Can pretend farming save Google?

According to ReadWriteWeb, Google has invested over $100 million and possibly as much as $200 million in Zynga, bringing the total investment in Zynga to somewhere around half a billion dollars. You might not know the name Zynga, but if you spend any time on Facebook, you have probably heard of some of the games they have created, such as Farmville and Mafia Wars. Believe it or not, according to TechCrunch, Zynga’s social games were worth $350 million in revenue in the first half of 2010, with half of that being operating profit.

What Does It Mean?
Those numbers are impressive, but mainly for what they signify. Some people might focus on the negatives for society that spending so much time harvesting virtual crops could indicate. The important thing to me is that many people find their games compelling and apparently Google thinks they are compelling enough to build their Google Games product around in the future. But why?

My thought is not that Zynga’s product is going to be so profitable or such a huge traffic draw for Google in the long run, but that this investment is a move to stay ahead of Facebook. By getting Farmville accessible through a Google login and taking away Farmville as a way of locking in Facebook users, Google is positioning itself for a stronger play as a social network. Google desperately needs that because they are afraid that search will eventually lose out to social networks and if that’s the case, Google needs a social network to monetize through advertising. Remember, Google is not a search engine. Google is an advertising network that happens to have the biggest search engine, as well as a phone operating system, business productivity apps and a couple social networks in Orkut and Google Buzz.

Now don’t get me wrong, Zynga is a good business that will make a lot of money. But the big story here is that Google is making a big play to undercut Facebook and shore up their own business, especially their social networks. That means that Google is more than a little concerned about the future of search as a way of serving their ads and growing revenue. Good thing Google has some spare cash to throw around to make multiple expensive plays like this in the hopes that something helps. Whether this one will pay off for anyone other than Zynga, only time will tell.

Help! I just want to grow up!

Yesterday, AT&T announced that it was changing its iPhone & iPad data plans. That’s right, the $30/month unlimited data plan on the iPhone & iPad and $15/month 250MB plan on the iPad will no longer be options for people getting new plans or changing their plans effective June 7. In their place, AT&T will offer a 200MB/month plan for $15 and a 2GB/month plan for $25. AT&T defends these changes saying the average customer will save money, since 98% of their users never hit 2GB in a month. Plus they say, for $20/month you can even tether your iPhone and use your data on another computer.

Where to begin? First off, I’m sure that 98% of AT&T’s users never hit 2GB. I rarely do, but I’m not mobile as much as others. But are 98% of AT&T’s smartphone users staying under that 2GB cap? I’m skeptical, but even if they are, I am not subscribing to AT&T as the noble company out to save us money. They’re looking to the future. They know that in the coming years people will surf the mobile web more and stream more and more audio and video content over their mobile connected devices. So, a much higher percentage of people will exceed 2GB of data a month in the future. Especially, since they’ve now offered tethering. Not to mention that we’ll be getting a new iPhone soon that might even have a front facing camera. I’m not sure how often people would use it for video calls, but that would impact data transfers as well.

Without even looking to the future, I can see how 2GB could easily get blown through on an iPad right now. Now I don’t have an iPad, but apps like the Netflix and ABC apps that let you stream video would tear through this bandwidth in no time. This is even worse as the 3G iPad was touted as a great mobile content consumption device with an amazing data package for an amazing price that you could just pay for as you needed it. Then a month later they completely neuter that package unless you keep paying for it on a monthly basis even when you don’t need it. Just sleazy AT&T, just sleazy.

The iPhone and iPad are no doubt stressing AT&T’s network and will continue to do so. Unfortunately, they’ve decided to handle it the wrong way. They should be growing and strengthening their networks more rapidly to handle the loads. We need a strong mobile web in this country going into the future. If AT&T really cared about their users,while they were working feverishly to build out that network they would have at least offered a 5GB cap, which would be hard to exceed for most people most of the time. Plus they would have offered some additional bandwidth with the tethering option. Making you pay twice for the bandwidth you get is ridiculous.

So, to sum it up, I’m not switching my iPhone plan away from my $30/month for unlimited and unless you aren’t really interested in where the mobile web is going or aren’t into streaming content, I suggest you do the same. You’re not smothering my baby AT&T!

I thought that number was between us!

Not too worried about how you share your personal information online? Well, VentureBeat has reported on an incident that should make you rethink your position. Blippy, the purchase sharing social site that I covered in January, has had a security breach.  As a result, they exposed the credit card numbers of some of their users to Google search. Initial reports state that only Citibank issued MasterCards were affected.

This is a huge black eye for a company that needed to show that they had rock solid control of user data.  I would think twice before I used a service like theirs, especially after a breach like this. I really don’t think knowing what your friends are buying is worth the risk of giving up your credit card information to the whole internet. If you desperately need to tell everyone what you bought, why not just mention it on Facebook or Twitter?

KnowEm: Check, check, check that name!

People constantly talk about how important a name is to a business. They usually follow that declaration up by emphasizing that a good domain name is just as important. What people often forget is how important it is to register the name of your business on all the major social media sites. Now some of you might be saying, “Whoa, there! I’m not interested in putting in the time to maintain a bunch of social media sites. I have my hands full just running my business.”

Fair enough. One day though you might want to use one of those social media sites for your business. Wouldn’t it be nice to have the name already and not have it occupied by some squatter? Or worse yet, have someone using your business’ name on one of those social media sites in a way that might damage the image of your business? Imagine how damaging it would be if someone was twittering nonsense or, worse yet, hate speech using your business name.

Terrible thought isn’t it? Still, it is daunting thinking about how long it would take to go through all the different social media sites to see if you can register with the name of your business. That’s where KnowEm.com comes in. KnowEm allows you to put in the name that you want to register. It then checks over 350 social media sites and tells you if the name you want to register is available or already taken. If the name is available and you want KnowEm to register the name of your business on a bunch of the sites for you, they offer paid services that can do just that. Sure those aren’t free, but if you want to register on a lot of services, the saved time might be well worth what you pay.

DoGood? Not so much.

DoGood Headquarters recently released a plugin for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari that replaces ads on websites with “green related initiatives, philanthropic calls for action and health and wellness ideas.” Before I get critical of this new service, because I will, I just want to say that I sympathize with part of what they are trying to do. Almost everyone has a favorite cause that they support and that they wish could raise more money. Doing something on the internet to help those causes raise more money or awareness is a good thing. There is no doubt about that. And it is done at the expense of advertising. Heck, most of us don’t enjoy advertising. So, what’s the problem, right?

The problem is that a lot of people enjoy consuming quality content on the internet. And most enjoy doing it for free. That is why most online content, if it makes any money at all, earns that money from advertising. That money is given in exchange for users viewing the advertisements and, in many cases, for clicking through on the advertisements. What the DoGooder plugin does is stop those ads from displaying to anyone that installs the plugin. Unless of course that person clicks the area of the site with the ads and indicates that they want to see the original ads. If someone installed the plugin in the first place, why would they ever do that?

Now, some people would say, “So what? What they’re doing is noble.” I disagree. DoGood says that they donate 50% of their profits to charity. That means that they’re profiting from showing ads displayed over other people’s sites. The rest of the money, including the other 50% of the profit and the other revenue goes to them. They don’t cut in the websites that are creating the content that they’re profiting off of. That leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. If services like the one DoGood Headquarters has created caught on, only pay per click ads would pay content providers. Then the money collected for advertising would drop for many sites as these DoGood style ad covering services impact their ability to provide quality content. Then sites will either close down or have to charge their audiences directly. That’s not what I want and that’s not what most other people want either. Bad form DoGooders, bad form.

Funny money of the past.

Micropayments have been the holy grail of the internet for years. Finally, companies like Apple and Amazon seem to be profiting where many others have tried and failed. Apparently, Facebook thinks that they stand to make a profit through micropayments as well. According to Facebook’s developer blog, Facebook is now entering the beta phase of their Facebook Credits program. This program allows users to purchase virtual currency from Facebook that would allow them to purchase virtual goods in participating Facebook applications, such as Farmville.

Facebook touts this as a great opportunity for developers. Since Facebook is more trusted by many than the myriad of Facebook app developers, the ability of users to buy credits from Facebook gives them more confidence that their financial information is safe. It also speeds up the purchasing process. Once Facebook has the credit card or Paypal information, it’s easy to add more credits. The user doesn’t have to deal with giving their financial information to all of the different companies that they might want to buy virtual goods from.

While it is reasonable to say that making the purchasing process easier should increase the amount of money that consumers spend playing Facebook apps, I think it’s too early to say how much it will increase the revenue collected by individual applications. Like with Apple’s program, Facebook takes a hefty 30% of the revenue. That’s an awful lot for what is, in this case, nothing more than a payment processing role. Assuming that a virtual good is about a dollar, that is about as much as if the company was paying the credit card company to ring up each $1 purchase separately. If Facebook was selling credits in bundles of $5 or $10 on the other hand, that comparison is much less favorable. A credit card company would charge around 7.5% and 4.8% respectively in those scenarios.

So, this definitely looks like a great additional revenue stream for Facebook, but whether or not being a part of this system will work out well for developers will have to be seen. My gut tells me that only a few developers will make out well under this system. Plus consumers will waste money buying virtual products that could have been spent on more tangible products. The only guaranteed winner I see is Facebook.

Give or get honest feedback anonymously with BetterMe.com.

One common problem in businesses is not knowing what coworkers or employees think about a subject. Sometimes the subject is fairly mundane, so you can just ask. When the subject is more sensitive though, either you or the people you intend to ask might be hesitant about discussing the subject openly. In the past, you might have asked people to write anonymous comments and put them in a comment box, but that still left many ways that you might find out who said what. Luckily, we now have a new online service that we can use instead: BetterMe.com.

BetterMe.com addresses these uncomfortable situations from both sides of the issue. It allows people to provide unsolicited, anonymous feedback and it allows people to solicit feedback from groups of people, who can then provide feedback anonymously. The service sends an email requesting feedback from the group of people you want feedback from and tells the recipients how many other people were sent the feedback request, so that they know how anonymous their answers are. After all, anonymous feedback from a single person is hardly anonymous. That safeguard is not bullet proof though because you could solicit feedback from a coworker, your spouse and 10 of your other email accounts. So, while the coworker thinks that they are 1 of 12 possible respondents, they’re actually the only real one. I know you’re ethical, so you wouldn’t do that, but theoretically someone else might.

So, if you need some feedback and think the people that you want the feedback from might be uncomfortable giving it directly, give BetterMe.com a try and get the feedback you need, anonymously.

Let’s go church shopping!

People are obsessed with rating products and services online.  If you can never get enough and want to extend your ratings to churches, I found an article on ReadWriteWeb about a new site called ChurchRater.com that is dedicated to rating and reviewing churches. When I saw the site I immediately thought: landmine. Many people take religion very seriously because it is a defining part of their lives. And after looking through the site a bit, I could see that some people did feel quite strongly about certain churches and about the mission of the site itself. So, I wondered whose idea the site was.

Well, the site features two Founders on its front page: Jim Henderson and Matt Casper, a Protestant minister and an atheist, respectively. In 2007, they cowrote, “Jim & Casper Go To Church” in which they visited and evaluated various churches, much as this site is meant to help others to do. Also listed on the site is Tyler Mahoney (Director of Communications & Co-Founder). A quick search online turned up a LinkedIn page, which stated that the company had 4 employees. It also turned up one additional employee: Julian Zegelman (Co-Founder & Investor).

Looking at the site I have a few comments to make. First, it needs some graphic design work. For a site put together by a group of people that includes an investor, the design is subpar. I have to think that a redesign is in the works. If it isn’t, it should be. Also, only 380 churches are listed so far and it seems like most don’t have many reviews, yet. Plus, the functionality of the site is very basic. The most finely you can filter the church listings is by a specific denomination in a given state.

There are a few features I’d like to see. The ability to see all churches within a certain distance from an address or zip code would be helpful. So would the ability to see the church locations on a map. Another helpful feature would be the ability to see the ratings of churches without drilling into each of them and the ability to sort church results based on ratings.

Given the state of the website I can only come to one of two conclusions:

1. The purpose of the site is to drum up publicity for the church review service, which they are offering to churches for $250-$2950 dollars and to sell more copies of their book.
2. The site doesn’t have enough funding yet to afford a graphic designer or enough developers to build additional functionality, so they are hoping that the publicity will turn into investor dollars to improve the site.

Any way you slice it, ChurchRater.com should have hired a graphic designer before throwing this site out to the media. It’s an interesting idea, but it looks unprofessionally done, which doesn’t inspire confidence in potential investors or customers. I am interested enough in what they’re building to check back in six months to see where they’re at, but I don’t expect the site to catch on fire. It has potential to serve a small niche, but I don’t see broad based appeal. Especially, since while they hype this as Yelp for churches, it has much less functionality than Yelp. Plus, Yelp already has ratings and reviews for many more churches than ChurchRater.com does. What will convince consumers that they should search on this site when they can continue searching on Yelp, both on the web or using a mobile application on their phones?  Personally, I don’t see a compelling reason to do so at this time.

Many people don’t worry about how much information they share on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Foursquare, etc. With people entering more detailed information, including geolocation data, maybe they should. At least that’s what Barry Borsboom, Boy van Amstel and Frank Groeneveld of PleaseRobMe.com believe.

They drove that point home by creating PleaseRobMe.com, which shows the most recent Foursquare checkins that were posted to Twitter as potential burglary targets. They stated that the purpose of the site is not to help burglars to pick potential targets. They created the site because they believe that giving away your location on social networks doesn’t just tell people where you are. It also tells where you aren’t, which is at home. So, they made their site to bring awareness to that fact to the masses.

I agree with their sentiment. To make that information useful though, the thief has to know where you live. If you’re smart enough not to share your address on those same social networks, you’re probably not giving away everything in your efforts to become the mayor of your favorite spots on Foursquare. Of course, those people who check in at their homes on Foursquare or who show their GPS coordinates on their iPhone are opening themselves up to the potential to get robbed in the future.

Now, I don’t want anyone to panic though. The point of this post isn’t to freak people out. It’s to get people to think before they share information on social networks. Are you giving out too much information? Like your name, the name of your kids, pictures of them and mentioning where they go to school? If so, wake up, clean up the information you share online and think about what you should and shouldn’t be sharing online. Be smart, be safe and, by the way, did I mention I’m now the Mayor of Cannery Row?

More education means being less click happy.

A few days ago, Chitika Research put out some interesting data comparing the relation between online advertising CTR (click through rates) in comparison to college education. According to their findings, the higher the percentage of college graduates, the lower the CTR for the population. Their conclusion from that finding was that advertisers who target more educated demographics should do a better job of making their ads “worthwhile.” They also recommended that “…this is an opportunity to push the industry towards the idea of content first, sales pitch second, even among advertisements.”

Now, I don’t necessarily disagree with what Chitika Research claims, but I do think there is more to consider. For instance, since online advertising is usually paid for by the click, I think these findings justify a higher rate charged to advertisers by sites with more educated audiences. Some people might disagree with this (most likely advertisers), but I defend my position in the following way.

First, a highly educated audience has more discretionary spending. That means that they are more likely able to afford more of a good or service. Second, while online advertisers pretend that impressions don’t matter, they do. Otherwise, advertising in newspapers, magazines, radio or television would all be useless. If they’re useless, advertisers would not spend as much of their ad dollars in those areas as they currently do. While the educated audience might not click on the ads as often, they are still learning about the company through the viewing of the ads.

Online advertisers need to sell their product through what is displayed in the ad, rather than relying on something flashy or interactive to get a more educated audience to click on it. They will not. Instead, the ad needs to sell the benefit of clicking the ad and make it clear where the ad originates from. If the ad addresses a need and it is communicated clearly, the audience will either click on it if they have the time or they might go directly to the site when they have time later.

The Bottom Line
If your business targets a more educated audience, you have to realize that you need to make higher quality ads and that ad rates will likely be higher. So, while a more educated audience will take more time and money to advertise to, they are potentially worth spending more money to advertise to, even though they click through less often. After all, they are still being exposed to the ads, which if the ads are done right will make them more likely to become future customers.

It's a great tool. But is it the right tool for the job?

Increasingly, web sites are allowing people to login using one of their existing social networking accounts. And for good reason. It makes life easier for users. Instead of having to signup for a new account and remember what login and password they used for a site, users can login using their account at Twitter, Facebook or another service. That can overcome the reluctance that a potential user might have to create an account at a site. The user will just use their login to whatever service is allowed by the site and boom!  The site has another user that they might not otherwise have had.

Sounds great. Maybe we should use these social networking accounts to login everywhere. Why not use our Twitter or Facebook login to access our work accounts, too? At least that’s what a guest author on ReadWriteWeb suggested.

While I think enabling those types of logins on a customer facing site is great because of how it makes things easier on users, it’s not a good idea when dealing with corporate accounts and employees. The first problem is that people get phished all the time on those accounts. Plus, people often use the same logins and passwords across multiple social networking accounts. That means that if hackers compromised any of those accounts, they could probably gain access to your company’s servers.

On the other hand, there are those people who wouldn’t want to have their social networking accounts tied to their jobs. That could be due to fear that they are potentially giving their employers access to their social networking accounts. So, they would just open another account solely for the purpose of accessing work resources. In that case, you haven’t gained anything and you have given control to the system used to authenticate your users to a 3rd party company that you probably aren’t even paying. That means that they aren’t as motivated to ensure that their servers are up when you need them to be. If they need to take their servers down in the middle of the day for some reason, a portion (or all) of your users won’t be able to work and there will be nothing you can do to fix that.

Plus, you could have potential issues if the company ever changed the way they handled their authentication and APIs. And don’t forget to think about what would happen if one of these companies went out of business overnight or was acquired by another company and integrated into the other company’s authentication system. Either example could be a nightmare at best and a disaster at worst.

Now the original post on RWW said that their suggestion was counter intuitive. I agree with that, but I would go farther and say it’s dangerous. Human nature being what it is, allowing users to login to their corporate accounts using Twitter or Facebook is not a good business decision. In fact, it’s a very bad one.

Our motto for ISPs: Don’t be slow.

I have to say that I’m pretty excited by Google’s announcement that they are going to build and test a few fiber networks around the United States that would provide internet access at up to 1 gigabit/sec. That’s in comparison to the U.S.’s pathetic 3.9 megabit/sec average. That’s over 250 times faster! That’s even 20 times faster than Verizon’s FiOS, which as far as I know is the fastest service in the nation that is currently available to consumers.

Now, I’m not a Google fanboy. In fact, quite often I’m a detractor of theirs since I feel that their goals are diametrically opposed to mine. I want to maintain my privacy and they want to violate it as much as possible to target me with advertising. As much as I distrust their claims that their motto is, “Don’t be evil,” I see their proposal to bring ultra high speed broadband to be fairly safe from a privacy perspective. That is unless they do something highly unethical or illegal, which I doubt. Especially, since they are proposing that they run an open access network that allows consumers to select from a number of providers that lease the access to the fiber network from Google and that they will run their network “in an open, non-discriminatory, and transparent way.”

If that’s the case, then it’s a big win to consumers. It’s in Google’s best interest to not allow filtering by the service providers and to not implement bandwidth caps. The more we use the internet, the better it is for Google. That’s where they make all their money, after all. The more we’re online, the more ads they can serve to us. While that gives Google the opportunity to make even more money, that high speed access would also benefit consumers. Plus it would create tremendous opportunities for businesses around the nation. Think of what it could mean to be able to run multiple enterprise level web apps and a high quality video conferencing stream without even a hiccup. That could mean that employees could work out of their homes as effectively as in an office and without having to give up on face to face meetings. That could be a tremendous leap forward, especially for startups outside of tech rich areas like the Silicon Valley. Plus, it would remove a lot of the limitations that businesses put on their services so that they can be accessible to users on slower connections. The possibilities are amazing.

Of course, Google won’t be building out fiber networks everywhere, but hopefully the threat of Google expanding into their areas will spur Comcast, Verizon and others to build out their networks and offer reasonable speeds and pricing before Google can move in, undercut them and potentially destroy their business models. After all, Google doesn’t really want to be an ISP. What they want is ubiquitous, capless, ultra high speed internet connections for the entire nation, which they can then serve advertising over and make ridiculous amounts of money on. They don’t care who builds the networks as long as they get built. That last sentiment is one thing I agree with Google on. I don’t care who builds it, just roll it out to my town first!

Check out my new location based device!

Like I said yesterday, it’s hard to decide what location based apps to target for a business. So, here is a quick roundup of some options available today. How did I choose which apps to include? Simple. I went through the Apple App store and downloaded all the location based apps I could find.

I didn’t review any paid apps or apps that required text messages because I’m cheap and don’t have text messaging in my blood (or on my account for that matter). Plus, I don’t want myself or my friends to be spammed with text messages. (Loopt has done it in the past.)

So, what makes a good location based app that your business should target? Some keys are:

1. The apps have to take very little time because when people use them, they’re out enjoying themselves. If checking-in takes so long that it gets in the way of enjoying themselves, most people won’t use it.
2. The apps have to be fun and rewarding to the users. If the users don’t enjoy them or don’t feel like they’re getting something out of them, they won’t use them regularly.
3. They need critical mass. If the apps aren’t being used by enough people in your area or customer demographic, what’s the point? Your business won’t get much exposure.
4. They need to update other services like Facebook or Twitter to spread the word about your business as much as possible.

Gowalla

Personal Verdict: Kept because I’m still enjoying this one and it’s easy. One of my personal favorites.

Business Verdict: I’d recommend targeting this service if you were targeting multiple services or noticed a particularly large amount of Gowalla users near your business.

Foursquare

Personal Verdict: Kept because I’m still enjoying this one and it’s easy. This one is neck and neck with Gowalla for me.

Business Verdict: This is my top choice since it is available on most mobile phones, has a large user base and rewards users for visiting a lot of businesses, encourages users to leave tips about those locations and rewards them for being the most frequent visitor of a business. Plus with the API’s and the early adoption by some businesses, this one looks like it has more longterm potential than the others.

MyTown

MyTown is less well known than Gowalla and Foursquare, but claims to have half a million users and six times as many check-ins as Foursquare.

Personal Verdict: I kept it for now, but mainly because I’m interested to see what is added to this app. If it doesn’t evolve, I’ll be deleting this one fairly soon. It just feels like a time sink to me.

Business Verdict: It has some decent exposure, but it is only available on the iPhone. It also seems like a lot of work, so people might get burned out on this one. I’d say wait and see where this one goes.

BrightKite

Personal Verdict: Deleted since it doesn’t offer as much as the other apps.

Business Verdict: Pass. Not enough users and not as good for discovering businesses or rewarding loyal customers.

Flook

Personal Verdict: Deleted because it’s too much work and just wouldn’t work well in many cases on my iPhone.

Business Verdict: If you have an iPhone, some spare time and want to add some pictures of your business to it, go ahead. Besides that, it’s a pass.

Yelp

Personal Verdict: Kept because I like using Yelp to find restaurants and other businesses when I’m traveling. I probably won’t use it too often to check-in though.

Business Verdict: If you have a business, you’re probably already on Yelp, whether you know it or not. This is one to pay attention to because of the large base of users Yelp has.

So, in the end, I really enjoy Gowalla and Foursquare. I’ll probably drop MyTown and stop checking-in on Yelp before long. For businesses that don’t have much time, I’d focus on Foursquare and Yelp. Foursquare because it’s innovative, has a large user base and is already focused on serving businesses. Yelp because it already has a massive user base and a ton of existing reviews that people consult regularly. Now I’m not saying you have to ignore the other services. If you have time, you can dabble in a few of the others, but if you need to focus your efforts, I recommend Foursquare, Yelp and if you have time, Gowalla. (What can I say, I enjoy Gowalla and want businesses to support it. Call me selfish.)

You are here!

So, what are geolocation apps and why should you care? Good question. Well, first off, geolocation based apps are apps that base their features around where you are. They take that information from the GPS in a mobile device, such as a Blackberry, iPhone or another smartphone. That information is used to tell other users of the service where you are. Then some game aspect is usually added, such as giving badges, points or ranks based on how many places you visit or how often you visit them. A couple current apps that use geolocation are Gowalla and Foursquare.

Now for the interesting question. Why should you care? That’s not so simple. If you’re a parent, someone who has a stalker or someone concerned with their privacy, then these apps could be bad news. Think about all the potential problems if the wrong person knew where you or your kids were at all times, just by looking at status updates on these applications. If you haven’t thought about that, you should. If you have kids that use these apps and you haven’t talked to them about the dangers, you’d better.

Okay, that’s the dark side. Now for the lighter side of these apps. They can be a fun way to see what your friends are doing, share what you’re doing and turn going out into a bit of a game. It might even encourage you to check out places you’ve never visited and try new things.

It’s not all fun and games though. For businesses, these apps could mean new customers or a way to reward your best customers. I’m sure some of you are saying, “More customers? Tell me more!”

When it comes right down to it, the benefits of these apps to businesses revolve around exposure and awareness. If I’m using this app and I check-in somewhere near your business and someone else has visited your business before, I’ll probably see the name of your business on the list of places to check-in at. Just the other day I saw a new business that I had missed because it was on the second floor. It’s now on my list of places to check out. See how easily being on these services can build awareness for your business? Plus, if people check-in at your business frequently, that shows potential customers that you might be a good business to check out.

Sold? Wondering how you can you drive those numbers up to increase the popularity of your business? Well aside from offering the most amazing product or service, you could offer a limited time discount to customers that check in at your business on one of these services. Or you could offer a discount to the person that checks-in at your business the most often. That encourages people to visit your business more often, which is always a good thing. Plus, it will increase the popularity of your business on these geolocation based apps, making you more visible to potential customers.

As you can see, not only do geolocation based apps make your business more visible to new customers, they also give you a way to reward some of your best customers. These are customers that visit often and effectively give free advertising to your business by telling their friends about your business every time they check-in.

I’ve only given you a few ways that you could put these geolocation apps to work for you. There are many other ways to use these services to grow awareness and loyalty for your business. Experiment and see what works best for your business. Of course, the method you try will depend on the app you are targeting and I haven’t talked about the different apps yet. I’ll cover some of those in tomorrow’s post. So, if you’re interested in learning about the different apps, check in here tomorrow!

Security requires a strong lock that is used properly.

Almost everyone has heard that they need secure passwords that are changed often or their accounts could be compromised. The problem is that secure passwords can be difficult to remember, especially when you have different ones for every account. I always believed that many people used insecure passwords, but a recent report from Imperva that analyzed 32 million passwords that were released due to a major security breach, really pounded that idea home.

According to the report, only 0.2% of the passwords were secure. That’s a fifth of one percent! So, what is a secure password? Imperva’s definition is a password with at least 8 characters, both upper and lower case letters and at least one number and one special character. I can see why the percentage might be low for a password with those characteristics, but almost 50% of users used passwords that were names, slang words, dictionary words or consecutive numbers or adjacent keyboard keys. Strings of numbers like 12345, 123456, 1234567, 12345678, and 123456789 were all very popular. In fact, those 5 passwords were all in the top 9 and accounted for about 1.5% of the passwords used.

Not good, but how bad could having such insecure passwords be? Well, someone could gain access to the financial accounts of you or your business. Or a disgruntled employee could access your company email or Twitter account and send inappropriate messages to all of your clients, like happened to Vodafone UK’s Twitter account recently. Now to be fair, we’re not sure how the Vodafone UK employee got access to the account, but an insecure password or one written on a post-it note could have been the cause.

So, what’s the answer? Well, you and your employees should be required to use a password that meets Imperva’s definition of a strong password. If possible, the password should be required to be changed on a regular basis. Why? Well, some people would say that’s in case the password got out. That way it might get changed before it could be used. I’d assume if the password got out, that it would probably get used immediately. I believe that passwords should be changed regularly, so that employees will be less likely to use the same password as they do for their Facebook, Twitter or another personal account. That’s important because if one of those accounts gets hacked, it might open up that work account to attack.

Now requiring a constantly changing secure password does open up another issue. How can you keep your employees (or yourself) from writing the password down and putting it somewhere that it can easily be found? Obviously, the best thing to do is to memorize the password. If that can’t be done, write it down. But don’t put it somewhere around the computer. Keep the password somewhere safe, where it won’t be compromised. Keeping the password in a wallet is a good choice. People tend to watch their wallets. Or keep the password in a password protected, encrypted file on your phone or maybe on a folded piece of paper in some secure, locked location. These options are all much better than writing the password on a post-it note and sticking it to the bottom of your keyboard. Yes, I’ve found passwords there. It’s like putting a key under a doormat. Not a good idea.

Now you all have secure passwords and don’t leave them lying around. You’re all set, right? No. Computers are like doors. If you don’t lock them when you’re gone, it doesn’t matter how good the lock is. Log out of your accounts or even computers when you are away. At the very least, password lock the computer when you are away. To make sure you (or your employees) don’t forget to lock the computer when away, set the computer to lock when the screensaver comes on and set the length of time before the screensaver comes on to be fairly short.

In one of my early jobs, we took security very seriously and sometimes when someone forgot to lock their computer for the night, we took the opportunity to play a prank on them that would trigger when they turned the computer back on. Don’t worry, all of the pranks were harmless. Needless to say, security awareness got better with time. (And no I was never victimized.)

Now, I’m not suggesting hazing coworkers or employees. In fact, I’d strongly advise against it. We were all sure that the people involved would take the jokes well or we wouldn’t have played them in the first place. Instead, I’d recommend quietly locking down unlocked machines and leaving a discreet note.

The key thing I want you to take away is that you need to ensure that you and your employees use secure passwords and implement good password policies. Looking back at the locked door metaphor, I’m saying: Use good locks, lock them when you aren’t home and don’t leave the keys lying around for burglars to find. If you can do all that, you’ll be much safer.

Too much can go wrong these days if passwords are compromised. More and more of our business functions are handled over the internet and hackers are able to compromise accounts more quickly than ever. So, don’t underestimate the power of hackers and don’t overestimate the security of your team’s passwords. Have good policies in place, enforce them using your systems and educate your employees. Some people make mistakes simply because they don’t know any better.