HAPPY NEW YEAR! 2012

HAPPY NEW YEAR! 2012

"Cup of Joe: How To Be A Better Marketer In 2012"

Oh yes I can already hear the champagne bottles popping! Happy new year! 2012 is going to be an amazing year! Have you made your resolutions yet? If one of them is to be a better marketer then I have a secret strategy in store that is sure to get you started on the right foot!

Some define marketing as a process which creates wealth. So if you want to get better at marketing then you need to get better at creating wealth. I am a big believer that practice makes perfect so how about start creating some wealth right now for an organization that needs it? No I am not talking about SEO or social media. I am not talking about PPC or conversion optimization.

The fastest and most dependable way to create wealth in 2012 is to donate to a non-profit or charity. When you give your time, money, and resources to a non-profit you are creating wealth for them. They then are better able to enrich the world, and thus expand “humanity’s wealth”.

Donating to a nonprofit makes you a better marketer because you get to see a how much potential your skills and resources have to change the world. Donating to a nonprofit makes you a better marketer because it gives you a perspective that doesn’t normally fit within commercial endeavors. Donating to a nonprofit makes you a better marketer because it makes you a better human being.

Its important to pick a nonprofit that you care about to spend your time and money with, but, here are a few of my favorites!

1.Shriners Hospitals for Children

2.National Youth Leadership Network

3.CARE

4.Catholic Charities USA'

When Facebook Attacks [Infographic]

I spent much of my Christmas holiday trying to clear a virus off my son’s computer. It was the worst one I’d ever seen. Like a monster from one of those Syfy original movies, it kept growing and mutating, blocking every move I made to try and destroy it.

How did he get the virus? Good question. The usual suspects come to mind; file sharing, clicking on suspicious links, hanging online with an unsavory crowd. Turns out getting a virus, or worse, having your identity or credit card information stolen can happen through no fault of your own.

Commtouch just released their quarterly Internet Threats Trend Report and though spam is at a three-year low, Facebook attacks are on the rise. Before we go any further, can we just rejoice in the fact that Commtouch counts Zombies as part of their report.

Now, back to business. Since Facebook’s security blocks millions of malicious links a day, scammers have turned to social engineering in order to wreck havoc. As you’ll see in the infographicbelow, scammers use offers of free gifts, celebrity news headlines and new app links to entice people to click. These same people then use the “like” and “share” buttons to spread the scam to all of their followers. (A small percentage use malware to “like” the link without the user knowing it.)

Commtouch found that 74% of these links lead to phony affiliate marketing or survey sites. Some cybercrooks use these sites to generate affiliate income. Others use them to collect data or trick people into signing up for a recurring payment on their credit card. Yes, people really do enter their card information into these sites.

A smaller percentage of scammers use social engineering to hack into accounts and many still pass around the old “urban legend” emails, but now in social media form, just for the fun of it.

Commtouch has put together this informative graphic all about Facebook attacks and what you can do to avoid them. Heed the warnings and save yourself a big head ache in 2012.