with the latest craze. To get a clear sense of how a brand might leverage curation, we can break them down into categories.

SOURCE:  8 social curation tricks for Pinterest and beyond (single page view) – iMediaConnection.com.

 

Why Pay-Per-Click Ads Are Wasting Your Money

 Marketing  420 Responses »
May 022012
 

Paid click campaigns are valuable traffic drivers, but they could be doing a lot more considering that half the time they don’t work. Research my company conducted indicates that non-branded paid clicks have a 55% bounce rate from their landing pages. Google Analytics and KISSmetrics reports put the range from 10% to 90% with new visitors bouncing 62.9% of the time from paid search clicks.

What these numbers indicate is that only about half of paid clicks actually drive conversion from new visitors they attract. That is the equivalent of throwing away $.55 of every marketing dollar. That’s not to say paid clicks aren’t a good idea, but rather that they can and should be more effective and efficient.

According to Conductor, an SEO platform, there’s an average online conversion rate of just 2.5% for visitors across all channels. Marketers need to invest in resources that maximize conversion from paid search traffic, often their largest digital line item. In paid search, there are two ways to bid: exact match or broad match.

The choice means most paid search marketers are forced to choose between scale and profitability, depending on how they bid. Exact match can offer profitability but lacks scale and it only wins if the query matches the exact keywords you chose. Broad match includes other content too, which is why it offers great scale, but it’s less profitable because it’s not as accurate.

SOURCE: Why Pay-Per-Click Ads Are Wasting Your Money.

 

Does “Mastered for iTunes” matter to music? Ars puts it to the test

 interface, Internet News, Tech News  509 Responses »
May 012012
 

Some musicians and record executives have recently bemoaned the fact that what ends up on a fans iPod or iPhone is of arguably much lower quality than what is laid down on tape or hard drives in the studio. While some players in the industry have pushed for higher resolution downloads, Apples current solution involves adhering to long-recognized—if not always followed—industry best practices, along with an improved compression toolchain that squeezes the most out of high-quality master recordings while still producing a standard 256kbps AAC iTunes Plus file.

Shepard applauded Apples technical guidelines, which encourage mastering engineers to use less dynamic range compression, to refrain from pushing audio levels to the absolute limit, and to submit 24/96 files for direct conversion to 16/44.1 compressed iTunes Plus tracks. However, he doubted that submitting such high quality files would result in much difference in final sound quality. Shepards conclusions led CE Pro to claim that Mastered for iTunes is nothing more than “marketing hype.”

So, we set out to delve deeper into the technical aspects of Mastered for iTunes. We also attempted to do some of our own testing to see if there was any difference—good or bad—to be had from following the example of Masterdisk.

SOURCE: Does “Mastered for iTunes” matter to music? Ars puts it to the test.

 

How Often Should You Post On Your Wall To Engage Fans?

 Internet News, Marketing  219 Responses »
Apr 252012
 

To engage your fans, you need to post enough content but not too much at the same time. Is there a magical number for the ideal number of posts on Facebook?

No, there is no magical number. The average number of posts tends to range between 2 – 3 posts a day but there are just too many factors that affect the engagement of a post to say that it works for each brand. So what is the right frequency?

Below are the average numbers of posts per day by the top 10 Brands and Media on Facebook. We have gathered data from last month, from March 25th to April 24th 2012.

SOURCE: How Often Should You Post On Your Wall To Engage Fans? – Socialbakers.

 

Replace those frustrating Captchas with a simple visual game

 interface  731 Responses »
Apr 252012
 

If you hate those annoying Captcha words you need to figure out before posting on many websites including Dvice, then a company called Are You A Human feels your pain. Their system called PlayThru dumps the unreadable words, asking you instead to play a simple little visual game that requires some human knowledge.

SOURCE: Replace those frustrating Captchas with a simple visual game | DVICE.

Who owns your files on Google Drive?

 Internet News, Law  671 Responses »
Apr 252012
 

Within hours of Google launching its new online storage service, the terms and service have come under heavy fire by the wider community for being able to potentially stifle innovation and harm the users Google seeks to serve.

After Dropbox and Microsofts SkyDrive — the two largest online storage services on the Web — Google was late to the party by a number of years. While Google needed no advertising to drum up support, what may hold back uptake is that as per the terms and conditions of using the product, the files you upload to the Google Drive product undergoes a rights transition.

A quick analysis of Googles terms of service shows how the search company owns the files you upload the minute they are submitted, and can in effect do anything it wants to your files — and thats final. But there is a small catch.Heres what the terms say:

SOURCE: Who owns your files on Google Drive? | Internet & Media – CNET News.

 

Facebook Timeline Alienating 50% of its Users

 interface, Internet News  542 Responses »
Apr 242012
 

More than half of Facebook users are worried about timeline, according to a poll of 4,110 people by Sophos.

More specifically, of the 4,110 respondents to the Sophos poll:

  • 51.29 percent said timeline worried them;
  • 32.36 percent said they didn’t know why they were still on Facebook;
  • 8.39 percent guessed they’d get used to timeline; and
  • 7.96 percent liked timeline.

According to  Sophos, the type of Facebook user who would respond to one of its polls is likely more security-conscious than the average user on the social network.

Still, more than 50 percent expressing concern and fewer than eight percent giving timeline the thumbs-up isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement.

SOURCE: Online Marketing Trends: Facebook Timeline Alienating 50% of its Users.

 

Facebook’s US users down to 20%, as global numbers set to reach billion

 Agency News  351 Responses »
Apr 242012
 

Out of Facebook’s  845M monthly users and 2.7 billion daily likes. Of those 845 million, 161 million came from the U.S., while 46 million from India and 37 million from Brazil — two areas that are key source of growth, according to Facebook. The company further broke out its user penetration by country:

  • 80 percent of all Internet users in Chile, Turkey, and Venezuela are on Facebook
  • 60 percent of all Internet users in the U.S. and U.K. are on Facebook

SOURCE: Online Marketing Trends: Facebook’s US users down to 20% ,as global numbers set to reach billion.

 

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