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http://hassassociates-online.com/articles/2013/03/07/five-ways-to-manage-your-digital-reputation/ Reputation is the key word. In fact, online digital reputation has never been more important. While a few years ago much of our personal information was still considered private, today cyber security expose more information about our lives than ever before. While many people don't think much about having a "digital reputation," especially in purchasing products online, information about almost all adult worldwide can be found online. Based from the survey conducted by ORC International, results have shown more than 89% of consumers research articles online before making a buying decision, while, 87% of them agree that a favorable review has confirmed their decision to purchase. And while our real life reputation is largely defined by us through our interactions with others, our online digital reputation defines how people perceive us - without ever having a single conversation. The fact is, a digital reputation can be incorrect, it may present only partial information and it might even allow for slander and online attacks to define us for others. Translating your brand's personality onto the web can be tricky, so here is our list of five simple steps that can help you get started. 1: Match your offline and online personas: When you're creating a Facebook page or a Twitter account, it should match your brand's personality in the real world. Choose a design language (colors, shapes, textures, fonts) that represents your brand's image. Next, ask yourself which social media platform is best suited for communication between you and your customers. You may not need to create an account on each one of them. Selecting the one most actively used by your target audience will make it more manageable for you. 2: Groom your search results: Your customers will rarely move to the second page of the Google Search results to find what they are looking for. Set a dis

Reputation is the key word. In fact, online digital reputation has never been more important. While a few years ago much of our personal information was still considered private, today cyber security expose more information about our lives than ever before. While many people don't think much about having a "digital reputation," especially in purchasing products online, information about almost all adult worldwide can be found online. Based from the survey conducted by ORC International, results have shown more than 89% of consumers research articles online before making a buying decision, while, 87% of them agree that a favorable review has confirmed their decision to purchase. And while our real life reputation is largely defined by us through our interactions with others, our online digital reputation defines how people perceive us - without ever having a single conversation. The fact is, a digital reputation can be incorrect, it may present only partial information and it might even allow for slander and online attacks to define us for others. Translating your brand's personality onto the web can be tricky, so here is our list of five simple steps that can help you get started. 1: Match your offline and online personas: When you're creating a Facebook page or a Twitter account, it should match your brand's personality in the real world. Choose a design language (colors, shapes, textures, fonts) that represents your brand's image. Next, ask yourself which social media platform is best suited for communication between you and your customers. You may not need to create an account on each one of them. Selecting the one most actively used by your target audience will make it more manageable for you. 2: Groom your search results: Your customers will rarely move to the second page of the Google Search results to find what they are looking for. Set a distinct and clear name for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube and other social networking site

The House of Representatives go for the second round of Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act as it passed legislation on Thursday. The newly granted powers are intended to stop computer security threats against a company's rights and property. But the definitions are broad and vague. The terms allow purposes such as guarding against "improper" information modification and ensuring "timely" access to information, functions that are not necessarily tied to attacks. Once handed over, the government is able to use this information for investigating crimes that are unrelated to the underlying security threat and, more broadly, for "national security" purposes, which is a poorly defined term that includes "threats to the United States, its people, property, or interests" and "any other matter bearing on United States national or homeland security." The bill's vague definitions like "cybersecurity purpose" and "cybersecurity system" also raise the frightening possibility of a company using aggressive countermeasures. If a company wants to combat a threat, it is empowered to use "cybersecurity systems" to identify and obtain "cyber threat information." But the bill does not define exactly how far a company can go, leaving it open to the possibility of abuse. The bill drew support from House Democrats, passing on a bipartisan vote of 288-127, although the White House repeated its veto threat on Tuesday if further civil liberties protections are not added. Some lawmakers and privacy activists worry that the legislation would allow the government to monitor citizens' private information and companies to misuse it. U.S. authorities have recently elevated the exposure to Internet hacks and theft of digital data to the list of top threats to national security and the economy. Though thousands of companies have long been losing data to hackers in China and elsewhere, the number of parties publicly admitting such loss has been

http://hassassociates-online.com/articles/2013/04/23/house-passes-cybersecurity-bill-as-privacy-concerns-linger/ The House of Representatives go for the second round of Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act as it passed legislation on Thursday. The newly granted powers are intended to stop computer security threats against a company's rights and property. But the definitions are broad and vague. The terms allow purposes such as guarding against "improper" information modification and ensuring "timely" access to information, functions that are not necessarily tied to attacks. Once handed over, the government is able to use this information for investigating crimes that are unrelated to the underlying security threat and, more broadly, for "national security" purposes, which is a poorly defined term that includes "threats to the United States, its people, property, or interests" and "any other matter bearing on United States national or homeland security." The bill's vague definitions like "cybersecurity purpose" and "cybersecurity system" also raise the frightening possibility of a company using aggressive countermeasures. If a company wants to combat a threat, it is empowered to use "cybersecurity systems" to identify and obtain "cyber threat information." But the bill does not define exactly how far a company can go, leaving it open to the possibility of abuse. The bill drew support from House Democrats, passing on a bipartisan vote of 288-127, although the White House repeated its veto threat on Tuesday if further civil liberties protections are not added. Some lawmakers and privacy activists worry that the legislation would allow the government to monitor citizens' private information and companies to misuse it. U.S. authorities have recently elevated the exposure to Internet hacks and theft of digital data to the list of top threats to national security and the economy. Though thousands of companies have

The website Songsrpeople.com looks a lot like other amateur-video sites. It is wallpapered with clips featuring "the most insane amusement park ever" and "your girlfriend's six friends." The site draws tens of thousands of visitors a month, according to audience measurement firms. It also has ads for national brands, including Target Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and State Farm. But Web-security investigators at a firm called White Ops contend that most of the site's visitors aren't people. Rather, they are computer-generated visitors, or "bots," designed to fool advertisers into paying for the traffic, says White Ops, which has blacklisted the site-and thousands more like it-so that ads from clients such as Zipcar don't land there. An anonymous representative for Songsrpeople declined to discuss the site's traffic but in an email called the White Ops methodology into question. State Farm said it was looking into the matter while Target declined to comment and Amazon didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. Authorities and Internet-security experts say tens of thousands of dubious websites are popping up across the Internet. Their phony Web traffic is often fueled by "botnets," zombie armies of hijacked PCs that are controlled from unknown locations around the world, according to Internet security experts. The sites take advantage of the simple truth that advertisers pay to be seen. This creates an incentive for fraudsters to erect sites with phony traffic, collecting payments-often through middlemen and sometimes directly from advertisers. "When you walk into this world, you walk with eyes wide open," said Brian Harrington, chief marketing officer at Zipcar, which ran a recent ad campaign, assisted by White Ops to filter out bogus traffic. "You know stuff is not real." At their most sophisticated, botnets can mimic the behavior of online consumers, clicking from one site to the next, pausing at ads, watching videos, and even putting items in shopp

hass associates review articles Think the Internet Leads to Growth? Think Again Remember the year 2000 in the months after the Y2K bug had been crushed, when all appeared smooth sailing in the global economy? When the miracle of finding information online was so novel that The Onion ran an article, "Area Man Consults Internet Whenever Possible?" It was a time of confident predictions of an ongoing economic and political renaissance powered by information technology. Jack Welch-then the lauded chief executive officer of General Electric (GE)-had suggested the Internet was "the single most important event in the U.S. economy since the Industrial Revolution." The Group of Eight highly industrialized nations-at that point still relevant-met in Okinawa in 2000 and declared, "IT is fast becoming a vital engine of growth for the world economy. … Enormous opportunities are there to be seized by us all." In a 2000 report, then-President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers suggested (PDF), "Many economists now posit that we are entering a new, digital economy that could inaugurate an unprecedented period of sustainable, rapid growth." It hasn't quite worked out that way. Indeed, if the last 10 years have demonstrated anything, it's that for all the impact of a technology like the Internet, thinking that any new innovation will set us on a course of high growth is almost certainly wrong. That's in part because many of the studies purporting to show a relationship between the Internet and economic growth relied on shoddy data and dubious assumptions. In 1999 the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland released a study that concluded (PDF), "… the fraction of a country's population that has access to the Internet is, at least, correlated with factors that help to explain average growth performance." It did so by demonstrating a positive relationship between the number of Internet users in a country in 1999 with gross domestic product g