October 8th, 2009

Sears Holdings Corporation: A silent giant in social media

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:23 am

Categories: Branding, Community Management, Corporate Social Networking, Fortune 500 Series, Marketing, Reputation and Privacy, Social Business, Social Business Case Studies, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices

Tags: Sears Roebuck & Co., Social Media, Customer, Q., Jennifer Leggio

Sears Holdings Corporation (SHC) has been a silent giant in social media for some time. Its online community now boasts more than 300,000 users and it was one of the first major retailers to adopt OpenID to connect MySears.com directly from major social networks. The company has been injecting social into most of its brands, which, in addition to well-known Sears, include KMart, Lands End and Orchard Supply Hardware. It hasn’t always been a pretty story, as Sears has suffered some online woes as well, most recently a defaced group of product pages on the Sears Web site. However, the company credits an existing social media presence with helping them deal with that crisis swiftly by allowing immediate engagement with its customer community. I spoke with Rob Harles, vice president of community for Sears Holdings Corporation, about this and more.

Q. [Jennifer] How is SHC using social media?

A. [Rob] We are one of the only retailers – and the only one of our size – that’s created online communities specifically for our customers (MySears.com, MyKmart.com, MyVoice.com for our MyGopher concept). The goal of these communities is to connect with our customers. We offer discussion forums to facilitate questions and answers between customers and associates, an ideas platform to hear what new innovations are most important and product reviews written by customers. The communities also offer an opportunity to address customer service issues. We offer members information about sales, deals, discounts and access to unique coupons and specials for their participation.

Q. How did the use of social media start?

A. We started our first version of our customer community about two years ago. It was primarily intended for research; we used it as a platform for surveys and online focus groups. We realized the greater potential in this forum and quickly moved to expand our community offerings. We launched MySears.com and MyKmart.com in the spring of 2009 with product reviews, discussion forums, member profiles, a company blog, the ideas platform and a number of options for members to find and connect with one another around similar interests. MyVoice followed in July.

Our marketing initiatives have included a social, online interaction, component for some time now on platforms like Facebook. We are becoming more and more purposeful about engaging with customers on those platforms. One example is the recent Sears Back to Campus campaign where we utilized Facebook, Twitter and blogs to let consumers know about the product offering from Sears. We also created several online interactions like the Facebook application that allows college roommates to plan the lay out of their dorm room together, online. They can then buy what they design, creating a link to social commerce.

Q. For which brands, and how?

A. All SHC brands have a social component to them. All brands are represented in our customer communities and have their unique platforms and programs on the greater Web that meet their customers where they are.

One example is our Kmart Design brand. This initiative has introduced our Kmart designers and their design process through blogs, videos and Twitter to customers. Being transparent and upfront about what goes into our design process has proven to be successful; we’ve seen great response in customer engagement and in sales.

Q. What are your social media objectives:

A. Being present in a variety of social media outlets is part of our “Shop Your Way” concept. Shop Your Way is about letting customers choose what works best for their schedule, their shopping preferences and their budget and providing for them through our SHC properties. Our social media efforts offer a choice of online forums for customers to learn more about our products, to share their thoughts with us and to have their concerns or service questions addressed and answered. All within the course of their current online habits.

Support and crisis response –>

September 21st, 2009

Six hazards of playing Foursquare

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:19 am

Categories: Foursquare, Reputation and Privacy, Social Business, Social Media, Social Networks, Uncategorized

Tags: Network, Twitter Inc., Social Media, Foursquare, Social Networking, Networking, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Jennifer Leggio

Anyone who has spent time with me at events in the last month is likely looking at the headline of this post and wondering who body-snatched me. I am a huge fan of Foursquare, so much in fact, that I’ve darn near brow-beaten everyone in my immediate physical social network into signing up. I even wrote a post a couple weeks ago talking about all of the wonderful uses for it — especially how it gives small businesses a ripe opportunity to participate in, and benefit from, social media.

Once I pull my head out of the Foursquare clouds, however, I really do have to face the hard truth: the service has some issues. Some of which — like the fact that it is only available in the U.S. and only certain metro areas within it — co-founder Dennis Crowley has said they are working to improve. “We want to make Foursquare work on more devices, in more cities, and eventually everywhere,” he said.

If you’re not familiar with Foursquare, it’s a location-based social network that allows users to “check in” and add tips at places they visit. Users can become “mayor” of a certain location after visiting it more than anyone else within a certain time period, can earn badges and compete against friends for points.

Foursquare is certainly growing in popularity. Robert Scoble wrote this past weekend that Foursquare could be bigger than Twitter and even predicted that the service would be mentioned on Oprah within 400 days. I don’t necessarily disagree with Scoble, but I do think there is a lot more need for innovation (beyond expanding the service’s reach). I also think that Foursquare might be underestimating the overly competitive nature of its user base. Some major issues I’ve seen:

1. Groundhog Day
Remember that movie with Bill Murray? Of course you do. The poor schmuck has to restart the same day over and over again until something happens and Andie MacDowell does something and the movie ends. Well, going from one Foursquare city to another is a little bit like “Groundhog Day.” A few weeks ago I was so excited about going to Seattle and checking in at more places on Foursquare (told you I am addicted). Then I realized I had to switch cities. My points start over. I start getting the same badges (”Newbie” again?!), I get pulled off of the San Francisco area leader board, and if I never return to that city, my efforts are all for naught. That somehow makes the game a lot less fun. There’s a messiness to the split city model, especially since now many of us have friends all over the world. Plus it gets kind of boring competing with the same friends over and over.

Next: Stalkers and cheaters, oh my –>

July 19th, 2009

The psychology of social media: Can a visible brand ruin your life?

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 3:11 pm

Categories: Career Development, Personal Branding, Reputation and Privacy, Social Business, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices, Social Networks

Tags: Employee, Brand, Boss, Relationship, Social Media, Life, Branding, Marketing, Jennifer Leggio

I read a lot about social media. Partly because I am interested, partly because I have to in order to write this blog. In all of my reading, there is one implied thought I run across more than others: “Social media is powerful.” It gives any average person who has access to the Internet and a bit of ingenuity the opportunity to create a more vivid, accessible “personal brand” and, if done right, that person can spend 15 minutes in the Internet spotlight. But at what cost?

We’ve all read the stories about people stupidly posting Facebook status messages about ditching work, only to have their bosses read it. We’ve also heard the stories about the guy who gets caught cheating because he was sloppy with his social networking. I’m not talking about those costs - that kind of human error deserves grief.

I’m talking about the side effects of creating a successful personal brand and, even if you make all of the apparent right decisions along the way, how it can create upheaval in both professional and private lives. The savvy engineer who creates a presence for himself via a blog or social network, only to make his boss feel threatened and then hamper his internal visibility. Or the rock star entrepreneur who feels she can’t get a moment to herself without the world watching, including her boyfriend.

“In business settings, the impact-for better or worse-of social media activities on relationships will be determined by a company’s culture,” said Dr. Pamela Rutledge of the Media Psychology Research Center. “In personal relationships, social media will expose insecurity and a lack of transparency (aka honesty). Social media amplifies information and behaviors. If we value authenticity, this is a good thing… The good news is that social media exposes inauthenticity and selfishness very quickly, so it’s easier to see them.”

Next: Workplace Impact –>

June 6th, 2009

Twitter provides sneak peek of 'verified accounts'

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 10:18 pm

Categories: Reputation and Privacy, Social Media, Social Networks, Twitter

Tags: Account, Beta, Twitter, Jennifer Leggio

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone posted a blog entry today in response to the frivolous lawsuit filed by St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa after his account was impersonated. Stone wrote that the law suit was “an unnecessary waste of judicial resources.”

The law suit, however, was an impetus for Stone providing a sneak preview of the social network’s new “verified accounts,” to try and more proactively prevent impersonation rather than simply react (though I must say that they react to impersonations pretty quickly — as  I experienced a couple weeks ago). Verified accounts will make a special note on a user profile that the user is indeed who it says it is (whether it be an individual or organization).

Stone said that verification will begin with a small set of users, including public officials, public agencies, famous folks and the like. The beta will include only a small set of users due to resource constraints.

This does not mean, of course, that you should block or unfollow anyone without a verified account, especially considering the small beta. Stone said:

Please note that this doesn’t mean accounts without a verification seal are fake—the vast majority of Twitter accounts are not impersonators. Another way to determine authenticity is to check the official web site of the person for a link back to their Twitter account.

Stone also wrote that businesses will not be included in the original beta, but they do see an opportunity moving forward for these types of organization. Could this be part of Twitter’s master money-making plan? If so, it would be a good idea. In the meantime I’m glad to see Twitter taking impersonation issues so seriously.

May 22nd, 2009

Nine worst social media fails of 2009... thus far

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:26 am

Categories: Brand Management and Monitoring, Branding, Corporate Social Networking, Customer Loyalty, Marketing, Public Relations, Reputation and Privacy, Snake Oil, Social Business, Social Business Case Studies, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices

Tags: Pizza Hut, Brand, Stunt, Social Media, Twitter, Motrin, Nannerpuss, Jack, Skittles Home Page, Ashton Kutcher

Social media has taken the marketing world by storm. Major agencies and internal divisions are hosting think tank sessions to try and come up with witty ideas to market their products and drive customer loyalty. Some of the ideas they come up with  are great. But others, let’s face it, are serious thuds. Let’s take a look at nine of the worst social media marketing campaigns  so far in 2009 (in no particular order):

House M.D.
When actor Kal Penn decided to leave the popular network dramedy to take a role with the Obama administration, the show needed to find a clever — and quick — way to get rid of the character of Dr. Lawrence Kutner. The show opted to kill him off via suicide and left fans with a lot of questions. What does this have to do with social media? Rather than running from the backlash of offing such a popular character, Fox embraced it by creating an online altar where fans could go leave memorial messages for Kutner. It was their way of trying to maintain viewer loyalty. However, it backfired, with many fans insisting that the altar and flippant social media attempt was insensitive regarding the topic of suicide. Fox has since pulled the altar from its Web site.

Next: Quiznos –>

May 19th, 2009

Brand impersonation: A cautionary tale

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 12:22 pm

Categories: Brand Management and Monitoring, Branding, Legal, Personal Branding, Reputation and Privacy, Snake Oil, Social Business, Social Media, Social Networks, Twitter

Tags: Social Networking, Brand, Twitter, ReputationDefender, Branding, Marketing, Jennifer Leggio

If you thought you saw me on #journchat last night, you’re wrong. It was a wicked impersonator — and not even a good one.

Folks, it appears that someone has deemed me worthy of personal brand impersonation. I’d be flattered if it was a worthwhile impersonation. Unfortunately it was an impersonation that was meant to do more brand damage than anything else, as seen below (vulgarities blurred, of course):

No, I wasn’t hacked. Some meaniefaceperson decided it would be funny to create a spoof of my name and try to tarnish my reputation. As my friend said, “At least he or she could’ve talked about hockey to make it more convincing.” I know I’m not alone. Chris Brogan told me this morning that this has happened to him a handful of times. But it’s not just people with large Twitter or social networking followings who need to be careful about character assassination via the Web — it’s anyone online. We all have something to lose. A few free tips:

1. Specific to Twitter, set up a slew of RSS feeds via Twitter search. Look for your real name, variations of your real name, company name, your screen name, variations of these screen names, etc.
2. Do the same with Google Alerts
3. Regularly do some appropriate data mining via other social networks, i.e. Facebook, Hi5, FriendFeed, MySpace, etc.
4. If it’s not against the terms of service of the site (TOS), “park” variations of your name so no one else can get to them. In the case of Twitter, it’s possible the spam team could see that as trouble and suspend the account, so watch the TOS (you also need multiple email addresses to do this).

OK, but what if you find out that you’ve been impersonated? Then what? Not everyone has a direct reach into a social network and certain customer support issues take some time. The best thing one can do to protect a personal brand is to make a small investment in it. Think about it — you work for years to develop your name and one bad situation to destroy it all. Or, at the very least, paralyze it. I wrote last year about a great company called ReputationDefender, a personal reputation and privacy protection service. I reached out to co-founder and executive vice president Owen Tripp again today about this situation, and ask some questions that might help folks better protect their brands or their companies’ brands.

“The best protection is prevention or prophylaxis.  Claim your LinkedIN, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace identities before somebody else does it for you and starts to damage your reputation. By establishing accurate information on these key domains you will prevent others from hijacking them from you,” Tripp said. “Also, you need to stay in control of your online brand by monitoring proactively.  You will limit the damage of brand hijacking if you quick recognize that you are under attack.  In my experience, too few people know how to properly set up the personal searches they need to be able to run in order to fully control their identity.”

When I asked Tripp specifically about my situation, or monitoring my brand, he gave me some pretty good insight into how they do what they do:

“Our MyReputation search runs the equivalent of thousands of Google Alerts.  For example, we wouldn’t just scan for ‘Jennifer Leggio’ but ‘ J Leggio’ or ‘Jennifer ZDNet’ or ‘mediaphtyr’, etc. And then we’ll extract additional clues from the content we find (for example, maybe we learn the name of a spouse and then add then on to the cluster of recursive searches we are running for you each month),” Tripp said. “Finally, we make sure we go deeper, seeking mentions of your name and personal details on Web sites that Google can’t reach.  For example, we actively search over 40 social networks, most of which are not indexed by the search engines.”

After this experience, I’m putting my money where my mouth is and signing up for the MyReputation service. 

Many thanks to Jessica Ward for bringing this to my attention and thanks to John Adams at Twitter for his lightning fast suspension of this account.

April 1st, 2009

Web 2.0 Expo: Top ten Web hacking techniques

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 2:33 pm

Categories: Reputation and Privacy, Security, Social Business, Social Media, Social Media and Security, Web 2.0 Expo

Tags: Technique, Web, Web 2.0, Hacking, Attacker, Attack, Clickjacking, Channel Management, Security, Marketing

A large portion of the Web 2.0 Expo attendees are focused on content. They want to create better, more engaging content for social media programs and Web engagement with their customers. But the Web and application developers behind this content need to know how to secure it. This is what Jeremiah Grossman, CTO and founder of WhiteHat Security, discussed today during his presentation, “The Web Just Got A Little More Dangerous.”

“I say a little more dangerous because the Web was already broken,” he said.

Grossman stressed that the more we rely on the Web, the more attractive the Web becomes as an attack vector. Companies need to be concerned both about data security and potential brand damage when it comes to Web security. He shared with the audience a top ten — or most dangerous — list of Web hacking techniques from 2008 of which developers especially should be aware:

10.  Flash Parameter Injection - Using cross-site scripting, this can grant the attacker full control over the page, as well as control over other objects within the movie. Best defense, when you’re developing flash applications be sure to sanitize user input according to context before its reflected back to the user.

9. ActiveX Repurposing - Multi-staged attack to get code execution on victims who were running a vulnerable and popular SSL-VPN attack. Defenses are making sure ActiveX makes use of Sitelock wherever possible and restrict Active X to the maximum degree possible.

8. Tunneling TCP over HTTP over SQL-injection - The best defense against this kind of attack is a good network architecture, solid application design and database hardening.

7. Cross-domain leaks of site logins via authenticated CSS - Checks the contents of a stylesheet property across domains to determine whether the victim is logged in to a given Web site. Do not store anything user-sensitive in a CSS style sheet. It won’t prevent the bad guy from knowing the user uses your site, but it will prevent them for knowing if they are logged in.

6. Abusing HTML 5 structured client-side storage. Attackers could steal or modify sensitive data online or offline. If a Web app uses this kind of client-side storage is vulnerable to attacks. Avoid saving sensitive data on the users machine and clear the client-side storage whenever possible; regularly check the content of the HTML5 client-side storage.

Read the rest of this entry »

March 11th, 2009

Security considerations for brands using Twitter

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 12:11 pm

Categories: Branding, Corporate Social Networking, Reputation and Privacy, Security, Social Media, Social Media and Security, Social Networks

Tags: Security, Brand, Twitter, Branding, Marketing, Jennifer Leggio

There’s been a lot of chatter about social media and security issues, from social engineering to the naivete of users. There’s especially been a lot of talk about Twitter and security issues, especially in the case of last week’s account hijackings. Much of this talk has focused on how individuals might better secure themselves. What about brands? And, more than that, how to brands take better social media security responsibility to protect their users? Because like it or not, some of the onus is on them. Here are two examples.

URL Redirection
I’ve written in the past about how some social networks are better handling URL redirection than others, but URL redirection is still a security consideration. Both consumer and business users are constantly hammered either by our IT departments or security-savvy friends never to click on untrusted or unrecognized URLs. Yet we still do it. Even the mass Security Twits using Twitter have been known to minimize URLs of their blogs or other interesting info they need to share. My company even got called on it for promoting a blog post about malicious Web addresses using a redirected URL. The problem here? Most of the time the URL redirection is done against our will.

Twitter has a policy (which is enforced through TweetDeck and other third-party Twitter apps) that no matter how many characters a user has available, if a URL is greater than 40 characters, the service will automatically turn it into a TinyURL.

Brands have a choice, of course. They can choose not to post URLs via Twitter. Or they can try to control the length of their originally posted URL (I did that with a blog post last week) but that’s not exactly great for SEO. Nor can brands control items they want to promote from media and other third-party sites. They can also encourage users who use Firefox to run grease monkey scripts that allow for redirected URL previews, but that’s tough to do. If they do make the choice to use redirected URLs on Twitter they have to consider that they are asking a great amount of trust from their customers. And if for some reason their account gets compromised and a malicious URL is posted, their customers may not trust them moving forward. They also need to be aware of the security risks:

“The negative part of this ’shortification’ comes from the obscuring the visibility to the text of the URL before it gets sent to your browser — it’s a possible injection vector for direct browser URL exploits, of which there have been lots of varieties, and a way to send them to people without having the URL be inspected or visible. Or possibly just a way to send people to sketchy domains with worse hosted documents,” said Dragos Ruiu, organizer of the CanSecWest security conference.

Another option that brands also have is rather than relying on Twitter to automatically shorten URLs to TinyURL, use Bit.ly instead. It’s slightly more secure, as Bit.ly is one of the few redirectors that looks at Google’s malware database before shortening. But should Twitter get rid of this feature in the first place and let brands decide if a URL is extended or not?

“My feeling is that Twitter should let users turn off this ‘feature’ if they desire, including all the auto-url-munging,” Ruiu said.

Next: Twishing and brand monitoring –>

January 29th, 2009

IT Management 2.0: Blame virtualization

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 1:25 pm

Categories: Corporate Social Networking, Data Center 2.0, EMC, Enterprise 2.0, IT Management, Reputation and Privacy, Social Media Best Practices, Tech Companies, Virtualization

Tags: IT Administration, Data Center, Information Technology, Bob Quillin, Virtualization, Data Centers, Cloud Computing, Storage Management, Utility Computing, Strategy

Guest editorial by Bob Quillin, EMC

After a brutal year of cost cutting, layoffs, and unattainable MBO’s, many IT managers are expecting more of the same in 2009. But hey, it’s a brand new year, there’s always a chance that better times are on the way. And as the smoke clears on 2008 and 2009 comes into focus, there are reasons to be hopeful.

In 2008 — somewhere in between the recessions, bailouts, elections, gas price insanity, Fannie Maes and Freddie Macs — the “Data Center 2.0″ vision reached critical mass. Personally, I blame it all on virtualization.

After speaking to hundreds of IT teams over the course of 2008, one thing’s for certain:  virtualization in all its forms - server, storage, and network - has taken root across the board. Granted, the depth and breadth of deployment varies from team to team, but virtualization changed the face of the data center in 2008. Given its cost benefits in terms of consolidation, IT managers have little choice but to drive virtualization hard and fast. That’s the good news. The bad news? How do we manage all this stuff?

Welcome to the jungle
In late 2008, the independent industry analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group surveyed more than 150 IT managers in various stages of deploying virtualization technologies. The results? Only 24 percent were very confident their current virtualization management tools were sufficient to maintain existing service levels.  That’s a problem — because in 2009 — my guess is most of us are expected to improve service levels while reducing expenses at the same time. And while virtualization holds the promise of helping us accomplish these goals, the exact opposite seems to be happening.

While we’re able to realize incredible cost savings from server and storage consolidation, it often costs more to manage virtualization because we’re trying to manage it like we always have — with the same tools. In many cases, we’ve created yet another IT silo to manage it, too. While virtualization is easy to manage in the lab or on its own, the data center is a jungle — a diverse, complex ecosystem with hundreds of IT species and a delicate management balance. What’s necessary is to introduce this non-native species (Virtualization Management) into the data center in a way that leverages its potential to change how we manage, while blending into IT’s newest best practices, processes, and systems. This is the key challenge for 2009.

Read the rest of this entry »

December 26th, 2008

Mitigating the collision course of social networks

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 10:05 am

Categories: Career Development, Facebook, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Personal Branding, Reputation and Privacy, Social Business, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices, Social Networks, Twitter

Tags: Nickname, Network, Picture, Social Networking, Internet, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Jennifer Leggio

* Jennifer Leggio is on vacation

Guest editorial by Michael Gaines

Do you remember Venn diagrams from high school math? Those are the overlapping circles which represent where two groups intersect. Social media circles have started to intersect as well, and keeping them apart may not be as easy as it seems.

If you’re wondering why you may want to keep your social circles separate, consider this scenario: you had a great Saturday night with your friends, maybe drinking, and someone might have put some rather awkward pictures of you on their Facebook account without you knowing. By tagging the pictures with your name, your boss could find this picture on Monday morning. There have been an increasing number of reports of people not getting jobs because of what potential employers find on social networking sites, and at least one person I know personally has been spoken to about what they’ve posted on their Flickr account. It’s become quite difficult to be yourself on the Internet. Who you are outside work might not be who you are at work. If you already have a job where they know you well it may not be an issue, but if you’re looking for a job, drunken pictures of you may not be the best thing to have floating around on the Internet.

Your workplace may not even be the only group you want to keep separate from your social network. It’s possible you may want to prevent people you know personally from seeing that you’re a hardcore gamer. Some people might not want to see messages of what your level progression in your latest gaming addiction is. This social networking “noise” could be another potential reason from separating your circles. People may follow you on FriendFeed or Twitter for some reason, only to see over time that some of the things you write about may become less interesting to them. I’ve personally had people unfollow me because either the gaming friends don’t like hearing about social networking or vice versa.

Next: How to keep the worlds from colliding –>