Posts tagged Fail
Pinterest Fail: 70% of Brand Engagement is Generated by Users [Study]
May 2nd
Pinterest use by brands in the fashion retail and automotive industries is lacking. Only 18 percent of fashion retail brands pin items on Pinterest, and more than 75 percent of Pinterest engagement for the automotive industry is driven by users.
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The 7 Step, No Fail Formula for Finding and Placing Guest Posts
Apr 23rd
Within the context of Google’s constantly changing algorithm updates, it’s critical to keep finding new ways to build links, develop good content, and show authority. A solid guest posting strategy is a great way to achieve all of these goals and market your products, services, and ideas to new audiences. But before you dive into [...]
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Twitter's Fail Whale Is (Hopefully) Dead, Meet Success Loch Ness
Apr 22nd
At one time, Twitter’s most familiar icon wasn’t its perky little bluebird. It was the Fail Whale, the image that Twitter displayed when the service was down or disrupted.
The Tale Of The Whale
The Whale was the work of artist Yiying Lu, whose now-iconic image was picked up by Twitter in 2007 to jokingly commemorate the site’s accumulated days of outages. Since then, the image of a whale borne aloft by several tiny birds has inspired its own Twitter fan club and Facebook page, along with an online repository of dozens of illustrations.
But now that Twitter’s online performance has dramatically improved, there’s a new Twitter icon that you probably will never see: the Success Loch Ness.
On the evening of April 8, following the Shorty Awards, Lu and other employees from Twitter were hanging out at The Pony Bar in New York City, when Tom Spano, the events coordinator at Twitter, asked Lu, “Since Twitter’s now became more and more stable, there’s less chance for folks to see your image. How about something opposite from the Fail Whale? Success Whale?”
The proposal was shouted down, Lu describes on her blog, because it didn’t rhyme. Instead, Lee Semel, the founder of the Shorty Awards, suggested the Success Loch Ness – named after the infamous Loch Ness Monster, often called Nessie. And the rest, as Lu suggests, is history.
Twitter Gets Its Act Together
Go back far enough in Pingdom’s logs of Twitter’s uptime, and you’ll find what could be the nadir for the site: an abysmal 92% uptime in March 2007, equivelent to being down more than two days in that month alone – just after Twitter hit the big time at South by SouthWest (SXSW). For the next few months, Twitter’s uptime averaged about 98% – better, but still not great. In Dec. 2007, Twitter moved to a new data center, which helped significantly. Twitter still suffered occasional outages during the next few years, including slowdowns when Michael Jackson died in 2009, a denial-of-service attack that same year and more slowdowns during the 2010 World Cup.
But over time, Twitter slowly improved its performance to the point where the service now reports stellar uptime results. In seven out of the last twelve months, for example, Pingdom credited Twitter with a perfect 100% uptime.
All that has put Twitter in a celebratory mood.
Here’s Twitter’s Jason Seed holding both the original Fail Whale and the new Success Loch Ness:
The launching of the “Success Loch Ness”, taking over from the “Fail Whale” vine.co/v/btLajquBZg0
— Jason Seed (@jasoncseed) April 12, 2013
And Lu’s own Vine showing the Success Loch Ness rearing its head:
Birth of the #SuccessLochNess, Vined, with Musika! vine.co/v/bUOzVuvwQlM
— Yiying Lu (@YiyingLu) April 18, 2013
Too Bad “Success Loch Ness” Doesn’t Make Any Sense
It’s great that Twitter has been able to move beyond the Fail Whale, but while its replacement may be far more positive, the new creature has its own grammatical, style and content issues. Loch Ness is a lake, after all. The Loch Ness Monster, if it exists, lives in the lake. More to the point, Success Loch Ness just doesn’t trip off the tongue with quite the same ease.
Image courtesy of Yiying Lu.
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Hitting Back At Hackers: Why “Strikeback” Is Doomed To Fail
Apr 9th
Guest author Corey Nachreiner, CISSP, is director of security strategy for WatchGuard Technologies.
Between agenda-pushing hacktivists, money-grubbing cyber criminals, and — more recently — belligerent nation states, there is no shortage of attackers breaking into networks, stealing trade secrets and generally wreaking havoc throughout IT infrastructure.
Even the U.S. government has noticed, with the latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) warning that the country is the target of a major cyber espionage campaign from China. In fact, network penetrations have become so commonplace that President Obama recently signed a cyber-security executive order in hopes of fortifying our defenses, and encouraging the government and critical private sector organizations to share intelligence.
(See also World War III Is Already Here – And We’re Losing.)
Considering this deluge of aggressive and costly security breaches, it’s no wonder that some people are getting frustrated enough to contemplate striking back directly against our attackers. While giving cyber criminals a taste of their own medicine certainly sounds appealing, most forms of so-called “Strikeback” have no place in private business.
What Is Strikeback?
The idea of launching a counter attacks against cyber criminals is not new. Security geeks at information security conferences have been discussing counter-hacking and proactive defense for years.
After all, many in the cyber security community are just as capable of breaching systems as the enemy (if not more so). In fact, the “black hats” often leverage tools and code created by “white hat” security professionals. Lately, though, this idea of striking back against attackers has shifted from lighthearted fantasy to potentially disturbing reality – some that security companies have even begun offering strikeback solutions.
There are different ways companies have started approaching strikeback initiatives. They have loosely evolved into three general categories:
Legal Strikeback: This is the least offensive form of strikeback. It’s where organizations, in cooperation with the authorities, gather as much intelligence as possible about attackers — typically by following the money trail — and then use any legal maneuvering possible to try and prosecute attackers.
Passive Strikeback: This is essentially cyber entrapment. An organization installs a sacrificial system, baited with booby trapped files or Trojan-laced information an attacker might desire.
Active Strikeback: In this approach, an organization identifies an IP address from which the attack appears to be coming, and launches a direct counterattack.
What’s Wrong With Strikeback?
Unfortunately, direct strikeback measures have huge inherent risks:.
Targeting: The biggest problem with strikeback is that the Internet provides anonymity, making it very hard to know who’s really behind an attack. It’s all too likely that strikebacks could impact innocent victims. For example, attackers have started to purposely plant false flags into their code, suggesting it came from another organization in order to sabotage that company.
Geography: Another key issue is that Internet crimes tend to pass through many geographies and legal jurisdictions. Domestic strikebacks invite potential legal problems, but cross-border actions have even wider ramifications.
Legal: Additionally, most strikeback activity is illegal. It is against the law for the average person to track down and punish a burglar who ransacked a house, and the same principles hold true for cybercrimes. If an organization uses a booby trapped document to install a Trojan on the attacker’s network, it is technically breaking the same type of computer fraud and abuse laws that the attacker broke to steal information in the first place.
Revenge: When it comes down to it, strikeback is simply revenge. If a network has already been breached, striking back against the attacker typically doesn’t recover stolen data or repair damage that has already been done. It’s almost always better to pursue legal investigations and prosecutions through the proper channels.
Strikeback simply doesn’t belong in private business. It offers no real advantages to most organizations, and it carries serious risks that far outweigh the short-lived satisfaction of revenge. Instead, companies should focus their security strategies on well-implemented, carefully monitored, multi-layer defenses designed to keep cyber criminals from breaching their networks in the first place.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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How Not to Run a PPC Campaign, Inspired by eBay’s AdWords #Fail
Mar 14th
Earlier this week, the Harvard Business Review blog asked, “Did eBay Just Prove that Paid Search Ads Don’t Work?” Apparently the company turned off their AdWords ads in a third of their markets and found no appreciable loss in sales. Much in the same way that Ask Jeeves did back in 2005. So the true [...]
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RIAA Slams Google For Anti-Piracy Fail
Feb 22nd
Frustrated and bitter that laws like SOPA and PIPA have yet to get pushed through Congress without those pesky constituents objecting to turning the U.S. government into muscle for entertainment industry, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is taking out its anger on Google. The music industry lobbying group is accusing the search engine giant of failing to effectively demote search results that lead people to those nasty little download sites.
In a blog post on the RIAA site yesterday, Steven M. Marks, EVP & General Counsel, RIAA made it clear that the music copyright association thinks that Google, despite making some headway, remains a day late and a dollar short.
“We recognize and appreciate that Google has undertaken some positive steps to address links to illegal music on its network,” said Steven M. Marks, the RIAA’s executive vice president and general counsel. “Unfortunately, our initial analysis concludes that so far Google’s pledge six months ago to demote pirate sites remains unfulfilled. Searches for popular music continue to yield results that emphasize illegal sites at the expense of legitimate services, which are often relegated to later pages. And Google’s auto-complete function continues to lead users to many of those same illicit sites.”
(This isn’t the first time: see also RIAA Slams Google’s Anti-Piracy Efforts, Demands Even More Unreasonable Measures.)
Testing The Claims
I wanted to see if the RIAA might be overstating its concerns, something that they’ve been known to do before. So I performed a little one-man experiment, using the song “Some Nights” by Fun. as the guinea pig. Your mileage may vary, of course, but my quick-and-dirty test revealed that the RIAA may have some valid claims.
A search for “Fun. album” returned a first, second, and third page of results that were absent of any results that would seem to contain illegal downloads, with the bottom of the third page containing three DMCA takedown notices that point to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s ChillingEffects.org for more information.
But down in the “Searches related to” section of all of the results pages, “fun. some nights download” was among the listings, and a click-through pulled in the plenty of links to aggregate MP3 download sites, mixed with a few legitimate sites, like iTunes (#3), Amazon (#7) and the official video on YouTube (#8).
As for the RIAA’s claim that Google’s AutoComplete will suggest search terms that could lead users to sites containing unlicensed copies of songs, I found this was indeed true. By the time I typed “fun. some”, Google had filled in four results:
fun. some nights
fun. some nights lyrics
fun. some nights meaning
fun. some nights mp3
On a whim, I turned on SafeSearch to see if that would make a difference. Results did differ on some search results, such as “fun. some nights download”, where legitimate sites (like the Wikipedia entry for the album) were moved up slightly on the first page of results, but the sketchy download sites were still in full-glory display.
I should also note that the RIAA did not take Microsoft’s Bing service to task, even thought the same experiment on Bing yielded very similar results, even in the auto-complete results. Type in “fun. some” on the Bing home page and you get these helpful suggestions:
fun. some nights lyrics
fun. some nights
fun. some nights meaning
fun. some nights torrent
fun. some nights video
fun. some nights album download
fun. some nights mp3
fun. some nights review
Search Engines As Police?
Based on these (admittedly quick) search tests, it seems like the RIAA has a point, and Google is failing to block apparent pirate sites on its search results, and its demotion policy announced in August 2012 isn’t really working all that well, either.
But let’s be clear: Google has said all along it wasn’t going to block site results from any site unless it receives a specific copyright removal request from the rights owner.
“Only copyright holders know if something is authorized, and only courts can decide if a copyright has been infringed; Google cannot determine whether a particular webpage does or does not violate copyright law. So while this new signal will influence the ranking of some search results, we won’t be removing any pages from search results unless we receive a valid copyright removal notice from the rights owner,” senior vice president of engineering Amit Singhal wrote back in August.
At the time, what Google said it would do was add a new signal to how it ranks search results.
“Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results,” Singhal stated.
The RIAA is contending in its statement this week that Google has failed to live up to that promise.
One has to wonder, though, if trying to keep up with the sheer number of sites that provide access to unlicensed media content is comparable to spitting on a forest fire. If the signal for page ranking depends in some way on number of takedown attempts, perhaps the RIAA and other rights holders are not sending enough signals. Or maybe these sites know who to game other ranking signals to boost their status on Google and Bing search results.
It is very easy to point fingers at Google and Bing and accuse them of not doing enough to keep people away from pirated media. If you forget, of course, that this not their job.
Complaining about the auto-completing results would seem to be a more valid concern, until you remember that there could be legitimate results for “download X.”
The RIAA wants to protect the rights of its artists and producers, a valid concern. But it is not clear at all that Google, Microsoft and the other search engines should be relied upon as key allies in the recording industry’s ongoing quest to stomp piracy. Search engines’ missions are to provide data, not analyze that data for legality.
Despite what they’re asking for here, I suspect even the most vehement anti-piracy activists would not care for some of the implications of a world where search engines were to undertake that goal.
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Surface Pro Scarcity: Colossal Fail Or Planned Demand?
Feb 11th
Microsoft Surface Pro customers, bedazzled by break-dancing pop-hop dance moves and flashy covers from endless Super Bowl-week commercials, were more than a little disappointed and wondering where the hell all these tablets were this weekend?
Fire Up The Wayback Machine
I didn’t want to buy a Surface Pro this weekend – or, really, ever – but a lot of what I was hearing over the Internet from the friends and colleagues this weekend reminded me of the exact situation that happened when the iPad 2 came out.
Faked out by advance reports that the iPad 2 would be sold outside of the Apple store, I went to local stores like Wal-Mart and Best Buy back in 2011 only to learn that each store only received one or two of the units to sell. Each.
So forgive me if this sounds familiar. After Microsoft’s Panos Paney blogged that the company was working to “replenish supplies as quickly as possible,” commenter Chris James responded:
“I went to three Best Buys, and two Future Shops. Sold out everywhere. Not one place had a display model to show off the Surface Pro either. Am I disappointed? Of course, I was really looking forward to ‘trading-up’ my iPad 4 for the Surface Pro, but most of all I am just blown away at the incompetence and total willingness to accept that failure as an option, and then make it seem as though it was a great success for Microsoft.”
Other commenters on the same blog entry were less charitable in their opinions. Wrote commenter RB255:
“What amazes me is that many reporters are helping to perpetuate this as simply a supply issue when, in fact, it was a blatant attempt to defraud the public. Microsoft did not ship ample supplies except in a few exceptions. Most Best Buy stores across the country received ONE unit each, and I know this for fact as I have been following up with research after trying to buy one on Saturday morning. Staples stores did not get any 128 model Pro in most stores and indicate that you will have to order them. You cannot order them online at either store. The Microsoft store claimed to have units on Saturday but they were holding them for people who had reservations. There was no publicity in advance of the launch about the reservation process, you couldn’t do it online, and the number provided online for the Microsoft stores was a call center who knew nothing about the reservations. The entire time that I was in the area of the MS store in Southpark Mall in Charlotte, NC, no one picked up any units. Do more research and then update your story with facts. Go check out Microsoft, Microsoft Store, and Surface Twitter and Facebook pages and look at the comments from consumers across the country. More did not get the Pro than did and those that did not tell the exact same story. This was not marketing, it was a manufactured ‘sellout’ and it was a FRAUD.”
Plan Or Fail?
It is easy to get riled up and start accusing Microsoft of manufacturing scarcity in order to ratchet up the demand for these tablets. Microsoft, naturally, will disavow themselves of such a dastardly plan.
But here we are, two years after the lessons of the iPad 2 launch that irked so many Apple fans, yet still managed to sell decent unit amounts over the long haul, and you can’t help but wonder if all of this scarcity is intentional.
Critics of this notion of planed scarcity will (rightly) ask why in God’s name would Microsoft deliberately hold back on units to sell? That’s an easy one: they don’t want a repeat of HP’s TouchPad debacle, when plenty of units were shipped to retailers on launch, coupled with a massive ad and marketing campaign. But despite plenty of units out on the shelves, many units ended up unsold and gathering dust in outlets like Best Buy and Fry’s. Ultimately, the units were returned to HP en masse, which led to the shuttering of the TouchPad line.
That scenario – Surface Pros sitting unsold on shelves and gasp! returned to Microsoft – would be the nightmare for Redmond, a PR disaster that would make Vista and Zune look like walks in the park. Rather than face that kind of failure, better to create the feel of high-demand and keep shelf stock low for now.
Because the other option is to freely admit that there is something seriously wrong with the supply chain that Microsoft is using to get these units into retailers’ – and ultimately customers’ – hands. Like someone-should-get-fired wrong.
It’s early yet, but I’m betting no one gets fired for any screw ups with the Surface Pro deliveries. Because you can’t screw up what was already planned.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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SEO Fail! 10 Most Commonly Overused Website Techniques
Jan 31st
Too often, websites pick up a technique just because another site uses it thinking it’s amazingly cool. But flashy techniques like infinite scroll and vertical scroll are probably hurting your user experience, SEO efforts, and conversion rates.
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SEO Fail! 10 Most Commonly Overused Website Techniques – Search Engine Watch
Jan 31st
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SEO Fail! 10 Most Commonly Overused Website Techniques
Search Engine Watch However, just because someone is doing it, even the biggest, baddest, coolest someone doesn't always mean you should as well. Here are some of the most commonly overused site techniques and why they're bad for users, SEO, and conversions. |
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11 Simple Conversion Strategies Many Product Pages Fail To Incorporate
Jan 23rd
Every e-commerce operation relies on the ability of its website to sell their products. Without the ability to have salespeople roaming the floor asking customers, May I help you?, businesses rely on the their website to sell, sell, sell. Many business owners rely on content to push the customer…
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