What Is Tag Management & Why Should You Care?

Over the last 15 years, marketers have seen an explosion in the number of digital marketing tools available to them, from a few dozen major email, analytics and advertising services at the beginning of the century, to as many as 2,000 marketing cloud applications today, according to Scott Brinker of ChiefMartec.com.

Sounds great for marketers, right? Yes and no.

While marketers now have nearly unlimited choice in the number of solutions they can use to engage new customers, they are also increasingly bedeviled by the management of all these sophisticated applications. More than ever, they must coordinate with their company’s software developers and IT department to get these applications up and running.

Throw in the number of fragmented customer data sources that each of these siloed applications generate, and this may not be the “Golden Age of Marketing” that some believe it to be – at least not yet.

That’s where tag management comes in.

What Is Tag Management?

Tag management is a new foundational platform that enables marketers to easily connect, manage and unify their digital marketing applications (e.g., web analytics, search engine marketing, email service provider, advertising, social technologies, etc.) without a lot of ongoing development work.

A tag, in this case, is simply another name for a piece of data-collecting code that a vast majority of digital vendors now require their customers to embed on their web pages and mobile apps.

These tags often collect visitor behavior information, but can also be used to launch product functionality such as live chat, advertising or surveys.

With tag management, marketers or developers deploy one single tag on their pages – a master tag, so to speak – and then use an intuitive web interface to add, edit or remove any additional vendor tags in a fraction of the time it would take via manual software coding.

Many tag management solutions have a “tag marketplace” that enables marketers to click on a vendor logo, add their account details and other information, decide which sites and pages to load the tag on and hit publish. The vendor solution is automatically deployed via that master tag without touching the web pages.
Tag management also works with mobile apps, where the same agility applies – install the tag management solution once and reduce the cycles needed to change analytics data points or deploy mobile solutions.
The real star of tag management, however, is something called “the data layer” — the behind-the-scenes data that drives customer interactions in web, mobile and other digital channels.

The data layer resides between the application layer, comprised of various mission-critical digital solutions, and the experience layer that users interact with. Through the creation and optimization of this data layer (via tag management), organizations can easily standardize the data definitions used by each application, which enables them to sync their applications more easily.

image courtesy of Tealium

Think of the data layer as a “control plane” that allows marketers to correlate and share customer data between applications.

The data layer is greatly enhanced by complementary visitor segmentation and profile enrichment tools, such as those offered by some providers (including my employer, Tealium) that deliver real-time segmentation and additional data distribution capabilities.
This is key for creating real-time interactions. For the above reasons, the data layer is a highly strategic part of the modern digital marketing technology stack, allowing these disparate tools to work harmoniously together for the first time.

Why Should You Care About Tag Management?

Tag management offers many benefits across the organization. Below are three core scenarios and related benefits to get excited about:

*Bring Order To Chaos – With marketers using an increasingly complex array of solutions than ever before to engage customers, digital marketing has become a chaotic burden. Tag management reduces complexity for both marketing and development resources, and allows marketers to move faster and launch campaigns easier than ever before.

Tag management can also significantly increase website performance by reducing the number of tags firing on each page (tag bloat is often a main cause of site performance degradation). This, in turn, helps increase online conversions and revenue.

*Build Your Own Marketing Cloud – Some marketers believe they need to be tied to one marketing cloud vendor – such as Adobe, Salesforce.com or Oracle – for both convenience and the promise of simple data integration. But the truth is, no one cloud can be everything to everyone.

Marketers need ultimate flexibility to choose the best solutions for their unique business needs. Tag management, through that unifying data layer, enables marketers to use any solution they want, whether it’s from a marketing cloud or from a best-in-class point provider, and still have them work together.

Additionally, the same visitor profile can easily be shared across your entire marketing technology stack, leading to unified messaging across channels and devices.

*Unlock Your Marketing Potential –Tag management helps marketers and their organizations in more diverse ways than perhaps any other digital marketing solution. At a core level, tag management helps increase marketing agility, reduce costs, and boost web site performance.

At a more strategic level, it helps improve data governance and control, maximize marketing technology investments, streamline data integration processes, and drive more profitable, real-time customer interactions across all digital touch points.

Another under-rated bonus of tag management is that it helps unify internal teams by reducing technology complexity, both in managing mission-critical applications and uniting key customer data.

One of my favorite customer quotes is from a marketing executive at U.S. Auto Parts Network who once told me tag management “is the first solution both marketing and IT could agree on.”

Marketing is entering an exciting new era. Thanks to the emergence of new technologies and best practices, marketers are on the cusp of achieving what some refer to as the “Holy Grail” of marketing — the ability to deliver consistent, personalized, real-time experiences to customers across channels and devices.
Ironically, the only thing standing in their way is too much technology and data, and the inability to effectively manage it. Through tag management and a sound technology strategy, marketers can easily cross into that next marketing frontier.

The Complexity & Confusion Of Tracking Without Tag Management

Tag management is a buzzword right now, but it’s not one of those vaporware phenomena. In this case, the buzz is legit. The tag management space has seen massive growth in the last two years thanks to strong vendors like Tealium, Ensighten and Signal, along with the introduction of Google Tag Manager.
In a survey report from Econsultancy published in June 2012, 73% of marketers using a tag management system (TMS) said it speeds up their ability to run marketing campaigns, with 42% describing it as “significantly faster.”
But to truly understand and appreciate the benefits of tag management, it helps to have a grounding in the traditional underpinnings of online tracking.

What Is A Tag, Anyway?

In the earliest days of online advertising, they were referred to as Web Bugs. Advertising networks needed a way to record interactions and ad activity across thousands of websites. According to Wikipedia:

“Originally, a web bug was a small transparent GIF or PNG image that was embedded in an HTML page, usually a page on the web or the content of an email. Whenever the user opens the page with a graphical browser or email reader, the image or other information is downloaded. This download requires the browser to request the image from the server storing it, allowing the server to take notice of the download. As a result, the organization running the server is informed when the HTML page has been viewed.”

Wikipedia

Today, we speak about tags more generally, such as a snippet of code that is placed on a website on behalf of a third-party to accomplish a specific purpose. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of legitimate uses for website tags, from analytics to remarketing, conversion tracking to surveys, even A/B Testing.
Nearly every web technology vendor utilizes a tag of some sort. Google AdWords alone has multiple tag types, include conversion tags, remarketing tags and custom audience tags.

The Most Common Types Of Tags

Two of the most common tag types used by many vendors are image pixel tags and JavaScript tags. (In truth, many JavaScript tags also make use of image pixels. For example, did you know that the Google Analytics code snippet actually produces a 1×1 image pixel request to google-analytics.com?)

A Google Analytics Tag

The invisible pixel request method has been around for years, and is still a primary way to transfer data to a third-party. The image pixel request is sent with one or more data-points about the visitor and/or their activity.
For example, when the Google Analytics pixel is fired, the request is sent back to Google’s servers with information like the title of the current page, page URL, screen resolution, etc. JavaScript tags are more complex, and often make use of either first-party or third-party cookies. The tag may set a new cookie, or read data from a cookie that was previously set.
Using our Google Analytics example again, the GA tag sets one or more first-party cookies on the visitor’s browser which contain information like their unique visitor ID, campaign names, date of last visit and more. A cookie is used to identify whether the visitor has been to the website in the past or should be considered a new visitor.

What Has Tagging Looked Like Thus Far?

Traditionally, adding these marketing or measurement tags to a website was kind of a beating — especially for large sites. Why? Because each tag vendor has specific instructions for when and where to install it and, in most cases, marketers have to go through IT to get any changes made to the site.
Here is an actual excerpt from the tag implementation instructions from a leading ad network:

Install tags across all pages of the website where tracking is desired, with the exception of pages that end in .aspx (.asp is OK) or any page that references the Apollo moon landing (this breaks the tag, our engineers are working on it). Further, tags should be placed in the body section of the HTML, not too close to the top but as far from the footer as possible. If you encounter situations where existing JavaScript code interferes with {Vendor Name} tag, please remove the tags from all pages and start over using a newer version of your operating system. Finally, tags must be manually typed in each time. Do not try to copy and paste tag code, as this can result in perfect implementation which might yield unexpected results.

I kid, of course. But in my experience, this isn’t too far off.

A Hypothetical Example

So imagine — you’re a marketing manager who just helped launch a fancy new website. Now you are dealing with the various online marketing vendors your company has contracted with, and each of them are requesting their tags to be installed on the website “ASAP as possible” (as Michael Scott from The Office would say).
Fast forward six months and three IT nastygrams later, and you think 95% of the tags are properly installed and working on your fancy new website. Of course the website is spiffy, but now you are noticing something else… it is SLOW to load.
Hmm…I wonder what could have changed? You only added a bunch of extra browser requests on every single page requesting data from vendors spread out all over the solar system. But never mind…it is worth it because now you have sophisticated remarketing lists, an email marketing system that is integrated with your CMS, an affiliate program that is running on auto-pilot and killer metrics in your web analytics platform.
Fast forward another six months. The affiliate thing didn’t work out, and you’ve outsourced your remarketing campaigns to a high-end vendor (that has its own set of new tags which had to be installed). But did the old tags get removed? Nope.
Why not? Well, you didn’t want to bother IT with “another ticket request,” plus you didn’t feel like absorbing all the negative feelings from IT considering they “did you a favor” by spending six weeks installing the tags initially. Honestly, it’s not going to hurt anything to leave them right? This is what happens — I’ve seen it time and time again.
Give me any ten websites and I’ll show you seven of them that have old or unused tags installed in the HTML code, slowing things down and accomplishing absolutely nothing. (Editor’s note: some in the industry have expressed concerns about that old code continuing to send data to vendors that are no longer partners.)
Hopefully this helps tell the backstory of tag management and why it’s being seen as the holy grail by so many marketers. Stay tuned over the next several weeks as we dive deeper into tag management use cases, challenges, benefits and best practices.

How To Apply Statistical Significance In Business Marketing

Some tests are easy to analyze. Is Superman stronger than Charlie Brown? Maybe we know the answer going into it and just need to prove we’re right, or maybe the data is heavily skewed in one direction.
But some tests are harder to analyze. Who is stronger — Superman or General Zod?
When the data don’t show a clear overwhelming winner, researchers and analysts leverage statistical significance calculators to determine if their findings are valid. But when we use the words “statistically significant” what do we really mean?
The academic definition of statistical significance focuses on the reliability of a statistic. The most common representation of reliability comes in the form of a metric called a “confidence interval”. A 95% confidence interval means that if we repeated a test, the observed result would hold true 95% of the time.

Depending on the application and purpose of the analysis, analysts can be comfortable with a wide range of confidence intervals. But in business, when was the last time you were 95% confident that something was true?

What’s Your Risk Tolerance In Marketing?

Let’s put this in perspective and test your tolerance for risk:

1. If you’re 95% confident that redesigning your email template will yield more secondary purchases, would you make the change?
2. If you’re 75% confident that using a certain ad will yield an improvement in associated transactions, would you use that ad instead?
3. If you’re 60% confident that making a change to your homepage will generate more leads, would you make the change?

Chances are you said yes to at least the first two questions and most folks probably said yes to all three. Does that mean you’re a maverick and don’t care about making responsible decisions?
Quite the contrary.

The Differing Worlds of Business & Academia

A few years ago, I got into a conversation with an old professor about business statistics. I asked him “what’s my target confidence interval for making a good business decision based on statistics?” His response has stuck with me for years as a reminder that business isn’t academia because there’s money to be made on each decision.
He said, “In academics we strive for high confidence intervals because our success hinges on proving a point. In business, if you tell me I’ll have a 51% likelihood of achieving more success with option A over option B then I’m likely to prefer option A.”
While my professor’s response was an exaggerated example, his point was that understanding probabilities and statistics around the likelihood of success enables us to make calculated risks.
If you have a 75% chance to make a million bucks and 25% chance to lose $1,000 then odds are you’re up for the bet. But if you have a 55% chance of making a million and a 45% chance of losing a million then chances are you’ll pass on the opportunity.
My point is that while confidence intervals and statistics are highly valuable tools to improve business decision making processes, your minimum acceptable confidence interval — and the associated tolerance for risk — should reflect your position.
If the proposed opportunity is high risk and low reward then you should be more calculated. But if it’s low risk and high reward then maybe it’s worth taking a chance.

5 Tips For A Successful Conversion Rate Optimization Program

If your business is struggling to compete online, it might have less to do with your competitive landscape than with your conversion optimization program.
The simple fact is that many companies can — and do — impede their website optimization efforts by having information silos, territorial teams, groups with tactical mindsets, aversion to change, and an unproductive focus on vanity metrics.
All of the above derail progress even before you factor in other companies who may have better or more mature conversion practices than your own.
Sound familiar? Here are five tips for tackling these internal conversion killers.

Tip 1: Start Small

People are afraid of change. Business organizations are no different. There’s a good chance that you’ll encounter some resistance while trying to implement your conversion rate optimization (CRO) program. Dealing with internal politics can be stressful, so it’s a good idea to have a plan for handling these challenges early on.
If you’re just starting out, it’s often best to keep your CRO initiatives small. This way, you won’t attract too much attention and won’t be too dependent on outside support. For instance, you can focus on testing and tuning unimportant landing pages first (e.g. a landing page from one of your marketing campaigns) and slowly build your case towards the more important, high-traffic ones.
The key here is to appear as non-threatening as possible. The last thing you want is to attract the attention of risk-averse constituents in your organization and get your project shot down (or shut down) before you have a chance to prove its merits.
Departmental silos and territorial thinking are among the biggest obstacles you’ll face in the course of moving your optimization projects forward. Conversion rate optimization requires a lot of teamwork, often from people who have disparate orientations and agendas. Even if you start out as one-person program, you’ll find that the future success and continuity of your program depends on getting more people on board, especially since the resources you need might be in another department.
By keeping your projects small at first, you can get things done with minimal help from designers or IT folks. Use these opportunities to make enough gains to help persuade the naysayers to support your efforts.
If you want your CRO program to move forward, minimize its scope and concentrate on demonstrating its value to the company. You can always increase the scope of your program when you’ve gained wider support.

Tip 2: Expand KPIs Beyond “Traditional” Conversions

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are metrics which let you know how near or far you are from achieving certain business goals.
Of course, one of the most valid KPIs for evaluating your marketing strategy is your conversion rate. But it shouldn’t be the only one you should be monitoring. It might be paradoxical, but the easiest way to fail in conversion rate optimization is to obsess over your conversions.
Taken as a single metric, your conversion rate won’t tell you about visitor intent, where people get stuck, or why users drop off without converting. Worse, if you have a high enough conversion rate, you can be misled into thinking that your website (or any of your channels, for that matter) is doing well even if your revenues are actually stagnant or down.
After all, you can just as easily increase your conversion rate by eliminating all non-converting traffic or drastically cutting down prices. Both are legitimate ways to boost your conversions, but they’re also not very smart.
If you want your optimization program to succeed, then learn to see how CRO fits into the big picture. And the only way to do that is to use metrics that matter to your business. If you’re an e-commerce retailer, for instance, you’d want to know the effect of your optimization activities on average order value and how many times a customer purchases from you. Or, if you’re in B2B, you might want to track conversions side by side with lead quality or the length of your buying cycle.
The key here is to focus on KPIs that are tied to profit improvements. This way, you’re not only bringing tangible benefits to your company, you’re also strengthening the financial case for conversion rate optimization in your organization.

Tip 3: Review Your Entire Funnel

Another downside to focusing just on conversions — and thinking of only purchases or leads as conversions — is that it’s a great way to chase obsolescence over time.
The top of the funnel matters. Sure, many of the people who visit your site to get a specific question answered will not become leads, and they will not become customers. But providing meaningful answers to people in that stage gives you a shot at getting remembered when the time comes that the visitor gets past the research stage and is ready to buy something.
PDF downloads, time spent on page or time spent reading for informational pages, blog visits – these are all things that you should pay attention to even if your calls-to-action, your lead forms, or your shopping cart were not necessarily in play.
Each part of the funnel has a different strategy attached – the top of the funnel may be search engine optimization and partner sites heavy, the middle of the funnel may involve keeping your promises upstream, and the bottom of the funnel can involve forms that do not ask for the world in return for a PDF, or a cart that people can understand and operate without giving them the urge to physically harm their laptops.
Each part of the funnel will require a different tactic, and a different success metric.

Tip 4: Know Your Tools & Tactics

It’s entirely possible to have a sound strategy but to fail at the tactical level. Companies with successful CRO programs have a knack for selecting and using the best possible tools to support their efforts.
If one of your objectives is to identify the sources of friction on your site, then your tactics could include primary user research and usability testing. If your objective is finding out what elements in your site attract visitor attention, then you’ll need the help of heatmaps and other visual analysis tools. Your tactics would vary depending on the objectives of your program (and, of course, your available resources).

The use of heatmaps like this one created by AttentionWizard is a

good tactic for learning about visitor attention on your site.

In order to choose the right tactic, it’s imperative that you learn the strengths and limitations of the activities and tools at your disposal. Usability and accessibility testing, for instance, is very useful in uncovering the myriad of issues that your visitors encounter on your site; but, they’re not of much help if you’re trying to discover how you can make your website more persuasive in convincing visitors to click the buy button.

Likewise, A/B testing can’t give you meaningful results if your website is making visitors jump through a lot of hoops. Even the most persuasive copy will fail to move the needle if your site is plagued with a haphazard information architecture and visitors can’t find what they need.

So, aside from ensuring that your tactics correspond to specific objectives in your program, you should make sure that the prioritization of your activities makes sense. Remember that like most programs, your conversion rate optimization initiatives operate under certain resource constraints. It pays to pick the right tactics so you can prioritize budgetary and time allocations when implementing your program.

Tip 5: Don’t Forget To Monitor & Evaluate For Impact

Monitoring and evaluation activities basically involve checking your accomplishments against your KPIs. Monitoring helps you learn if your projects are going as planned, and if not, what difficulties are keeping you from doing things that need to be done. Regular monitoring therefore allows you to resolve problems as they arise, change tactics and direction when necessary, and revise and improve your strategy if it seems ineffective in attaining a goal.
Evaluations, meanwhile, are valuable sources of information on the short and long term effects of a CRO program on the organization. Evaluation activities are done not only to gauge how successful your program was in achieving the desired outcomes or goals, but also to identify unintended effects. As such, evaluations often involve looking at not just the financial outcomes but also the influence of the program on leadership processes and cultural elements.
Done right, the monitoring and evaluation of your CRO program can provide lessons for a smoother way of implementing program activities. More importantly, data from these activities can give you insights on which tactics were most effective (and which ones were not) in getting your desired results, which in turn helps you create a better program.

Understanding Your Business

Businesses face different sets of challenges related to conversion rate optimization. Some of them are benign and easy to work through – others, well, not so much. It helps to understand early on which challenges you will be facing, so you can gradually make your CRO program better.

7 Limitations Of Big Data In Marketing Analytics

As everyone knows, “big data” is all the rage in digital marketing nowadays. Marketing organizations across the globe are trying to find ways to collect and analyze user-level or touchpoint-level data in order to uncover insights about how marketing activity affects consumer purchase decisions and drives loyalty.
In fact, the buzz around big data in marketing has risen to the point where one could easily get the illusion that utilizing user-level data is synonymous with modern marketing.
This is far from the truth. Case in point, Gartner’s hype cycle as of last August placed “big data” for digital marketing near the apex of inflated expectations, about to descend into the trough of disillusionment.
It is important for marketers and marketing analysts to understand that user-level data is not the end-all be-all of marketing: as with any type of data, it is suitable for some applications and analyses but unsuitable for others.
Following is a list describing some of the limitations of user-level data and the implications for marketing analytics.

1. User Data Is Fundamentally Biased

The user-level data that marketers have access to is only of individuals who have visited your owned digital properties or viewed your online ads, which is typically not representative of the total target consumer base.
Even within the pool of trackable cookies, the accuracy of the customer journey is dubious: many consumers now operate across devices, and it is impossible to tell for any given touchpoint sequence how fragmented the path actually is. Furthermore, those that operate across multiple devices is likely to be from a different demographic compared to those who only use a single device, and so on.
User-level data is far from being accurate or complete, which means that there is inherent danger in assuming that insights from user-level data applies to your consumer base at large.

2. User-Level Execution Only Exists In Select Channels

Certain marketing channels are well suited for applying user-level data: website personalization, email automation, dynamic creatives, and RTB spring to mind.
In many channels however, it is difficult or impossible to apply user data directly to execution except via segment-level aggregation and whatever other targeting information is provided by the platform or publisher. Social channels, paid search, and even most programmatic display is based on segment-level or attribute-level targeting at best. For offline channels and premium display, user-level data cannot be applied to execution at all.

3. User-Level Results Cannot Be Presented Directly

More accurately, it can be presented via a few visualizations such as a flow diagram, but these tend to be incomprehensible to all but domain experts. This means that user-level data needs to be aggregated up to a daily segment-level or property-level at the very least in order for the results to be consumable at large.

4. User-Level Algorithms Have Difficulty Answering “Why”

Largely speaking, there are only two ways to analyze user-level data: one is to aggregate it into a “smaller” data set in some way and then apply statistical or heuristic analysis; the other is to analyze the data set directly using algorithmic methods.
Both can result in predictions and recommendations (e.g. move spend from campaign A to B), but algorithmic analyses tend to have difficulty answering “why” questions (e.g. why should we move spend) in a manner comprehensible to the average marketer. Certain types of algorithms such as neural networks are black boxes even to the data scientists who designed it. Which leads to the next limitation:

5. User Data Is Not Suited For Producing Learnings

This will probably strike you as counter-intuitive. Big data = big insights = big learnings, right?
Wrong! For example, let’s say you apply big data to personalize your website, increasing overall conversion rates by 20%. While certainly a fantastic result, the only learning you get from the exercise is that you should indeed personalize your website. While this result certainly raises the bar on marketing, but it does nothing to raise the bar for marketers.
Actionable learnings that require user-level data – for instance, applying a look-alike model to discover previously untapped customer segments – are relatively few and far in between, and require tons of effort to uncover. Boring, ol’ small data remains far more efficient at producing practical real-world learnings that you can apply to execution today.

6. User-Level Data Is Subject To More Noise

If you have analyzed regular daily time series data, you know that a single outlier can completely throw off analysis results. The situation is similar with user-level data, but worse.
In analyzing touchpoint data, you will run into situations where, for example, a particular cookie received – for whatever reason – a hundred display impressions in a row from the same website within an hour (happens much more often than you might think). Should this be treated as a hundred impressions or just one, and how will it affect your analysis results?
Even more so than “smaller” data, user-level data tends to be filled with so much noise and potentially misleading artifacts, that it can take forever just to clean up the data set in order to get reasonably accurate results.

7. User Data Is Not Easily Accessible Or Transferable

Because of security concerns, user data cannot be made accessible to just anyone, and requires care in transferring from machine to machine, server to server.
Because of scale concerns, not everyone has the technical know-how to query big data in an efficient manner, which causes database admins to limit the number of people who has access in the first place.
Because of the high amount of effort required, whatever insights that are mined from big data tend to remain a one-off exercise, making it difficult for team members to conduct follow-up analyses and validation.
All of these factors limit agility of analysis and ability to collaborate.

So What Role Does Big Data Play?

So, given all of these limitations, is user-level data worth spending time on? Absolutely — its potential to transform marketing is nothing short of incredible, both for insight generation as well as execution.
But when it comes to marketing analytics, I am a big proponent of picking the lowest-hanging fruit first: prioritizing analyses with the fastest time to insight and largest potential value. Analyses of user-level data falls squarely in the high-effort and slow-delivery camp, with variable and difficult-to-predict value.
Big data may have the potential to yield more insights than smaller data, but it will take much more time, consideration, and technical ability in order to extract them. Meanwhile, there should be plenty of room to gain learnings and improve campaign results using less granular data. I have yet to see such a thing as a perfectly managed account, or a perfectly executed campaign.
So yes, definitely start investing in big data capabilities. Meanwhile, let’s focus as much if not more in maximizing value from smaller data.

How To Create A Content Marketing Culture At Your Company

Creating a content marketing culture at your company can be quite the obstacle. Making even the smallest of modification to company policies and procedures can be extremely difficult, so how do you go about changing the entire company culture?
For most, creating a culture of content will require a shift in mindset from the top down – starting with the executives, and ending with each and every employee across departments and teams.
When you’re seeking such a dramatic shift, begin your campaign with senior management.

Convince Your Boss

Management must be on board to drive the cultural shift and successfully change the mindset of the rest of the company. Because of this, the first step in creating a content marketing culture is convincing the boss to invest in content marketing.
When pitching higher-ups on content marketing, focus on the following:

• Pitch Personalization – Personalize your pitch to your executives. Try to explain content marketing in a way that relates back to their personal interests. Talk to the CFO in financial terms, the CMO in terms of marketing objectives.
• Education – Educate the executives on what content marketing is and what it can do for your business.
• Objection Handling – Come prepared with rebuttals to common content marketing objections, including upfront cost and ROI.
• Competitive Situation – Showcase what your competitors are doing with content marketing. Explain how you can fill the gaps and present the same information better.
• Strategy – Lay out your plan from beginning to end, including timelines, implementation, content creation, promotion, and measurement.

Get Everyone On The Same Page

Once you have management buy-in, take the necessary steps to make sure everyone is on the same page with your content plans.
Explain the purpose of your content strategy. Why is the business getting started with content marketing? What are the business goals and objectives toward which you’re working?
Additionally, be sure to share the content marketing process. How will you brainstorm ideas? What does the creation process look like? Where and how will you promote your content?
Sharing these details will help each employee understand their role in the content marketing process, as well as the “big picture” going forward.

Invest In The Vision

As soon you roll out the company’s content marketing vision to your employees – put your money where your mouth is and invest in the vision. If you truly want to transform the culture at your company, you will need to provide the tools and training your employees need to succeed.
Also, consider investing in new hires – a content leader or better, a content team, to manage the content process. This team will serve as your internal spokespeople for content by illustrating the value of content to the rest of the company.
It should be responsible for content strategy development, ideation, and content creation. Additionally, the team should be in charge of cross-department coordination, and continually developing creativity internally.
Though your marketing team will have to work hand in hand with the content team in order to achieve success with content marketing, employing a team to focus specifically on content strategy and creation has its advantages.
Not only does having a content team tell your employees you’re serious about making this culture shift, but it ensures your content strategy won’t fall by the wayside or get put on the backburner.

Enable & Encourage

Though your content and marketing teams will manage the process from content strategy to measuring ROI, every single employee should be able to and encouraged to participate in the content process. Start by including different teams and departments in brainstorming sessions.
Some of your employees spend more time with customers than others, but each one can bring something to the table. Through these brainstorming sessions, you will you gain new perspective for content ideas while the collaborative environment can be great for team building.
Also, encourage employees to contribute to content creation, and let them know that it’s okay to spend work time doing it. Provide guidelines so the content will be closer to meeting the standards necessary for publishing, but also have members of your content team tasked with editing employee-generated content.
Staying “on brand” through tone, style and voice is important, and your editors can ensure that content created by colleagues fits the bill before it’s published.

Reward Top Participants

Not feeling appreciated is the number one reason Americans leave their jobs, so employee recognition needs to be a high priority. Fortunately, your content culture may create more opportunities for employee recognition. Make it a point to reward your top content performers – first and foremost by recognizing their accomplishments in front of their superiors and peers.
This can be done in many ways – perhaps in a company-wide meeting, or even in a “company announcement” type of email. Be sure to highlight the content created, and any results – traffic, social metrics or ROI – to further showcase the value of content and possibly inspire others to contribute, while giving your employee the credit deserved.

Practice What You Preach

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, creating a content marketing culture at your company starts with management. To successfully foster a content-focused culture, higher ups need to participate and lead by example.
Sure, some employees will participate without needing much convincing, but others will mimic what others are doing – especially upper management.
Like hiring a leader or team devoted to content, C-suite-level participation also sends a message to other employees – this “content” business is here to stay.  When some of the highest-ranking managers start participating in content creation, others will certainly follow suit.
Creating a content marketing culture won’t be easy – but it can be done. From getting management buy-in and investing in the vision to enabling, encouraging and rewarding employees who contribute, successfully shifting the mindset across an organization will take perseverance and a lot of hard work.
While you shouldn’t expect the employees’ mindsets to change overnight, following the above steps will help put your company on track to fostering a culture of content in no time.

Anonymous Member Placed on FBI Terrorism Watchlist

Jeremy Hammond, one of the well-known Anonymous members, who took part in some of the hacking group’s largest cyber acts, can be now found in the FBI’s terrorism watchlist.

 

Some leaked document from the NY state division of criminal justice services revealed that Jeremy Hammond was classified as a possible terrorist organization member and instructed not to advise him he was on a terrorist watchlist. The document in question is dated from around the time of the hacker’s arrest and suggests that he was put on a Terrorist Screening Database compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. However, it is unknown why the FBI offered to include the Anonymous member on the watchlist.

Of course, civil liberties groups were concerned that a person with no record of terrorist behavior should be classified in this way, unless the US government has expanded definition of terrorism to including hackers.

Jeremy Hammond was arrested three years ago and sentenced in the end of 2013 to ten years of jail time for participation in Anonymous high-profile hacks. For example, he took part in the release of 5 million emails from the private intelligence company Stratfor. The hacker was prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and there was never any suspicion that he was involved in terrorist organizations. In addition, Jeremy has always insisted he is an activist and not a criminal, let alone a terrorist.

In response, the Terrorist Screening Center responsible for administering the database claimed they could neither confirm nor deny whether anyone may be included in the database, because it would impair the government’s ability to investigate and fight terrorism.

It is known that the guidelines governing terrorism watchlists are cast very wide to include “acts dangerous to human life, property or infrastructure”, which are “intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population” or “affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction”. The representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union admitted that the approach of the American government to the watchlists was quite controversial, since it had a very broad definition of terrorism, along with a poorly defined standard of “reasonable suspicion” with many exemptions.

Infectious Porn Video Back on Facebook

The new pretend-porn trojan was fast enough: it has infected over 110,000 Facebook users in a couple days. It works as follows: one of user’s Facebook friends shares a porn video and it appears in the user’s news feed. After it is clicked, it asks the user to install an update for the Flash software, instead installing malware.

 

The malware tags the infected user’s friends in a post containing porn video clip. The clip itself can’t be played, as it asks to download a (fake) flash player to run. Of course, instead it downloads the actual malware. Security experts revealed they have been monitoring the new malware for the last 2 days where it managed to infect over 110,00 users and remains on the rise.

Once the trojan infects someone’s account, it re-shares the video adding up to 20 tags of their friends. This helps it spread faster than previous malware, which was distributing itself through private messaging on Facebook. The experts dubbed the new malware “Magnet” and explained it was able to hijack victims’ keyboard and mouse movements.

Of course, this is not the first time porn videos have been used in Facebook-targeted malware scams. For example, last summer, there was a scam designed to look like a YouTube video of someone stripping in front of their webcam.

In response, Facebook said they were aware of the latest malware, and were doing what they could to stop it spreading further across the network. Facebook used several automated systems in order to identify potentially harmful links and stop them from spreading. The company also explained that these malware varieties are normally hosted as browser extensions and distributed via links on social networks. Facebook blocks links to the scams, offers cleanup options and extra measures to make sure its users are safe.

Journalist and Anonymous Member Sentenced to 63 Months

Barrett Brown, a journalist and one-time member of Anonymous, was recently sentenced to 63 months in prison. His supporters from across the web had hoped the 33-year-old would be able to walk free with his 31 months of time served for “merely linking to hacked content”. However, the court decided it in the other way: Brown, who used to act as a spokesman for Anonymous hacking ring, has got more than twice that sentence. Moreover, he was also ordered to pay over $890,000 in restitution and fines.

 

Barrett Brown was sarcastic about the sentence, saying that the government must have decided that since he did such a great job investigating the cyber-industrial complex, they’re now sending him to investigate the prison-industrial complex.

On the other hand, Brown was facing a possible combined sentence of more than a century. However, when prosecutors dropped some charges against him following a plea deal, his sentencing parameters were reduced.

The industry observers pointed out that long sentence would set a precedent for journalists, because it means that if anyone shares a link to publicly available content without knowing what’s in it, they could be prosecuted.

Barrett Brown is known as an investigative journalist, essayist and satirist. He was working for the Onion, Vanity Fair, the Huffington Post, and the Guardian. The journalist has split with Anonymous in 2011. In addition, it is known that Barrett founded Project PM – this is a crowdsourced investigative thinktank disclosing the abuses by companies in surveillance.

He was arrested in September 2012 for allegedly threatening a federal agent in a YouTube video. After being held for 2 weeks without charge, Brown was indicted on charges of making an online threat and conspiring to release personal data about a government employee. After two more months, Barrett was indicted on a dozen of further charges connected with the hacking of private intelligence contractor Stratfor in 2011. In the meantime, the hacker who actually hacked Stratfor was already caught and sentenced to 10 years term in prison, while Brown was punished for merely linking to hacked content.

Brown remains a great speaker. In his statement to the judge before his sentencing, he said he regrets about posting the “idiotic” threatening videos, while pointing out that those were made in a manic state brought on by drug withdrawal. At the same time, Barrett also criticized the government for its methods in pursuing the case. He was particularly concerned that contributors to Project PM also might be indicted under the same charges.

After the judge announced the ruling, Barrett struck a different tone, claiming that for the next 32 months, he has a great job – he will get free food, clothes and housing while seeking to expose wrondgoing by Bureau of Prisons officials and otherwise report on “news and culture in the world’s greatest prison system”.

The interesting fact is that Ladar Levison, the operator of the Lavabit email service used by Edward Snowden, attended the court for the verdict. As you may remember, Levison preferred to close down his service rather than let the FBI in.

WikiLeaks Will Sue Google and US Government over Email Revelations

The online service is determined to fight back in an escalating war with both the tech giant Google and the American government, claiming that it is going to start legal action the day after demanding answers for the Google’s handover of WikiLeaks’ Gmail contents to the US government.

 

The problem is that the targets of the investigation weren’t informed until 2.5 years after secret search warrants were issued and served by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. WikiLeaks claimed it would be looking at legal action not only with Google, but also those who actually turned in the “illegal and arbitrary” order. The whistleblowing service also insists that any information used from the taking of documents this way should be considered as biased and illegal and therefore can’t be used in the proceedings.

WikiLeaks insists that was a clear violation of rights. In response, Goggle pointed out that its policy is to tell people about government requests for their data, except for the cases when they are gagged by a court order. Unfortunately, this happens quite frequently. Google also claimed that it has challenged many orders related to WikiLeaks and pushed to unseal all the documents related to the investigation.

The problem is that WikiLeaks received the notification of the court order from Google only before Christmas 2014 and published it online. As for the tech giant, it insisted that the legal process was initially subject to a nondisclosure order, which barred the company from disclosing the very existence of the legal process. In the meantime, WikiLeaks doesn’t even know whether Google even went to court at all, and if it didn’t, that would not be good, because Google is expected to litigate on behalf of its subscribers.

It is known that the Google court order targeted 3 employees of the whistleblowing service: two journalists and a spokesperson. According to the wide-ranging scope of the order, all email content, including all messages (even deleted ones), drafts, login data and contact lists had to be handed over to the US law enforcement.

WikiLeaks also pointed to Twitter as an example of best practices for tech firms responding to government requests. The microblog notified the target of a similar demand from the law enforcement, and the warrant in question could be fought in court.