Well, at least you own most of the information the world has to offer! I’m constantly amazed at how few people know how to use a search engine effectively. When I came across this infographic I couldn’t help but share it. Please enjoy the tips and share it with anyone you’ve encountered who just couldn’t find a thing on Google.

via HackCollege.com

Linkedin just launched a shiny new contact manager to give you more information on what your contacts are up to on both the website and your mobile phone.

What the app does
Probably the most important features here are to see when you last contacted someone, who you added recently, alphabetically, by company, location or those who you’ve lost touch with.

You’ll also be able to sort by titles, companies and whether you imported them through the “import contacts” feature or maybe you’ve hidden that contact. The app will also show you if there are potential merges. These could be people with the same names, were imported and already in the database or perhaps have two profiles.

How to get started
Click this link to start. (Note, not all accounts have this feature yet, so if you don’t, check again in a few days.)

On the next screen you can manage your contacts.  If you went through a phase of accepting all comers, this is a good time to clean house. Sort through by viewing all of your connections, then tag by  keywords relevant to you.

Example Tags

• haven’t connected yet
• done business with
• phoned
• emailed
• people I’ve met
• people I want to meet
• what they do (SEO, coder, sales, contractor, CXO)
• Met with and hope I never see them again

What you should do with it
As I said before. Go in and clean up your connections. Tag people appropriately and look to see who you have forgotten about. How can you renew that connection?

Click the name of a connection and you’ll see the most recent conversation you had with the person through Linkedin. Then you can add a note, tags, the story of how you met, who introduced you, even a reminder to get in touch.

Once you’ve got these cleaned up, you might want to import your personal contact database too. While not as rich at sharing what people are doing on other networks  as CRM’s like  Nimble and Salesforce,  those apps don’t have the richness of information about your contacts that Linkedin does. This is a big step forward for Linkedin as an even more useful resource for business communication.

Connect with me on Linkedin. Let’s talk about how the Tatu Digital team can help you!

WordPress is a wonderful CMS for websites and blogs alike and we highly recommend it. Because of it’s ease of use however, sometimes we fail to remember to secure our sites as best we can. In some cases that’s due to an inexperienced site owner installing WordPress on their own, and sometimes it’s because of a web developer who simply forgets or is…*gasp* lazy.

Whatever the reason, this last set of alerts about WordPress botnet attacks resulted in a lot of frantic emails and phone calls this week and it is indeed a serious threat, especially to the hosting companies. Hostgator announced on their blog that the brute force attach was involving over 90,000 IP addresses. That’s bad for everybody. I’ll share here what we told all of our clients.Let me first say that doesn’t mean if you take these steps you’ll NEVER get hacked. It happens all the time and sometimes it’s not a bot or a hacker but a disgruntled former staff member who still has your admin password! Honestly if you’re not getting spam and attention from the robots it probably mean nobody knows your site exists….

Update your version of WordPress

This is the most obvious, but if there are holes in WordPress security they patch them up as quickly as possible. But if you haven’t updated recently you’re a lot easier to hack into. Backup your files first. Then check the plugins too. If they haven’t been updated in a long time you might need to look for newer ones. Plugins can be a way to get into your WordPress install AND they take up load time. If you don’t need them delete them. If you simply deactivate them they can still be sued by a hacker to get in.

If you use “admin” as your main login you’re asking for trouble!

This is the default for many, but it’s an easy fix.

1. Log in as admin and create a new account with your own user name. Give the new user name admin access.
2. If you’ve already created a lot of posts using admin and want to keep the name on the posts in the author box, change the “nick name” on admin to whatever you want it to be.
3. Now log out and log in with your new account name. Change the access level of admin to “Subscriber”. Now anyone who logs in with that Admin password won’t get any further than the login screen.

Really…. you’re using your daughter’s full name and birth date as your password?

This latest bot is simply running dictionary words and common names until it finds one that works. Stay away from these kinds of things. Passwords need to be harder to figure out. Use a password keeper app like OnePassword to help you remember it on your devices if you can’t remember but use at least some of these tips to make your password stronger.

• Don’t use real words or names
• Mix character types
• Include random numbers and special characters.
• Think of phrases and then create acronyms. For example “Really? You can’t remember this?” could be “R?Yc’Rt?” or a similar combination. (no that’s not my password so quit trying).

Lock down your login screen

Many of these bots just keep hitting your login screen until they get it right. Stop them after a few attempts with a plugin like Simple LoginLockdown. You set the number of failed attempts you’re willing to allow and then the user is locked out of the login for a specified amount of time and most bots will move on to easier pickings.

Don’t use default WP_** as your database table prefix

The bots are scanning the web for references to WordPress. If they find the prefix WP in the database tables then they’ve hit gold. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to fix this, but please BACK UP first. Many of our favorite web hosts allow you to chose the username and the database name when you install now. Be creative and avoid this in the first place.

Use a monitoring system

We set up Sucuri site monitoring for many of our clients. Sucuri constantly monitors the site for bot type behavior and they will clean up malware insertions, get you removed from blacklists after you’ve been hacked, and alert you when there is an issue. I have personal experience with this company and they’re top notch. If you don’t want to use an outside service, use a security plugin like Better WP Security to clean up some of the obvious “tells” that your site is built in WordPress.

If you’re a Wolfram|Alpha fan then you’re probably a data geek, so this is pretty cool. Analytics at Facebook are minimal at best and though there are apps that do give us some info, nothing quite like the data crunching Wolfram Alpha can deliver. So imagine my surprise when I discovered Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook.

It’s super simple to do. Just click this link to go to their site and then hit the “Get Your Report” button. You’ll go through the usual approval screens for Facebook to give Wolfram|Alpha access to your data and in just a few minutes it spits out some very pretty reports you can dive into, download and save or share right from the page. You can also turn on “historical analytics” to see how your network is evolving.

So what kind of data?

• Basic personal information
• Cluster graphs of connections
• World map of connections
• Graphs on which apps you are using the most
• Time you use Facebook
• Most effective posts
• Most influential friends

What good is it?

Well besides the egoistic desire to see yourself in all your glory, it will tell you a lot about how you post. Do you post more links than photos? Who interacts with you most? Who are the biggest influencers in your network? What kind of information is most popular in your network and who shares your stuff the most?

Take all this information and see if you are really reaching your network the way you thought you were. Was it the great photos of your fishing trip that got everybody’s attention? Did everybody basically ignore your pleas for sponsorship on the whatever walk? Who is at the core of that cluster of people interacting? Hone in on who has influence as opposed to who has a lot of followers.

A couple of words of warning. It seems that the reports are a little touchy. Sometimes the report will run and then if you leave the page it will reert to the search page. Type in “Facebook Report” and the report will run again. Right click links to open in a new window because if you don’t, when you come back to the page all that data may be gone and you’ll need to start over. Personally I prefer screen shots with Skitch so they go right to Evernote, but that’s me.

Now go forth and give it a try.

I Love Cupcakes Box

Like many bloggers, we get  pitches every day from marketers who thoughtlessly spew a press release to hundreds of bloggers at once. Sometimes they’ve got the best person to guest blog and we should be thrilled to have them even consider us, only to find their content irrelevant to the topics of our blogs. Often it’s quite clear they don’t even know who they are emailing, but they want us to help them market whatever their product is to our networks.

Needless to say sloppy research and poor outreach practices results in minimal return and can actually hurt your brand.

So when an influencer outreach campaign is done right, we’re the first to stand up and shout WELL DONE!

The campaign below was conducted by Smoyz for Kotex.  The team at Smoyz researched Pinterest  to find 50 women who had a lot of interaction on their personal boards. Then they made individual gifts for each woman based on what they were most interested in. All the women had to do to receive their gift was to re-pin it on Pinterest. Then their gifts were shipped to them.

Needless to say after putting so much thought into what the gifts were, they hit the sweet spot for these women and nearly all of them did share their gift at least once. They also shared them on Facebook, Twitter and Insatagram leading to almost 3,000 interactions and just under 700K total impressions. (Probably much more now).

Pretty much a social business win all around for the client, the agency and the 50 women who were celebrated.

Here’s a video summary of the event.

Was this a labor intensive campaign? Youbetcha. But it was effective. First with the 50 influencers, then with their networks, and finally with the blog posts that sprung up about it all over the world from media sites like AdWeek and Mashable to Digital Marketing blogs  blogs like Digital Buzz and this post.

Was this the world’s first Pinterest campaign? Hardly, but it does set the bar for whatever campaigns come net and how to really reach out to influencers effectively. What do you think?

The Wall St. Journal report that Facebook is going to incorporate linked #Hashtags is a nod to how popular they are on other networks. Some people say it’s an art form, some outright hate the idea, some say it’s going to result and a whole lot more targeted ads using hashtags to deliver them. Drew Olanoff says it will open up exploration on Facebook way more than Graph Search.

But what’s a hashtag?
Hashtags started with Twitter as a way for us to focus on specific topics. Although there are some #sillyhashtags, and #Hashtagabuse and some say they’re now useless, I don’t agree.

Hashtags help us follow Twitter chats, the topics we’re most interested in, politics, news and conferences. Here’s a video I did a while back to give you the quick and dirty tutorial on hashtags.

Once hashtags became popular on Twitter, it wasn’t long before they spread to other networks as well. It just makes sense. #Hashtags are now actively in use on Flickr, Pinterest, Google+, Tumblr, Wikipedia, Tout, Linkedin and YouTube to name a few.

Hashtags and SEO
It’s pretty well known in the Search Engine Optimization community that using a hashtag on popular social networks can dramatically increase the number of clicks on a link and the associated traffic to your website. If you’re a local business using a hashtag like #SanJose with your post for your #restaurant can reasonably be expected to raise the visibility of your profile and the links and images you post along with it.

Hashtag Hijacking
It is quite possible to go too far and be tagged a hashtag spammer. This happens often when there is a lot of traffic around a particular tag and people want to tap into that action by inserting an irrelevant (and possibly malicious) link tagged with the same hashtag. Often these aren’t even people but robotic scripts searching for frequently used terms to append their message to. ALWAYS block and report spammers. They’re a plague. Needless to say you don’t wanna be THAT guy.

Hashtags and conferences
How many times have you been to a conference lately and the first slide in the presentation includes the hashtag they’d like you to use when discussing it? This is an excellent way to follow a presenter whether you’re at the conference and in another session or around the world. After the conference click on the hashtag and see a summary of all the discussion.

Memes and news
These days the two things are often inseparable. Evidence the memes around the news of the new pope #Francis which of course spawned, #pope, and my personal favorite #Exbenedict. Of course it’s hugely useful for breaking news. #Earthquake is populated very quickly on Google+ and Twitter whenever there is a tremor, as is #Sequester at the moment.

Instagram visibility
If you’re posting amazing photos on Instagram and only your friends see them you can reach a much larger audience by simply using a hashtag or two. Some of the most popular hashtags are watched regularly and if you really put up something awesome and a lot of people comment or like it you can reach Instagram fame by having your image show up as one of the most popular listed on the “Explore” tab and be seen by millions of people. One common technique here is to add multiple relevant tags to an image including the popular #nofilter #photooftheday #instamood and #latergram to name a few.

Want to see what people are tagging on your favorite networks? Check out these links:

• Hashtags.org
• Top Hashtags on Instagram
• Tags in Action- Track tags across multiple sites and search engines
• Top Hashtags for education
• Hashtagify.me (very spiffy visualizer)

Oh, and isn’t it interesting that The Wall St Journal finds #Hashtags important enough to write about? The times they are a changing people.

I wasn’t happy to see Tweetdeck’s Air app discontinued. It’s been the go-to Twitter client I recommend to our clients since the app launched. Easy to use and lightweight, pretty much anybody could master it in a few minutes, and with a few minutes more they could add on some spiffy bells and whistles and rock the Twitterverse.

Alas, Twitter acquired TweetDeck for $40 Million, and now they’ve killed it on the iPhone and Android as well as their popular desktop app. They say they’ll be working on a browser based app and may follow it with native Mac and Windows apps. They are discontinuing Facebook integration altogether as well. So what to do?

Honestly I use Hootsuite and SproutSocial in the browser, but since I had to go look at alternative desktop apps for my clients I thought I’d start with my favorite Twitter app on my phone, Tweetbot.

If you’re Mac user, you should take a look at the Tweetbot IOS Twitter app. If you’re PC user, read this post from PC Magazine with some good PC alternatives.

Tweetbot IOS app Features:

• Multiple accounts within the app
• Sync via iCloud
• Multiple Column Views
• Use Lists as Timelines
• Save drafts of your tweets
• View trends locally and worldwide
• Create, edit and manage lists
• Inline media preview
• Mute users, hashtags, clients, keywords and RT’s
• Choose Quote formats (RT, Via @username, RT w comment)
• View profile in Favstar

The only thing that would make Tweetbot better is the scheduling I get with the Hootsuite app. On the iPhone, Tweetbot simply rocks! Now cross platform wise I’m really excited about Banjo for my personal use. More about that in a post soon!

Janet moderated a great discussion panel recently for the Silicon Valley Tech Women’s Forum about making the world a better place through technology. On the panel were  Jennifer Pahlka from Code for America, Mona Motwani from  SparkSF , Jill Finlayson from Striking Poverty and Celine Takatsuno from  Benetech.

We discussed ways each of these organizations is making change and how we can all use technology to make a difference in ways large and small.

What we came away with is this; we can make a difference and it doesn’t mean we have to donate huge sums of money or even dedicate our lives to making change. Small gestures, donating time or expertise to an organization that is working for social good can have tremendous impact.

What are you good at? Odds are good some organization out there needs your skills. Look to some of these resource sites mentioned below and see what you can do. Minutes, days or hours, together we can all impact the world.

• Social Coding for Good If you can code, donate some time to make support organizations or even your local government run more smoothly.
• NTEN The Nonprofit technology network is a great place to find like minded people who want to make change happen. Learn from the community and chip in.
• Techsoup The community for nonprofits is full of resources for nonprofits and people who want to help. Encourage your corporation to support them and get nonprofits the tools they need to succeed. Look into the Donate your brain initiative.
• Volunteer Match Thinking about getting your feet wet as a volunteer? Dive into the opportunities at Volunteer match to find a good fit for you.
• Peace Geeks Are you a geek and want to work for peace? You can work remotely on some projects and help their clients with web development and other web-based tasks.

The photo above of this event is provided by DJ Cline. DJ photographs many of the top tech events in the bay area. See his blog to find out what’s happening.

Google+ is constantly fine-tuning and this latest set of updates seemed focused on usability for the less geeky of us.Some are saying they’re trying to look like facebook, but since I actually prefer Google+ to Facebook I’m happy to see the changes to a more useable and visual interface.

Cover photos
The new cover photos are larger and give you lots of real estate to play with. You can use a photo or graphic with a size of up to 2120px by 1192px and the image displays at 16X9 when fully expanded. Don’t know what to do with all that room? Here’s a nice post with lots of examples for you to enjoy. Need a great image? Photographer Trey Ratcliff shares some fantastic options here, Creative Commons NonCommercial licensed. Go get one and change it frequently to keep people coming back!

Local Reviews
Are you reviewing restaurants, vendors and services on Google? Now’s your chance to show off your favorite places with a new tab for reviews on your profile. You can turn the tab off in your privacy settings if you like.

Editing the About page
The cumbersome process of editing your about page is gone. Now sections of the about page are split up into “cards”. Click the edit link to …well, edit, and then manage your privacy in settings to hide the information you don’t want public and highlight the ones you do.

Phone calls in Hangouts
Adding someone to a Google+ Hangout was a little problematic in the past, but no more. Now you can invite people to the Hangout with a call to the US and Canada for free, and international rates are quite low. Just click the invite button, then the link that says telephone. A keypad displays and you can make your call from there.

Facebook’s Offers allow a business to promote discounts and special offers on their page. We’ve had very good results with offers for our clients, spending anywhere from $.89 to $1.25 per claimed offer. All in all it’s not bad. Now it’s about to get better.

One of the downsides of Facebook Offers is that people often forget about the offer once they’ve seen it and don’t collect it before the offer expires. So even though they claim it, they never really spend the $$ to get the offer.

Facebook is currently testing a new feature that allows users to get the offer now, or have Facebook remind them to collect it before it expires. Unless they actually pay for it you are paying for “Claims” and not actual purchases. So numbers can be deceiving.

The new service is in limited testing right now, and Rosetta Stone is one of the pages in the beta period. Considering they are shared on Inside Facebook and this post as well as practically anybody else reporting on the new feature, Rosetta Stone is probably raking in the clicks right now!

From the user side
You just click “shop now” and get the offer right now, or you can tell Facebook to “remind” you to get the offer before it expires. Once you set a reminder, you’ll find them stored on your Facebook offers page. It works seamlessly except of course for the fact that you don’t have a link in your profile yet for “Offers”. We expect to see that added soon. In the meantime just go to Facebook.com/offers to see if you have any offers in the works!

This should make it a whole lot easier to remember that great deal you wanted to get, but didn’t want to collect while you were…at work maybe?

We expect this to be a great option to Facebook ads and it may even become more popular than some of the flash sale sites online. After all, it’s FACEBOOK. You’re there already and they’ll remind you so you don’t forget you really needed that deal. Way to go Facebook.