Posts filed under 'Database marketing'
July 8th, 2008
Web site security. Although this is a technical discussion, it can have a serious marketing and business impact. Especially when you are trying to drive visitors to your site and it is down for two weeks because the data has been hacked.
Microsoft has taken the unusual step of issuing a security bulletin for something called “Rise in SQL Injection Attacks”. Although not a particularly attention-grabbing title, this is an exceptional subject for a security bulletin because it’s not about a specific Microsoft product that’s patchable, but rather coding practices in general.
“SQL Injection” is a technique used to “hack” websites, and unfortunately, a great deal of websites are vulnerable to it (some estimates suggest “hundreds of thousands”, but it may be many, many more). Hackers typically use automated tools to find vulnerable sites, and then “inject” malicious code that can do any number of things. In recent weeks there has been a huge surge in the volume of these attacks.
These range from simply adding code that causes a virus infection on a visitors browser, to editing or changing any content on your website, or in the extreme case, completely wiping out the website. The consequences of an attack should be pretty clear - for less extreme attacks, you may not even realise there’s a problem, but it’s more likely that the attack may cause inconvenience or embarrassment. In the extreme case, a well-crafted attack can have disastrous implications to a business-critical website, totally disabling a business, or result in the theft of credit card data and associated financial loss.
Links to documentation on SQL injection and coding best practices:
SQL Server Injection Protection
Preventing SQL Injections in ASP
How To: Protect from SQL Injection in ASP.NET
Coding Techniques for protecting against SQL Injection in ASP.NET
Filtering SQL Injection from Classic ASP
Security Vulnerability Research & Defense Blog on SQL Injection Attack
June 12th, 2008
Imagine a site that you frequently visit, let’s say amazon.com. Given the exhaustive amount of information you initially find that it is difficult to navigate. But over time, you realize you’re finding the Web site is easy to navigate, more comfortable, and it gives you the information you need. Almost second nature. Is this a result of you simply learning how to navigate the site? Maybe not…
Here’s an article from MIT Tech review about websites that recognize the cognitive style of visitors by the way they click around and adapt their interfaces accordingly:
“The researchers’ initial studies show that morphing a website to suit different types of visitors could increase the site’s sales by about 20 percent. While quite a few sites, such as Amazon.com, offer personalized features, many of those sites adapt by drawing information from user profiles, stored cookies, or long questionnaires. The Sloan system, however, adapts to unknown users within the first few clicks on the website by analyzing each user’s pattern of clicks.
In addition to guessing at each user’s cognitive style by analyzing that person’s pattern of clicks, the system tracks data over time to see which versions of the website work most effectively for which cognitive styles.”
June 3rd, 2008
So you’ve created a great email newsletter. You’ve built your email lists. You’re ready to send it out. But take a step back and consider whether you’ve offered an “opt-out” option. Not only does including an opt-out make good marketing sense but, under the CAN-SPAM Act, it’s also federal law.
We’ve been doing enewsletters for years - both for clients and for our own company - and we sometimes sign up our clients and prospects because we think they’ll find the content relevant to what we’re working on for them or where they’re at in their business. But occasionally, someone will opt-out.
And that’s OK.
From a marketing point of view, it’s better to have subscribers opt-out than be annoyed with having received it and not know how to stop them from coming.
Perhaps more importantly is that not including an opt-out option is now a federal crime subject to up to $11,000 in fines every time it happens. In 2003, the federal government passed the CAN-SPAM act, which requires all commercial emails - those email messages “whose primary purpose is advertising or promoting a commercial product or service, including content on a Web site” - to include an opt-out procedure. Read more about the CAN-SPAM act here.
Updates to CAN-SPAM - On Tuesday, May 13, of this year, the FTC updated the CAN-SPAM laws to talk about the nature of the “sender” of promotional emails. Read more here.
Moral of the story - giving clients and subscribers an opt-out option is easy and the law.
April 16th, 2008
What do Dr. Pepper drinkers and Chic-fil-A eaters have in common? They’re typically Republican. Likewise, those who have Fig Newtons in the cookie jar are likely supporters of Senator Clinton, and Bear Naked granola chompers are supporters of Senator Obama. Today’s New York Times reports that political pollsters are increasingly turning to “microtrending” to slice and dice the electorate down to what brands of food and drink we like and what we do in our free time. Once they do that, then they know how to communicate with us and what message to send.
Microtrending is certainly something the big consumer-goods marketers have done for a while now, and politicos are catching on. In fact, Mark Penn - he formerly of “chief Clinton strategist” fame - is actually a leader in the field. His book - Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes - was published last year.
Locally, you’re still likely to see mailing lists and other marketing communications tactics being tailored based on general demographic information like age, household income, etc. But the data we parse locally is just the surface of what you can find out about the general public when you’re marketing to them. So, what’s in YOUR fridge?
