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Social media skills are increasingly important for business. Twitter is an ideal resource for companies, celebrities and anyone who feels a need, to build an online presence and engage with customers or fans.

Being able to provide instant feedback on products or direct complaints to a listening ear is an invaluable service. Simply registering with Twitter isn’t enough. You also need to properly manage your presence, and ensure that you are responding to any tweets directed to your company.

(A) It is possible to see what other people are tweeting without becoming a member. Twitter is free to join. Register at Twitter.com. Choose your Twitter account name carefully – you want customers to be able to find you.

(B) Publicise your Twitter account to attract more followers. Key areas include your website, blog and email signature, but you should also add your Twitter address to your company letterhead, business cards, advertising and any other marketing materials you may produce.

(C) Make the most of your Twitter Feed. Provided that majority of tweets are relevant, consider adding a feed to your blog or home page. If you use WordPress, you can drag a Twitter widget into your blog.

(D) Link your company’s feed using the @ tag. You can also use the @ tag to grab the attention of particular Twitter users.

(E) Squeeze as much information as possible into your tweets. Although URLs will appear shortened, the longer version still uses upto 20  characters of a tweets 140 character limit. A URL shortening service like bit.ly will leave you more characters for your tweet.

(F) Use generic terms that other users may be searching for.

(G) If your company is showing off its wares at an event , use hashtags to attract people who are interested in or visiting that event. A hashtag is a generic search term prefaced with a ‘#’ symbol. Clicking a hashtag within a tweet will call up all tweets that contain it.

(H) Crosslink your website and Twitter feed. Regularly mention  your blog or website, as well as any products of particular interest. However, your followers are likely to drop you if they think you are only interested in marketing.

(I) Tweet regularly. If you want to keep hold of your followers and hopefully attract new ones, you must maintain a strong presence.

(J) Schedule your tweets. Rather than uploading a number of tweets at once, spreading them out will help your company stay at the top of your followers’ feeds for longer.

(K) Engage with your followers. Respond to your followers tweets regularly. If someone complains about your service or products, or asks for help, a response is essential.

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With Googles’ fresh update, retailers and marketers hoping to boost their natural search rankings in the coming months, this new year could be dubbed the Year of Content. The relationship between original, updated and popular content on an e-commerce site, and potentially higher search rankings for a brand, merchant or product page, is hardly unknown.

In 2012, however, is how Google’s'  latest major update to its search algorithm—those mathematical formulas that carry so much weight in digital marketing—is pushing retailers to offer stronger content on their web sites, update that content more often and encourage those in-bound links that signal page quality to the search engine.

With relatively little original content most retailers are scrambling for more, while those web merchants that have long had staffers producing how-to articles, product demonstrations and the like are working toward improvements.

Another Google update called Panda was designed to punish what Google views as low-quality web sites, which includes those with unoriginal content, such as retail sites that rely on the same manufacturer product descriptions that many other e-retailers display. It also sought to downgrade sites that web users seemed to find of little value.

E-commerce site are likely to be downgraded if it fails to attract links from reputable sites, without paying for them. Paid links are worse than no links at all—if a retailer gets caught by Google.

Retailers used  manufacturer-supplied descriptions on its site instead of original content.  Retailers have worked to improve rankings by hiring  copywriters to write original product descriptions that contain keywords that consumers use when searching for products.  They also removed content that caused pages to load relatively slowly—another negative signal that can depress a site’s position in Google organic search ranking.

But now retailers will have to do even more  than they did to protect themselves from demotions in search rankings under Panda. Fresh is meant to help shoppers find the latest product information— and that points to all kinds of content-related improvements for e-commerce sites.  That includes, for instance, a steady stream of new user reviews on product pages. Merchants should rethink both their own product descriptions and also make sure that user reviews are happening whenever possible, especially when they are good reviews. Retailers should continually update content, starting with best-selling products and pages that already rank high in search results.

Google’s fresh update will kick in around April or May, after Google finishes testing the changes. But retailers need to prepare their content efforts now. By studying what consumers search for, along with comments left by consumers via Facebook, e-mails and even phone calls to sales agents.

That old wisdom of search engine optimization hasn’t changed too much with Fresh, but the update, with its emphasis on new content, drives home how important a social media campaign and retailer-produced blogs are for retailers. engages consumers on  Twitter and Facebook, the search engine update will require even  more posting and communication via those social networks. It also underscores the importance of paying attention to Google+, the search engine’s own social network. A strong social presence, one that demonstrates a loyalty among consumers that can translates into links, is another sign of good content, and therefore another way to earn the good graces of Google.

Retailers are on the right SEO track if they are putting more effort into social media. The ‘freshness algorithm’ is Google’s attempt to continue to provide more relevant, real-time results for search queries, further highlighting the need for marketers to accelerate their focus on integrating SEO and social marketing practices to ensure pertinent, up-todate content is accessible to Google. Retailers can maximize the impact of their content by making sure they have the “social
share” buttons embedded on their sites, enabling consumers to pass on appealing content to friends and other shoppers on social networks, which also encourages links and builds credibility.

Retailers and marketers are increasingly using a variation of this mantra as both social networks and updated content assume more importance within e-commerce: SEO is social media, and vice versa.

Besides participation in social networks, retailers hoping to keep ahead of Google’s changes will want to invest in such marketing services as price optimization—technology that can help a retailer better compete with competitors’ off ers—and display ads based on consumers’ behavior.

Whatever the effects of the algorithm change over the next few months, retailers hoping to keep up or improve their rankings should embrace another concept besides fresh—speed.  That means getting fresh content onto a site quickly.

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Twitter metrics, fairly simple to keep track of some top-line data of your Twitter users

-Number of followers: How many people are following you, and how is that growing over time? Your goal should be 1,000 Twitter followers, and your Twitter following should be growing at about 9 percent per month.

-Speed of growth: Track when the followers started following you. Twitter should send you an email detailing this information. Steady growth can mean a brand with strong, consistent awareness. Growth spurts can mean that people started following you based on their interest in one specific post that may or may not be characteristic of your other tweets.

-Number of questions and comments: Track the number of times people directly contact you with a question or comment.

-Are you listed: Twitter users can organize the people they follow into lists. These offer a way to group together the people one follows on Twitter so the user can get an overview of what they’re up to: one list might be for a user’s family members, another for work colleagues, another for businesses or an industry they follow. While lists do not necessarily suggest that you are being closely followed, they do show that someone is interested enough in you to segment your tweets into a group with like-minded tweeters. To see how many lists you are part of, click the “lists” link in the upper right-hand corner of your Twitter home page. While there is no simple way to increase the likelihood that someone will add you to a list, providing consistent and interesting tweets may help that to happen.

-Re-tweets: On average, a business tweets about 4.5 times per day. Measure how often and what types of messages that you post on Twitter are re-tweeted. People retweet messages that interest them, and that they think will interest others. To measure this, look at the right-hand side of your Twitter home page and click on the “Re-tweet” link. Click on the tab that says “your tweets, re-tweeted” and you can get an idea of your most popular tweets.

For some businesses, having every third tweet re-tweeted is the norm. You and use this metric to track  re-tweets, and
watch for the types of tweets that are re-tweeted. For other businesses, followers will not re-tweet messages often, but , what is most important to notice is what types of topics get the most re-tweets. These are the types of messages that are likely to be resonating with many customers, and they give you an idea of what topics to focus on in future tweets.

-Business  mentions: While on your Twitter home page, click on the link with your username preceded by the “@” symbol; on our page, it would be @smlbizsmarts. This shows you all the times people tweet about your brand.

-Response to special offers: Send out “special offers” via Twitter, and count the number of people mentioning Twitter. Can use coupons to attract visitors to the marketplace, and these coupons are offered primarily via Twitter. Use coupon-tracking codes so that you can see how quickly the customer redeemed the coupon and where they used it. Additionally,  you will  find that people re-tweet these offers, so the coupon spreads virally, which should be the goal of any promotion.

Leads: Track sales from people who mention they follow you on Twitter.

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There are different ways for you to promote your videos. You could use blogs, email blasts and even word of mouth.  You should begin promotion of videos on YouTube.

Post regularly: It is important to post regulary, especially once you have a subscriber base. Your subscribers are eagerly awaiting your next video. If you fail to post new work, your subscribers will forget about you and move o to more regular contributors. The key is to create videos quickly and staying in touch with the community.

Share Option: Your videos will get good exposure on YouTube for a brief time. When viewers click on a category link they can zero in on videos of interest by clicking on the hyperlinks across the top, which include Featured, Rising Videos, and Most Discussed. If they click the down arrow next to the more link, however, they can display Recent Videos.

The best tools to promote your video on YouTube is the Share link.  Click that, and one of the options you’ll get is to “send this video.” You can fill in an e-mail address in the box, or just highlight All Contacts or Friends, and YouTube will send it to the people on those lists. You become friends with other YouTubers, by the way, when they’ve accepted your invitation to do so. You send those invitations from your Channel page. And contacts consist of the list of people you’ve
added to your address book.

Comments: When you upload your video, you can allow this feature. Viewers can comment on your video, and begin a dialogue and suggests how popular your video is. Comments can work against you as easily as they can work for you. You need to watch the comments posted for your video. Keep a lookout for unacceptable comments such as spam pointing people to another video or site, comments riddled with typos and curse words or something completely off target.

Response Videos: This is a YouTube feature that lets your viewers respond to you video not through textual comments but in video form. Videos that have a lot of response videos are usually popular and provocative. But response videos work the other way, too. Post your own videos as video responses to gain additional exposure. Just be sure to post them where they will be relevant.

Related Videos:  If a thumbnail of your video happens to appear as a related video next to lots of other videos, its getting more views. This happens if your video covers the same territory as other videos. It then appears to the right of those
videos under the headline Related Videos. But YouTube makes it clear that you have no control over when your video appears as a Related Video. Obviously, your video’s topic, title, tags, and description help determine what other videos are related to it.

Subscribers: On YouTube your subscriber base is one big fan club, a club you want to build and cultivate. There are two steps to serving your fan club: building a subscriber list and then communicating with that list. The people who comment on your videos are a great source of potential subscribers. Another way to get subscribers is to just ask for them: encourage people to become subscribers to your channel right on your Channel page. Its the quality of your videos that builds your subscriber base more than anything.

Once you have a subscriber base, reaching out to them through tools like Twitter and addressing them on your MySpace and Facebook pages helps keep them connected.

YouTube Home Page:  If you can make it to there, your video can make it anywhere.  It helps to have lots of subscribers or views. Once your video appears there, you will get a lot of publicity.

YouTube Honours: YouTube automatically tracks statistics for all the videos on the site. If any of yours are standouts, they will receive “honors” in categories such as viewings, ratings, how much they’re discussed, and so on. Your overall channel can also receive honors related to the number of subscribers you have. Any of these honors will show up on your Channel page.

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Location-based services all have one thing in common: They create semantic information around the concept of a place. Semantic information means that the way the data is expressed is via a set of common attributes. A place contains a name, address, description, category, and phone number. Some of that data — such as the category — is even standardized, which means that you have only a finite number of values to choose from.

Categorizing Location-Based Services:

Mobile: Mobile location-based services give you the ability to reach just about anybody with a mobile phone in the place that they are at the time that they need the information. You may assume that all location based services are mobile because of the strong association of location and global positioning systems and the fact that all mobile phones have
GPS. Companies build applications to run on smartphones— such as Apple’s iPhone, the HTC Incredible that runs Google’s popular Android operating system, and many others.

Mobile applications can also be accessed via the (mobile) web. While many companies favor building applications that are delivered via stores like iTunes, Android Market, Blackberry’s App World, and many more, developers can also deliver applications via the mobile web and SMS (text messaging) so that feature phones can also get some of the benefits.

Check-in: One of the most common application types is the check-in. A check-in is the ability to announce “I am here.” The idea is simple, but the barriers to entry are high, though, as checking in to a location isn’t very useful on its own. The check-in can deliver a lot of highly standard data for you to analyze: the person, place, and time.

Knowing that a person checked in to a place allows you to begin to build profiles of users who check in to your business. Those profiles can tell a story about who checks in and why they check in.

Social: What good is a check-in if nobody knows? Social applications allow users to maintain a list of trusted friends that they can share the information with. Location-based applications allow users to share check-ins with a wide range of entities, including friends, colleagues, business associates, and even strangers. Some services allow a user to share this information through other social applications, too. In other words, a location-based application — such as foursquare — might plug into a larger network like Twitter or Facebook.

Discovery: When you talk about location, you have to talk about discovery. Accidental discovery, which is one of the driving forces behind the popularity of location-based services. Location-based services can document the secrets of your business through content attached to places in the form of pictures, recommendations, and even video.

Helping others discover businesses, places, products, and services that they might enjoy — isn’t limited to the application users. You can add tips in places to help customers unlock the secrets of your business. Some platforms offer users the ability to declare that they saw your tip and tried your recommendation.

Engagement: Some location-based services allow you to have a conversation. Engagement is a one-to-one, more personal sort of conversation. If you can carry on a dialogue or group conversation, this is engagement. Think of Twitter and Facebook as the ultimate platforms for engagement.

Ambient: Ambient networks use the device’s environment to do interesting things like building a social graph without the input of the user. These networks use attributes like place, time, and even the noise in the room to see who is together and then decide who the user’s friends are. To use this technology, encourage loyal customers to take pictures that represent your brand. Those customers are then lumped into the social graph of early adopters, and they can then interact with other early adopters and encourage others to join the fun.

Color is an ambient social network. Other ambient networks allow users to interact with each other based on proximity. They use chat rooms and text messaging to form temporary networks of people in a particular place.

Intent: Sometimes you know what you’re going to do and you want to let people know. Whether it’s going to an event or having a coffee, you might want to let people know so that you can connect with them or solicit their opinions about what you should do. People like recommendations and advice from people they trust. They also like to know who’s going to be at an event so that they can decide not only how they’ll spend their time, but with whom.

Platforms: Platforms allow you to take a set of functionality and build something else. Location-based platforms provide places databases, check-in functionality, tips and recommendations, authentication, and much more. You can use these platforms to build your own application to cater to your specific purposes.

Content network: Some location-based systems have copious amounts of user-generated and publisher/professional content. User-generated content is created voluntarily by someone who isn’t paid. Reviews on Amazon and Yelp, videos on YouTube, tweets on Twitter, plurks on Plurk, and highlights on Gowalla are all examples of user-generated content.

Analysis: A series of tools allow you to build campaigns and measure their impact. Some of them are location-specific and provide a look at what’s happening in check-in spaces. Others require you to have the data, but provide strong tools for visualizing the impact.

Offers: Many platforms let you offer specials and deals to people who check in at your place. The idea is that location adds contextual relevance. Sending the ideal offer exactly when someone needs it is the idea that marketers really latch onto.

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As  people get connected online, and connect to others, their social profiles grow. Facebook and Twitter have millions of registered users, and Google starting Google plus services  that will increase social interaction and an obvious relationship  in social media and search.

Google and Bing both use Twitter to determine search ranking. Bing also receives data from Facebook to rank pages for users who are logged into Facebook profiles. From a search measurement standpoint, the key things to measure are Facebook likes, tweets and retweets on Twitter and +1s on Google.

The challenge of using social signals is that there are many ways to consider their influence over a search result. A tweet from one user may be more valuable than many tweets from other users, and a tweet that is retweeted may have a stronger influence than it did when its author wrote it. But what impact do several tweets all linking to the same page have versus a single retweet of the same topic.

Much as PageRank was developed as a measure of a page’s relevancy and authority, the same will likely happen in the social space, with stronger social voices carrying more weight than weaker voices. A strong voice may be defined as someone who is repeated a lot (retweeted). It may also be someone who has many followers, but who does not follow a large number of people. The Klout Score (http://www.klout.com) is one metric that is already in use,  it measures influence based on data collected from sites such as Twitter and Facebook regarding the size of a person’s network, the content that person creates, and how others interact with that content (likes, retweets, etc.).

Personalization and Social Media: recognizes people in your social circle and provides results that these people have shared and the sources from which they have shared them.

Bing has partnered directly with Facebook to tap into Facebook data to provide personalized results. These personalized results are slowly popping up and will be influenced by how many of your friends are active on social media. The same happens with Google and Twitter, with Google giving emphasis to results that friends of yours have retweeted. These results are based on the experiences and actions of your friends or people you follow. Essentially, you are getting personalized results based on the activities of other people in your social circle and the influence people in that circle may have over you.

With personalized results becoming more and more prevalent, you may be able to affect your rankings not only through your optimization efforts, but also through your social influence and impact. It may not be surprising to see rankings change dramatically from one person to another, based on differences in their social circles and the different influences social sharing has on results.

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As people interested in growing website traffic, it is important that we understand social media and SEO. SEO is the one that, through time and understanding, will bring you the most traffic, most consistently. But social media can do some surprising things for your business.

The main way that SEO and social media intersect is in the area of links. Social media sites have them, and SEO needs them. You can use social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to generate inbound links from popular, high-TrustRank websites. You could use social media campaigns to attract links from news sites, social bookmarking sites, and popular blogs.

Social networks like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter represent the masses. And while a single link or status update on one of these social networks has no significance, there is great power in numbers. If you post a link to a video you took, and it strikes a chord in the average person, she will share it with her friends, who will share it with their friends, and so on. If you are the creator of a piece of content that goes viral, your website can get links rained upon it. This is why social media is a powerful complement in the world of SEO. In the future, SEO and social media will evolve together to incorporate our profiles, preferences, and relationships into search results.

The flow of information: Traditionally, the most powerful ways of getting exposure have been advertisements, press, and word of mouth. Although these tools have always been the backbone of marketing, the rise of social media websites has opened up a whole new world of possibilities for online marketers.

In the past,you might see an ad in a magazine, stare at it for a few seconds, and then either remember it or forget about it. Now the same company might place an ad on Facebook. Recognizing the company, you might click Like underneath the ad, indicating your acceptance of the brand. The next day, because of that “like,” you might get a status update showing you a YouTube video that the company made as part of a campaign for a new product. Finding the video interesting, you might then post it on your friend’s profile page. His 1,000 friends might then see it, and 3 of them might post it on their friends’ profile pages. An additional 2 of your friend’s friends might tweet about it, exposing it to their 800 combined followers. One of those peoples’ followers might then submit it to a social bookmarking site such as Digg, where the best content of the day gets posted on the home page. If enough people voted for this video, it would hit the front page of Digg, get 150,000 additional views and 550 comments, and even more sharing would occur. Because of the Digg exposure, 15 blogs might repost the video, including a major outlet that gets millions of visitors per month. And on goes the sharing. That entire journey started with just one click.

The significant event, SEO-wise, in that story was the part where the blogs reposted the video to their sites. If 15 blogs repost a video, that’s 15 links to a single web page. In this case, the web page hosting the content was on YouTube, but it could easily have been hosted on your website. As you know from earlier chapters, acquiring a link can be pretty tough in an age when most webmasters understand the value of linking.

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Social location marketing has the ability to impact the purchase decision cycle at all points—brand awareness, brand elevation, brand consideration and purchase. The concept of the purchase decision cycle is best defined as the continuous loop through which customers become aware, consider, select and finally reconsider purchases.

In the pre-social media market place, the purchase decision cycle involved much less influence from strangers. Purchasers were influenced by a closer network of people. Purchasers were also unable to take part in the level of comparison shopping that they are able to do now. With the advent of the internet the travel requirement declined but it still took time to visit all the websites and make notes on which product had which features and which site was offering the best prices.

Price comparison sites quickly became popular with members posting coupon codes and special offers as they became aware of them. Social media took all of this to the next level. Twitter and Facebook users can post a question and receive hundreds of responses about the best deals, perhaps even getting responses directly from brands themselves.

What differentiates social location sharing from much of the rest of social media marketing is that it is specific to allocation. It happens as someone becomes or is in the process of becoming a customer,visitor, or user. When users check in at a specific location, they are publicly declaring an affinity with that location. Wittingly or unwittingly, they are making the statement that they use this location as part of their lives. Whether it is a grocery store, a clothing shop, a restaurant, or a hair salon, the effect is the same. They are telling the people in their networks, all of whom they have selected to share with, that this is a place they go to.

Perhaps at times they want to promote a local business because of the great service they have received from them. They believe that by announcing this location and its great service, they are helping to promote and prolong the business. All of these motivators can be leveraged by marketers and all have their place within the purchase decision cycle.

Brand Awareness: Making the target audience aware of the existence of the brand. This is traditionally something that is associated with advertising, but in the current environment of a society that is more “word of mouth aware,” getting existing customers to be your advertisers/advocates is a much more common effort. Social location sharing tools are
most definitely achieving that. These tools broadcast the fact that the user is not only grocery shopping but is shopping at a specific grocery store.

Brand Elevation: Making the target audience aware of a brand is not usually enough to trigger a purchase. Rather, having made the target audience aware of the brand, the next step is to move the brand into the consideration stage of the purchase decision cycle. To do that, the brand needs to position itself as a better choice than its competitors. Again,
social location sharing tools play their part here. Having an advocate in the form of a social location sharer share her decision to make a purchase at a location immediately aids that business in providing a reason why it is different from its competitors.

Consideration: This stage can be immediately before purchase or can be several months, even years ahead of purchase. Much of this depends on the immediate need of the purchaser, the price point of the product or service, and the amount of information available. A customer looking to buy a pair of jeans is unlikely to spend the same amount of time in the consideration phase as a customer buying a new car or even a home. However, social location sharing tools can and do play a part in all these decisions. Users checking in at the Apple store, for example, are stating a preference for a particular brand, but they are also stating a preference for a particular type of technology.

Purchase: Checking in at the time of purchase, and announcing that a purchase has been made, is obviously the most powerful use of these tools. Each of the tools allows for this in different ways, but at the most basic users can tag their check-in and in doing so start a conversation on other platforms such as Twitter.

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Emerging technology developments and trends can create a tumbling mash-up of hard-to-understand products and services, from web-connected printers to robots that represent you in meetings.

Smart Browser: All browsers from Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox to Safari now host ambitious third party software tools that latch on quickly onto existing browser software. Now once unimaginable services run natively on web tools. Check out design tools like Aviary (aviary.com), complex collaboration systems like Usekit (usekit.com) and communication tools such as Follow-up Robot (curecrm.com).

All this new browser software will make it tougher for businesses to develop code that works across all browsers and the fast moving extension market. The debugging of web based products and services will get very complex.

Apps for Appliances: Apps, like the ones on mobile phones, are spreading to TVs, washers and fridges. Check out TV apps Vizio offers on its sets that enable Netflix, Flickr and Twitter.

Touch revolution (touchrev.com) has a Google Android OS based modules that turn a microwave oven into an app ready web ready device.

Talking to a Computer: Microsoft and other companies now support some sort of voice-activated software.  Test drive Naturally Speaking (nuance.com)

PC-Less Desktop Imaging: With printers now a commodity, desktop imaging eventually will free itself from being tethered to a PC. The big mover here is, yet again, Google. The giant is rolling out cloud-based printing that will not need a connected computer. You can expect everything from smartphones to positional devices to be able to easily communicate with web-connected printers.

3D Peripheral: Products like Space Controller (3d-mouse-for-cad.com) and SpacePilot Pro from 3Dconnexion (3d
connexion.com) are offering computer controllers that put depth access in the hands of CAD artists and engineers.
Why it matters: These systems will lower the barrier to entry for creating and developing 3-D content.

Ultraportable Office: There’s nothing like a cutting-edge technology that combines another cutting-edge technology to give you that buy-one-get-one-free sort of feel. Portable hot spots that let small groups collaborate quickly are now available in units like the MiFi 2200 from Verizon Wireless (verizon wireless.com). In addition to giving you a nice productivity boost on the road, portable Wi-Fi is creating an ad hoc network of mobile Wi-Fi coverage.

Next time you need to log in, look around in your Wi-Fi software—a local portable hot spot might be nearby.

Videoconferencing for Everyone: If Skype has a bonus, it’s that it has banished the videoconferencing taboo. Now many vendors are making low-cost video appliances that even tiny firms can use, with development in this area only to increase. Although these units won’t rival those cute Cisco commercials for quality, videoconferencing can be helpful in your firm. And you can’t beat the price. The Vialta Beamer FX video phone (vialta.com).

Everything goes Automatic: As crazy as it sounds, web-delivered, automatic decision-making will quietly creep into the basic fabric of your business. Expect smarter versions of everything from spell checkers to complex decision engines to show up in web office tools and business software. Try out Google’s recently acquired Aardvark answers product (vark
.com), which uses Google Chat to automatically match a person who has a question with a person who has an answer.

Projectable PC Interface:  Projectable computer interfaces have long been stubbornly “just around the corner.” Projectable keyboards and other controllers aren’t yet up to full business-class capabilities, but when a unit like the one from Light Blue Optics (lightblueoptics.com) finds its way into smartphones, it will offer a new, simple way for road warriors to communicate on the go.

Smarter Delivery Van: Technologies like Ford’s Sync Traffic Direction and Information (fordvehicles.com/sync) and Rand McNally’s IntelliRoute (trucking .randmcnally.com) make the idea of sending a man and a van to wander around town unsupervised about as smart as using carrier pigeons. And commercial vehicles are set to get smarter still: FedEx is preparing to deploy electric delivery vans. And startups like Boulder Electric Vehicles (boulderev.com) will make such technology available to most any small business.

Making Inventory Talk: If it’s good enough for Wal-Mart, it’s good enough for you. Low-cost RFID (radio frequency identifier) devices from companies like RF*IDI (activerfidtracking.com/rfidi/) will offer tagging and tracking solutions even your small business can afford. Wondering where your stuff went is like worrying about Y2K.

Virtual Self: Be at that meeting without actually having to attend. Anybot the robot avatar (anybot.com) will use telepresence technology to let you attend meetings virtually by rolling into conferences and transmitting information so that you don’t have to be there to get the job done.

Flexible Display: It will be years before flexible screens make it into your office, but not so for getting them into your point-of-sale displays. Flexible, high-quality displays from companies like Atlanta’s NanoLumens (nanolumens.com) are making big, bright screens that can be mounted on rounded surfaces. That means any old column can work as a pricing display or marketing surface.

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Companies are taking measures to protect their systems from security leaks that can make them vulnerable to external attacks.

Unauthorized Smartphones On Wi-Fi Networks: Smartphones create some of the greatest risks for enterprise security, mostly because they’re so common and because some employees just can’t resist using personal devices in the office.

The danger is that cell phones are tri-homed devices — Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GSM wireless. If you use a device like a smartphone that spans multiple wireless spectrums, “someone in a parking lot could use a Bluetooth sniper rifle that can read Bluetooth from a mile away, connect to a smartphone, then connect to a corporate wireless network. Bluetooth thus becomes an open portal that allows hackers to access Wi-Fi and therefore the corporate network.

Only approved devices should access the network. And that access should be based on MAC addresses, which are unique codes that are tied to specific devices, making them more traceable.

Another tactic is to use network access control to make sure whoever is connecting is, in fact, authorized to connect. In an ideal world, companies should also separate guest access Wi-Fi networks from important corporate networks.

Open Ports on a Network Printer: Printers have had telephone lines for faxes for several years, and some are now Wi-Fi enabled or support 3G wireless connectivity. Hackers can break into corporate networks through these ports. A more nefarious trick is to capture images of all printouts in order to steal sensitive business information.

The best way to deal with this problem is to disable the wireless options on printers altogether.Make sure all ports are blocked for any unauthorized access.

Custom Web Applications With Bad Code: One common trick is to tap into the xp_cmdshell routine on a server, which an inexperienced programmer or systems administrator might leave wide open for attack. Hackers can use that opening to gain full access to a database, which provides an entryway to data and a quick back door to networks.

Small coding errors, such as a failure to use proper safeguards when calling a remote file from an application, provide a
way for hackers to add their own embedded code. A company can also be open to attack if it has a blog with a trackback feature (to report on links to its posts) but doesn’t sanitize stored URLs to prevent unauthorized database queries.

The obvious fix to this problem is to avoid using freebie PHP scripts, blog add-ons and other code that might be suspect. If such software is needed, security monitoring tools can detect vulnerabilities even in small PHP scripts.

Social Network Spoofing: Facebook and Twitter users can be fooled into divulging sensitive information. Usually, these types of attacks are subtle and not easily traced. Someone claiming to be, say, a employer, contacts an employee, and the employee believes that the caller is, in fact, a employer and doesn’t attempt to verify his credentials.

Companies should use e-mail verification systems that validate senders’ identities by generating return messages that ask senders to confirm their credentials.

Downloading Illegal Movies and Music: In a large company, it’s not uncommon to find employees using peer-to-peer systems to download pirated files or setting up their own servers to distribute software. The P2P ports should be completely shut down at all perimeters and ideally at the company’s endpoints. P2P programs can be stopped through [whitelists or blacklists] and filters on the enterprise servers. Injecting hostile code into P2P files is not difficult. organization.  A technique called “resource isolation” that controls which applications users are allowed to access based on permission rights.

SMS Spoofs and Malware Infections: Hackers can use SMS text messages to contact employees in direct attempts to get them to divulge sensitive information like network log-in credentials and business intelligence, but they can also use text messages to install malware on a phone.

An attacker can send an invisible text message to the infected phone telling it to place a call and turn on the microphone. That would be an effective tactic if, for example, the phone’s owner were in a meeting and the attacker wanted to eavesdrop.

it’s possible to filter SMS activity, but that’s usually handled by the wireless carrier because SMS isn’t IPbased and therefore isn’t usually controlled by company administrators. The best option is to work with carriers to make sure that they’re using malware-blocking software and SMS filters to prevent those kinds of attacks. Creating smartphone usage policies that encourage or require the use of only company-sanctioned or company-provided phones and service plans can reduce the risk.