That seemingly safe PDF you receive may not be as innocuous as it looks, warns Washington Post security guru Brian Krebs. Writing in today’s online edition, Krebs reports that PDF-format owner Adobe is warning of security vulnerabilities. According to Krebs, the company plans to release a fix Tuesday so that its software updates at the same time that Microsoft sends its weekly operating system update. Put a note in your calendar now to have your company’s computers updated Tuesday. Meanwhile, be on the lookout for a blizzard of PDFs even from addresses that you know. A good rule of thumb: if you’re not expecting a file from someone and the tone of the email doesn’t sound like your acquaintance, send a short note and ask them to confirm they sent you a file.
FTC’s Washington, D.C. headquarters. Image via Wikipedia
News around the blogosphere is rampant with warnings about the Federal Trade Commission‘s update to the documents used to explain and enforce actions regarding testimonials and endorsements. The big issue for online marketers is that spam blogs and blogs must disclose when a material connection is present between themselves as publisher and a post — even if that post is a review.
With my big disclosure that I am not an attorney, and this is not legal advice, I don’t understand why legitimate businesses are concerned. Isn’t disclosure a good business practice? Certainly anyone reading this blog follows these sort of guidelines. Creating a spam blog is easy. For that matter, we own multiple web properties that publish reviews. If we accepted payment (the FTC says “cash or in-kind payment”) to publish a review then the review is considered an endorsement. As an endorsement, the review then falls under advertising guidelines. But as I told group at a review site earlier this week, “You have always been responsible for what you publish online” Nothing has changed in that regard.
The FTC’s Guides are updated sporadically and these provisions don’t take effect until December. On top of that, the FTC can make life miserable for bad businesspeople, but the FTC’s administrative actions are different from the FTC Act. Yes, as good businesspeople you need to follow FTC guidelines and not be like the cretin I once advised about the FTC’s Mail Order Rule. “What is the penalty,” this person asked when I advised that their subscription model could be considered to be in violation of the FTC’s rules. Businesspeople who weigh penalties against knowingly violating rules and laws should be dealt with quickly.
Now the FTC has some more ammunition to go after people who create a new site on a different server through a variety of names every week. Placing a fake review site in the public and using good SEO tactics to rank for well-paying keywords is easy. I can name more than a hundred people right now who have the skill sets across editorial, design, marketing and technology to put such a site in place tonight between the time they get home from work and the time they go to bed at a reasonable hour. The point is that they don’t do that kind of thing, you don’t do that kind of thing and people who follow best business practices have nothing to worry about.
If you want to read the rules for yourself, here is a PDF link to The Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising. Disclosure: Neither Chairman Leibowitz nor President Obama nor any person affiliated with the federal government and specifically the Federal Trade Commission, made any payment regarding this review of the new Guides or an incentive to provide a link to the FTC’s site. It does get rather silly, doesn’t it?
Executive Summary: The FTC is there to catch the bad people. Still, talk with your marketing agency or attorney about a blanket disclosure and make sure your policies regarding accepting gifts or payments for goods and services you promote are up to date.
I love magazine subscriptions. I especially love free magazine subscriptions, but I love all sorts of print. Magazines, newspapers, catalogs. How many marketers do you know who still keep a copy of Famous Catalogs on their bookshelf between a PHP book and Robert Spector’s book about Amazon‘s business model called Get Big Fast?
In a world of Kindles, on demand cable television and smartphones, print may be dying as a media, but the print layout is something many still seek. Google Reader add-on Feedly is maybe the best RSS platform I’ve ever used. And now Google itself enters the fray with Google Fast Flip, currently in development in Google Labs, but available to all. Fast Flip is just about the coolest news platform ever.
Enter the microsite to be greeted by your choice of periodical, subject or popular stories (with links to the most popular in each category). The periodicals are simply A-list: The Washington Post, BBC and The New York Times are just a handful of the news periodicals available. Subject-specific periodicals like Billboard, Cosmopolitan and Popular Mechanics are also here. Fast Flip gives a thumbnail view of a periodical page. Text links float around the top or bottom (Google is always testing, after all) although simply clicking the thumbnail itself brings forward a copy of that publication’s online article. Subjects are on target for world events. Today’s topics include Nigeria, Facebook, Pakistan, Tsunami — actual news. A recommended link will undoubtedly make smart use of Google’s algorithms and create a newsstand populated by your previous choices, biases and likes. In its quest for increasingly granular micro-targeting, Google started with big brands and refines their content to the reader’s biases.
What’s not to like about a fast Google rendering with a familiar New York Times logo showing that someone was at least paid to edit and fact check the article? Fastflip isn’t the end of print. Print already ended. We’re simply watching its slow death now. But the thin-slicing of Google information about its users and search patterns are fast resulting in something that could easily converge with YouTube and challenge CNN or the BBC with enough video content. That’s a future phase. Right now, FastFlip seems content to be an electronic newsstand.
Executive Summary: Google’s Labs features enhancements and new services you should stay on top of to see where the search giant is headed as it morphs into an information services company. The latest foray, Fast Flip, reproduces the online pages of traditional print media in an appealing filmstrip layout.
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