Does social responsibility protect the company name?

Negative information about businesses is omnipresent. Even much-admired businesses, such as Apple Inc., must deal with negative information, as Apple discovered when consumer complaints surfaced in 2010 about the antenna design of its iPhone 4. Negative information tends to spread faster than positive and, because of increased usage of social media and the Internet, businesses are likely to be confronted with more — not less — negative information about their companies in the future. While a business may not always be able to control the spread of negative information, it can try to mitigate the potential damage from negative information in different ways.

An increasing number of companies invest money in corporate social responsibility initiatives, in part to build general goodwill for their organizations. However, it's not clear how effective corporate social responsibility initiatives are in strengthening customer resistance to negative information, compared to other tactics that can enhance a company's reputation, such as investing in product or service quality or customer care. Does doing good help protect a business's reputation against negative information it may be confronted with in the future?

Not completely, suggests some recent research, conducted by researchers at MIT, Michigan State University, and IE Business School in Madrid. The survey asked 854 customers of a commercial bank about their opinions of the company and how they would react to negative information about it. The results of the survey showed that the company's reputation for corporate social responsibility had a greater effect on consumers' willingness to overlook negative information about the company than did the company's reputation for being customer-oriented (defined as the extent to which a business is viewed as being caring and attentive to customer needs) or for being oriented toward service quality. These results suggest that a dollar invested in corporate social responsibility initiatives would buy greater insurance against negative information than a dollar invested in either service-quality orientation or customer orientation.

Despite the positive impact of corporate social responsibility on customer resilience to negative information, further results tells a cautionary tale. In a second experiment involving 133 participants, researchers exposed customers to negative information of specific types, relating to a company's corporate social responsibility, service quality orientation or customer orientation. In this second experiment, a reputation for corporate social responsibility did not protect a service business against negative information related to service quality or concern for customers; what it did was help protect a company's reputation more narrowly against negative information related to corporate social responsibility. Something similar held true for service quality and customer orientation as well. Customers who began with a high opinion of an organization's customer care, for example, were less likely to be influenced by new negative information about the organization's customer care.

In light of this research, businesses should not expect investments in corporate social responsibility to provide blanket insurance against any negative information they may be faced with in the future. Corporate social responsibility is more effective in strengthening customer resistance to negative information when the majority of customers have low levels of service-related or product-related expertise. In the case of expert customers, however, a company's reputation for good quality has a stronger influence on customers' resistance to negative information than corporate social responsibility does.

© Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2011

iPads run amok: Does your company need a tablet policy?

Computerworld - When RehabCare executives started asking IT for the Apple iPad several months back, CIO Dick Escue didn't skip a beat.

Unlike many of his peers in the healthcare industry, he had no real qualms about security, despite the specter of compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

Nor did he have misgivings about users loading up the devices with personal stuff like photos and music. As for worries about putting an additional support burden on his IT staff -- according to Escue, not a problem.

While these concerns have other IT shops scrambling, the RehabCare team was well ahead of the game. Thanks to a widespread deployment of the Apple iPhone a couple of years back, the company had a formal deployment strategy for the iPad and, potentially, for other emerging tablets.

Rather than trying to ban mobile units or deploy them haphazardly, RehabCare's IT group implemented new corporate policies and standardized on mobile management technologies that opened doors for the iPhone, and now the iPad, to participate in the enterprise in a secure, centrally managed fashion.

Based on this prior experience with the Apple iPhone, Escue was already well aware that users, not the IT department, are rapidly becoming the driving force behind new technology adoption -- a trend some call the consumerization of IT. (For more on the "bring your own technology movement," see Computerworld's recent video chat with Carfax CTO Gary Lee.)

"There was a time when work was where you got new technology, but that day is over thanks to unbounded innovation in the consumer technology world," explains Escue, who heads up technology efforts for RehabCare, a nationwide operator of acute care and rehabilitation hospitals.

With the recent introduction of the iPad 2, Motorola Xoom, RIM PlayBook, and new versions of the Samsung Galaxy Tab, tablet mania is taking the enterprise by storm.

Gartner estimates that 69.8 million media tablets will be shipped in 2011, and analysts and forward-thinking tech managers say it's time for IT execs to do more than simply take notice of that surge.

As with the iPhone before it, the iPad is cropping up in all corners of the enterprise, brought in by C-level execs, sales folks and worker bees who purchased the device for personal use and, now hooked, are hungry to use it on the job.

Regardless of whether staffers work on their own tablets or are given corporate-issued gear, the influx means IT needs a systematic approach for managing, tracking, securing and supporting these devices, just like they do for any other corporate computing platform.

At a recent Computerworld Premier 100 event, Gary Lee from Carfax chats with technologies editor Johanna Ambrosio about the issues and challenges surrounding letting employees choose their own technology, including smartphones, tablets and even notebooks. This independent paper from senior analyst Jon Collins at FreeForm Dynamics considers how Web-based security threats are evolving, within the context of IT trends including mobile, home computing and other forms of remote access that could potentially increase the attack surface of the companies. It defines the scale and types of threat, what to look for in a corporate web security solution and compares the different types of technological approach available to companies and the processes that need to be considered for effective protection.

Read now.

Security is not an option. This KnowledgeVault Series offers professional advice how to be proactive in the fight against cybercrimes and multi-layered security threats; how to adopt a holistic approach to protecting and managing data; and how to hire a qualified security assessor. Make security your Number 1 priority.

Read now.

Social-networking sites have revolutionized how businesses use the Internet. Instead of relying on faltering newspapers to find job candidates, companies can access thousands of potential employees through Facebook and Twitter. But social-networking sites have also left businesses vulnerable to new security threats. So are they tools to be used or security traps to be avoided?

Read now.

Games company Sega becomes latest hacking victim

LONDON (AP) — Video game developer Sega said that its online database has been hacked, making it the latest in a string of games companies to be attacked.

The company sent an email to users of the Sega Pass system on Friday to warn them that email addresses, dates of birth and encrypted passwords had been stolen from online database.

The email stressed that no financial information was at risk and that it has launched a probe into the extent of the breach. It is not immediately clear how many users were affected.

"Please note that no personal payment information was stored by Sega as we use external payment providers, meaning your payment details were not at risk from this intrusion," the company said.

The company says it had taken its Sega Pas system offline and all users' passwords have been reset.

The security breach came after Sony Corp. and Nintendo suffered similar attacks by hackers.

In April, Sony's Playstation Network was the victim of a huge security breach that affected more than 100 million online accounts. The company suffered a second data breach earlier this month.

The hackers' group that claimed credit for the Sony attack, Lulz Security, had also said it was responsible for the recent breaches of the U.S. Senate computer system and the CIA website.

The group did not appear to be responsible for the Sega intrusion. It said on Twitter Friday that it wanted to help Sega "destroy the hackers" that attacked it.

5 Ways To Make Google Analytics Benefit You

Google Analytics is absolutely free and there are many benefits that come with installing it on your site. We've listed the top five things you can do as soon as you start tracking your site with Analytics:

1. AdWords advertisers can make Analytics available right in their AdWords account as a separate tab through a simple linking process. Advertisers can review extra data for their online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals), and pick out their highest performing ads.
   You can also use Analytics to track other Google products including AdSense, Blogger, and Google Sites.
2. See which pages drive the most pageviews on your site from the Top Content report. This report can answer questions you have about your most or least effective pages - for example, a high bounce rate indicates a landing page that should be redesigned or tailored to the specific ad which links to it.
3. Which groups of visitors became customers or did something else important to the success of your business? You can get key insights for these questions by setting up goals.
   
4. Grant other people in your company or organization access so that they are restricted to viewing reports in a profile or given full access to help manage your entire account as an administrator.
5. There are over 80 reports with customizable, drag-and-drop interfaces. You can also create your own reports with Custom Reporting, create the segments you want to see with Advanced Segmentation, or view multi-dimensional views of your data with Motion Charts.

Magnifying Business Chances

Unlike magnifyin,g lens, search engine optimization does not only make a business company appear "virtually" bigger. Rather, it makes the business company "actually" bigger by using the information superhighway or what we commonly refer to as the World Wide Web.
The world today is mostly influenced by the World Wide Web, and we know that for a fact. Almost all trades and industries make use of it in order to heighten their status. All that consumers should do is to simply key in their queries using certain keywords in search engines like Google and Yahoo!. However, recently, there are not only thousands but millions of corporate names in the internet. With this colossal count of names in the online market, chances are slim for most companies to get to the top chart and get seen by potential clients and costumer. Thus, this is where search engine optimization comes in, but how?
Well, here is the simple rationale behind this optimization process. Considering the aforementioned claims, search engine optimization develops websites of businesses in a way that it gets seen by people easily on the internet. It makes use of various ways and means in order to do so. And ranging from small-scale businesses to medium sized ones and up to the leading business names in the globe, this kind of optimization tool proves to be a really expedient means of increasing business market and eventually, sales.
On that note, search engine optimization also has other advantages aside from merely magnifying the existence of business companies in the World Wide Web. This trend also spares a company from the hassles of marketing the business using other ways and means. With this optimization process, business market broadens to the optimum level without undergoing so many hassles. Also, this process of marketing a business helps in saving company funds. As compared to using other media of marketing, doing it online is definitely less costly.
Further still, search engine optimization allows not only potential clients and customers to reach the company but also other companies. With the company optimized, it would be easy for other corporate bodies to access and deal with the said company and conduct possible business to business transactions and relationships which would pave a way for a business expansion and which is certainly good and advantageous for the company.
Finally, borrowing a line from raffle draw events, "the more entries you have, the more chances of winning too!" But well, in this case, it should rather go this way, "the more optimized a business gets, the more chances it gets at snagging clients and profit too!"

SEMRush GEO

How To Offer Local Businesses And Attract More Clients, How To Finds Local AdWords Advertisers? There’s an easy way today to find companies who are using AdWords locally and help their business grow.
For those who missed out the news, just recently was launched a free(beta version) tool from Semrush team called ‘SEMRush GEO‘ which let PPC Fans and SEO Professionals, and bloggers to find local AdWords Advertisers and clients with just a few mouse clicks.

The best part of this free tool is that shows sites advertising in Google AdWords and mapped on Google Maps by their addresses, so you have a full overview of all companies located in a particular area you’ve choosen and know what are the most profitable. For Whom SEMRush GEO May Be Useful?

For bloggers this tool can be useful to spy company that already buy AdWords and improving their AdWords campaign. E.g. you can offer them local businesses, help put their business online and attract more clients (e.g. help them to set up a blog, promote it, and so on). Even, you can offer local AdWord ads on your blog and help them reach a wider audience. How Does Geo Semrush Works?

First at all, go on geo.semrush.com. If you drag the map and zoom in and out you can view regions with lots of AdWords advertisers and zoom in to view their exact locations. In general, the map show you three main simbols:

    * A red circle
    * A Gold circle
    * A little windows with all company informations

Start this typing the key term “Jersey City”(ps: the image below show ‘New York’ as key term, it was a mistake). As I said above, this tool let you see red circles in the map. What does it means? In brief, they represent regions where AdWords advertisers are located. The bigger the circle are, the more advertisers are located in this region. Simple right? You can drag and zoom the map to find regions you’re looking for, with a maximum of 100 regions, sorted by number of advertisers, are shown for current map.

Now, click on the region “Jersey City”

Next, you should see Golden coins in the map which show locations of AdWords advertisers. The bigger the coin are, the more AdWords Ads this advertiser has. If you move the mouse over each Golden coins, a windows will appear with all details about the company, in particular it show you:

1. Company name(e.g. TheLadders), 2. Company domain name(e.g. TheLadders.com), 3. Link to Google Maps for this domain name, 4. Company address(e.g. 137 Varick street, New York, NY 10013-1105), 5. Number of AdWords keywords that SEMRush knows for this domain name (e.g. 41961). 6. Report button.

Any Adwords ads in the left sidebar(image above) link to SEMRush’s AdWords report which let you track many things about the company sites you’re interested in. Here are just a few element you can check through this strong tool:

    * Pos: It show you any position ranking for the keyword you select.

    * Volum: Average volume of searches for this keyword per month.

    * Cpc: Cost per click based Google Adwords keyword tool.

    * Url: You can know which url of the site is ranking for that keyword.

    * Traffic: For each keyword you know the percentage of traffic that refer that keyword.

    * Cost: Cost of traffic in percentage that the website get for a particular keyword.

    * Competition: Advertisers activity in Google Adwords for this keyword.

    * Results: Number of results for this keyword known by Google.

    * Keyword: You can know for what keyword your site competitors is ranking for. If you are intoaffiliate marketing you can also know what are the company is ranking.

How Does To Use All This Data? A Pratical Example: For instance, in little time you could create a list of local, hotels, restaurants and other shops advertising on AdWords and start contacting them with an offer they can’t refuse. You could say something similar…

    “Hi. My name is Harry. I want to help your company attract more clients and sell additional products and make you increase your montly income stream. I’d like if we can working together. I can provide proven blogging services and I’d like to schedule a 30-minute consulting call with you to see if I can help with your specific business needs. Hope in a quick answer. All the best, Harry”

Using online marketing with offline marketing is a perfect mix to improve profit. As I said above if you’re offering blogging services, then this is a great opportunity for you to help clients make more money. Also, with the free(beta version) you can also see local AdWords advertisers in some country, say like in US, UK or India.