Tag Archives: Twitter

The FIFA 14 “Free Coins” scam

Technology,

Today is European Data Protection day 2014, or ‘Privacy Day’ if you live outside of Europe. Happy EDP or PD depending on where you live.

One of these accounts asked for my email username and password to get free FIFA coins
One of these accounts asked for my email username and password to get free FIFA coins

To celebrate EDP/ PD, I thought I’d share the latest scam going around on EA Sports FIFA 14 and Twitter, mainly targeting children.

FIFA 14 has one of the best monetisation strategies of all computer games which leaves Candy Crush and Farmville well behind.

Firstly, the game costs around £40 to buy, and to play it online on the Xbox, you need to buy a subscription to Xbox Live, which is a further £40 per year. And that’s only the beginning of the journey because many online gamers have quality football ‘players’ in their squads.

There are two ways of getting decent players into your own team – either to trade players in a marketplace or buy ‘packs’ of players (a pack contains a random selection of players which are undisclosed until purchase).

The currency for these transactions are FIFA points. You can buy FIFA points with real cash or through trading players. A brief survey of my kids’ friends revealed that the average amount of money spent on FIFA coins is around £10 per month. Playing FIFA is a £200 per year hobby.

The trading option provides the perfect environment for scammers – it’s the combination of naïve children who constantly want more FIFA Coins.

There are dozens of websites and Twitter accounts setup offering ‘free’ or cheaper coins. Remember that we’re dealing with children who want more coins quickly. So these websites ask for personal details in return for the coins. These personal details appear logical to a child.

I saw a Twitter scam as follows:

  1. The ‘Free coins’ account asks the gamer to follow them in return for coins. The reason for asking a gamer to follow the account is because following a Twitter account enables both parties to Direct Message (DM) each other. This means that further communication can’t be publicly viewed.
  2. The ‘Free coins’ account now DMs the gamer, dangles the carrot of ‘Thanks for following, do you want 100K or 500K coins?’
  3. The gamer responds
  4. The ‘Free coins’ account now asks for the FIFA team name and the Xbox Live account name. Both appear reasonable and are easily justified as “I need to know who to send the coins to.”
  5. The gamer replies.
  6. Now the clever part… the free coins account claims the transaction didn’t work correctly. They will ask the gamer to re-confirm their details. It builds the frustration and emotion for the gamer.
  7. The free coins account now explains there must be some sort of technical problem and asks for the gamer’s email account and password.

At this point, the DM conversation may have taken under 5 minutes from the gamer following the account. Once any hacker has control of a person’s email account, they have an open door to many other services because they can visit other sites and press ‘Forgotten password’, and keep resetting these services. And of course, the hacker’s first job is to change the email password and backup email account/ phone number.

Remember that we’re mainly dealing with children who undervalue security.

There are two steps to prevent this scam:

  1. Explain to your child the importance of never giving away their email password to anyone, no matter what the ‘offer’ is. It’s the online equivalent of giving a stranger your house keys.
  2. Explain no one on the Internet is likely to give you something for nothing, especially just for following them on Twitter. Back to the first analogy, it’s like someone on the street offering to buy you some chocolate for free, but they need your house keys to leave the chocolate in the fridge.

Parents of children who have fallen for this scam are rightly upset. The psychological impact is that a stranger has managed to break into the family home and steal from the children, all without parents noticing.

With more apps and games offering freemium options and monetised gamification, these scams will become more common.

Have a happy European Data Protection day.

The greatest story about TWTR

Business,
Vivienne Harr's Make a Stand campaign
Vivienne Harr’s first Make a Stand campaign on Twitter

My favourite story on Twitter’s IPO yesterday is about the person who rang the NASDAQ bell during the offering.

I wonder how many IPOs call upon a non-paying user to ring one of the most famous bells in the World… you can read the full story about the 9-year-old Vivienne Harr here.

Getting the first 500 Twitter followers is the hardest

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Labour Party Twitter Banter
Even political parties can have some banter on Twitter

I’ve dabbled with Twitter for a while. I opened my account over five years ago on the 16 January 2008.

In those five years I’ve described Twitter as pretty much everything from “The Emperor’s New Clothes” to the third best free social media website. The point is, if you are looking for web traffic, Twitter is an excellent tool that borders on the obligatory.

The problem I found is that your engagement with Twitter keeps plateauing. You get a number of followers, you find a number of people to follow, and it remains stagnant for a while.

I’ve been to presentations from Twitter users, such as Bill Boorman, who have large followings, but that didn’t work either. I had 200 followers when I went to the presentation in October 2011 and the advice didn’t seem to work for me.

I read The Tao of Twitter which is a great book and I recommend you read it with a highlighter pen. I read it twice in a few days, and started following the book’s advice. I quickly built up a bigger following. I then discovered other tricks to accelerate this further.

One golden rule before you start – whatever you do, don’t buy Twitter followers.

And here are the tips for getting quality Twitter followers relatively quickly:

  1. Tweet at least 3 times a day. Make sure it’s relevant content – so include some consistent keywords. Personal stuff works occasionally – see #4. Tips 6 & 7 will help you with content suggestions.
  2. Retweet other interesting or funny tweets. Use a blogger outreach platform to source content, such as Triberr. These websites are a win-win for the authors who are trying to promote their content and Twitter users looking for good content.
  3. Friendly banter with friends is good. Don’t make your feed too dry. Banter displays personality. Even if you’re a political party.
  4. Follow back new followers, except obvious spammers.
  5. When reading an article on say, a news website, express your opinion in a tweet. Always include a link to the article too. It’s difficult to condense an opinion into less than 140 characters, but try. In fact, you should try to use only 135 characters so that others can retweet your content prefixed with an “RT: “.
  6. When reading an article on your news or sports sites, if you see a snippet or “sound bite”, tweet it with a link back to the article.
  7. Find relevant industry/ topic tweet chats, and join in. I’ve usually accumulated an extra 25-50 followers (that’s a 5-10% growth) shortly after twitter chats.
  8. Use #ff (it stands for ‘Follow Friday’) on Fridays, especially to new followers from the week. Group similar users together in one #ff and another hash tag to describe their commonality. The chances are, they’ll retweet this to their followers.

Finally, please let me know if this article helps you and I may produce other similar guides.

Creating & timing the perfect post: infographic

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Here’s a really good, practical, infographic on the ideal types of social media post including timing.

I’ve seen a number of similar infographics before but this one has been well summarised and kept simple. Try the tips below and let me know if you see any improvements.

 
How to create the perfect social media post is an infographic that was produced by mycleveragency

Generating value from social data in real-time, Dara Nasr from Twitter

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These notes are from the adtech London exhibition in September 2013. Apologies for any brevity, grammar or spelling mistakes, I did the best I could! Here is a full list of all my presentation notes from adTech London 2013.

How the Jay-Z hashtags are linked by Dara Nasr from Twitter
How the Jay-Z hashtags are linked by Dara Nasr from Twitter

Dara Nasr is the Head of Agency Sales at Twitter, and had an arsenal of amusing, anecdotal case studies about brands on Twitter.

His opening slide was “Twitter: the real time pulse of the planet”

Case studies:

  • @policiajun – 3,000 inhabitants in a town in aim. All civil communication handled by twitter
  • “Other companies preach mobile first…” 80% of access to twitter is via mobile, and mobile was truly before the web for Twitter
  • It took 3 years to serve a billion tweets. They now serve a billion tweets every 2 days

Successful Twitter users and brands:

  • Plan for everyday moments. He showed the use of everyday keywords such as shopping, which are cyclical around the days of the week. Time your tweets to coincide with everyday activities.
  • Plan for live moments. E.g. There were 6m tweets around the champions league final.  Nokia’s imitation is the form of flattery was retweeted 18m times when the new iPhone 5 was launched (and I retweeted their tweet because I thought it was funny). Successful brands and users have playful banter between competitors, which ends up successful for both. This ranges from political parties and politicians to CPG brands to sports personalities
  • Plan connected moments… Twitter and TV. Twitter bought Bluefin who connect Twitter to TV adverts. Twitter claim 60% of people use Twitter while watching TV. Dara went through a case study on Jay-Z boosting music sales
  • MTV ran a competition with [a staggering] 166m entries

Answers to questions from the audience:

  1. The brands who use Twitter well try and try again to get it right. Key companies are Samsung, Mondelēz, Paddy Power. They make mistakes, learn from them, and end up with successful campaigns
  2. On commercialisation: There are 3 ways Twitter makes money: from promoted tweets, promoted accounts and prompted trends, i.e. pushing results higher up on all 3 listings
  3. On commercialisation after a potential IPO: Twitter might not change that much because it’s very user focussed, and doesn’t want to do anything users don’t want.

Here is a full list of my presentation notes.

Singley & Mackie’s 3 step plan for social media engagement

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Keith Pape is SVP Social Engagement at Singley & Mackie and provided some practical advice for brands working in social media.

Social equalises big brands with smaller businesses. It’s a pretty even playing field

Everyone can tell a story in a different way. The top 10 most engaged brands span several industries from supermarkets to travel agents to drinks companies

Too many clients don’t understand the business, not the social, goal of a project

Their recommendation is three phases:

Grow, engage, convert. It’s vital to measure and refine at every stage.

Grow = content. Keep measuring

Engage = talk (customer service & sales/ marketing). Keep measuring

Convert = sell. Keep measuring

During the Q & A he pointed out that people don’t visit your timeline, so your content on twitter and Facebook needs to stand out from the rest of the content. Assume only 15% of your followers see each of your tweets.

Use link trackers such as bit.ly to measure click though rates.

See the other presentation notes from ad:tech.

The ticking time bomb of digital footprints

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Mail on Sunday front page 7 April 2013
Mail on Sunday front page 7 April 2013

This week’s news about Paris Brown brought home the reality of growing from a child to an adult with a digital footprint.

Paris wrote some tweets aged between 14 and 16 years old that contained poor language that most adults would be ashamed of.

What Paris tweeted (I’ve seen the tweets and they are not worthy of being repeated here) is completely wrong. However, the point to this case is that Paris is the first high profile case of a child who had made some pretty bad statements which have come back to haunt her later on in life. She won’t be the last.

There are a number of important points to the Paris Brown case. Firstly, I find it appalling the way the news was broken. The Mail on Sunday covered the story on the front page. Really? Was this really the most important story for a Sunday paper? Paris is 17 years old and this week’s ordeal has been out of proportion. She was 14 when she wrote some of the tweets.

The question is whether employers should check all social media channels for indecent content?

That’s an interesting question. Should employers check newspaper articles and letters to the editor too? How can employers check Facebook pages which are, or at least should be, private? Where’s the line drawn?

In 2008 there was a court case in the UK where a company took an employee to court to instruct them to remove all LinkedIn connections from their account. The employer claims to own those connections, not the employee. The case was settled out of court.

In the US, a similar case, also concerning LinkedIn, did go through to judgement, and the court was in favour of the employee, mainly because the contacts could be found in the public domain and replicated by anyone.

We are at the tip of the iceberg with these legal issues. These are new challenges that need to be resolved.

When recruiting, should it be standard practice to research the candidate online? What happens if an employer sees a photo of the candidate in a fund raising capacity for cause seemed inappropriate? “Inappropriate content” is a very wide grey area.

I feel sorry for Paris Brown. She posted something at 14 years old, has apologised for her comments, resigned from her job, and now has a permanent digital footprint across all the national newspapers which is beyond her control. Paris’ digital footprint, which started as a handful of tweets, now has over 38,000,000 results according to Google. She won’t be able to delete those so easily.

An example of buying Twitter followers

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Crowd

While I was travelling recently, I heard he following marketing story. A car dealership ran a radio-only promotion to win Superbowl tickets (a random lottery style competition) in return for visiting their showroom. The campaign was run in complete isolation, meaning that if a radio listener visited the showroom’s website, there was nothing obvious to endorse the advert.

They ran the campaign for a few weeks and the response was… zero. Not one person visited the showroom.

The dealership called a digital agency with just a few days to go before the Superbowl, and asked them to implement a campaign using the dealer’s Twitter account. The dealer had just over 50,000 followers, so the agency went to work designing and implementing a campaign.

After a few hours the agency wondered what had gone wrong… not one follower had engaged with the campaign – either entering an online competition, retweeting, or most importantly, visiting the showroom.

The agency had run digital, including social, campaigns in the past and were surprised at the lack of engagement. They spoke to the dealership and found out that they had ‘bought’ the 50,000 followers.

To me, this demonstrated the immaturity of the dealership on a number of levels. Firstly, all marketing campaigns need to be aligned across channels. Secondly, buying Twitter followers needs to be recognised as buying a disloyal and untargeted ‘user base’. I’m being careful not to describe the ‘user base’ as fans or eyeballs because there’s no evidence to suggest they are actual people – as Facebook found out immediately after its IPO.

I would guess that the reason the dealership bought the followers is that after launching a Twitter account and struggling to attract followers, buying them seemed easier and quicker – but in the long run, they were an unengaged statistic of absolutely no use whatsoever.

Photo courtesy of James Cridland on Flickr

 

How to get help with online marketing for small businesses

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6070249129_3bebb307141

Last week I was invited to a networking event hosted by Rob Tyson of The Tyson Report and Triberr.

As regular readers will know, I am interested in small UK businesses, mainly because my grandfather started a small shop in Camberwell shortly after the war, which my dad looked after until retiring some five years ago.

I’m acutely aware that small businesses need as much help they can get, and in some ways the Internet has created a level playing field, but small businesses struggle with the complexities of the Internet and it takes too much time to research the necessary material.

Step forward Rob Tyson. Rob has created a subscription based website which helps small businesses understand the nuances of Web marketing.

His website is based on a freemium model – a lot of content is free, the first month costs £1 and thereafter it’s £19 a month.

I spoke to Rob at the event, not for as long as I’d like because there were lots of others there, and he seems a genuine guy who wants to help small businesses. I asked him what his long term plans are, and whether he would help large companies, and he said that he wants to focus just on smaller companies at the moment – usually less than a dozen people, running a business as well as a website.

At the networking event was a wedding photographer who has reduced his marketing spend (at one point he was spending 50% of his revenue on marketing) through Rob and a charming lady who is setting up a London tour guide business and needs help promoting it online.

I’ve read Rob’s blog, and it’s straight up, direct content. There’s no fluff, and something to take away from every post.

If you’re a small business, I recommend following Rob on Twitter and taking a look at his site.

 

Broken motorbikes, Sky TV and Office 2013

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Now that the extended holiday season has finally finished, I thought I’d update everyone on what’s been going on recently, or more accurately, what I’ve been up to.

For one thing, I haven’t been cycling a lot recently. After our family summer holiday and really poor weather when we returned, I ended up not cycling for 4 weeks. I then got back on the bike and was shocked how much fitness I’d lost. Fortunately the fitness returned relatively, although my Strava times are still low. 

On the subject of cycling, last summer I read Lance Armstrong’s autobiography and loved every page. It was a truly inspirational book especially for anyone with cancer. I am torn between trying to understand that he allegedly cheated, and respecting him for the inspirational he has given so many cancer patients.

I’ve now installed Office 2013 on my work laptop and both home PCs. I’ve only encountered one major problem which was caused during an upgrade process where I clicked on a ‘Next’ button to begin installation. I clicked a couple more times and ended up installing Office three times on the same PC! Not only would none of the Office apps run any longer, I couldn’t uninstall the thing either. After some perseverance I managed to uninstall and reinstall Office again as I described in the Office 2013 forums.

This week I’ve been asked to review a social media report, which I’ll try to do on the weekend and post here. If there’s anything else you need me to review or want my opinion, please contact me, preferably by Twitter.

I had to be home quite early a couple of weeks ago, so I rode to work on my motorbike. I left home extra early and after filling up with petrol the battery had gone and I couldn’t restart the bike. The Green Flag motorcycle breakdown truck arrived in less than an hour and kept me regularly updated by text message – I thoroughly recommend them as a breakdown service.

A couple of days later they sent me a questionnaire to complete and return to them. I can’t remember the last time I completed a paper feedback form, and I don’t understand why they didn’t use an online tool to save costs – and I’d probably have filled it in by now rather than put it on the desk in the ‘to do’ piling tray.

And finally, last but by no means least, the Howard family have finally moved to Sky. It started when I contacted BT Vision, which I’ve defended and promoted to everyone who would listen over the last few years. The tipping point though was calling them to ask for the Sky Sports channels. The increased cost put the service on a par with Sky, which I didn’t mind, but I had to pay to upgrade my BT Vision box to the latest version to accept the Sky Sports channels. I didn’t even mind this, but I was annoyed that even the latest version of BT Vision doesn’t support HD channels. So I compared Sky, Virgin and BT packages. Virgin was about £30 a month more expensive than Sky for what we all wanted. Sky was £10 more than BT Vision if I included the HD channels, which we have gone for.

The most impressive thing about moving from BT Vision to Sky has been the speed and communication. It took three days from ordering online to an engineer coming to the house and installing Sky. The phone line and broadband are due to be switched over on Monday, ten working days after I’d ordered Sky. I keep receiving text messages of the latest status, and it’s all very impressive. Sky even contacted BT to let them know I was leaving. 

I’ll let you know how the phone and broadband transition goes – I already have the router waiting to be plugged in on Monday.