Have you heard of the damage the Stuxnet worm has been causing businesses and their computer systems around the world? Have you heard of the huge impact it has had on cyber warfare? Did you know it is a USB transmitted malware that’s not that hard to stop? Have you heard of cases where entire customer lists are copied and stolen by former employees, upset that they were fired or just because they wanted more money from a competitor? Have you heard of people just walking into a company and copying all the private data stored there on a simple USB stick or on a smart phone and just walking out with it?

While we love our mobility and portability – who doesn’t love to run their business from a mobile phone when stranded in an airport for hours, waiting for their next flight? – there are serious security threats that come with the use of portable devices, especially if we don’t know what we’re doing. Enter data loss prevention, device control and endpoint security solutions, some of the best being brilliantly developed by Mirror Communications client CoSoSys. What you also might not know is that there are virtually none such solutions to protect Mac computers! Not only does CoSoSys provide such a business application, they also have just released a new verison of their Endpoint Protector 2009 for Mac device control and endpoint security solution!

What the new product does is make sure that while you’re traveling, you can still stay productive and complete tasks which require the use of portable devices, while staying safe from the threats I’ve mentioned earlier. The new release also offers companies a closer watch on what their employees are doing with files and data accessed on or copied to portable devices. Continue reading

Popularity: 1% [?]

A five-part series on online branding for businesses by Ryan Chaffin

1. What’s in a Name? Everything
2. SEO: Marketing in the New Millennium
3. PPC as a Model of Smart Advertising
4. Social Media: Highly Accessible Advertising
5. Freshening Up: Maintaining Your Brand Image

Social media is taking over. Blatant and bold as that statement may sound, it is the truth. You can either hop on the bandwagon or stay behind and figure out how you are going to catch up once the dust settles. Don’t believe me? Simply type the word “blog” into any search engine and tell me how many hits pop up. Facebook currently has over 400 million (!) active users. Twitter, a relatively new player in the social media field, has over 75 million users. Simply looking at those numbers and denying the prevalence of social media is willful ignorance. Continue reading

Popularity: 1% [?]

Guest post by Lauren Horn

Twitter presents the opportunity for you to connect with leaders in your industry, your peers and your target audience, while generating exposure and making connections. You have not only created your account, updated information, customized the look and feel of your page, but also begun tweeting up a storm. At this point, your following base should be through the roof, but you’re not seeing the results you anticipated, so now what?

So now, it’s important to remember that your page is just another marketing tool which ultimately needs to be promoted. Step back and first reassess your content and your purpose. Are you only tweeting about your product and services? Is your messaging consistent? How involved are you in the community? Are you following your target audience? Do you engage with your current followers? Are you listed? Do you utilize hashtags? These are just some things to consider. However, there are several ways to actually build a following. Below are some tips and tricks of the trade. Continue reading

Popularity: 1% [?]

Does any of you know the Rotring Tikky mechanical pencils? They are awesome! The best in the world if you asked me! And you would have a terribly hard time changing my mind! I fell in love with them back in secondary school. We first started seeing them when our teachers used them. Then some of the kids saw them in the specialized writing utensils stores and wanted to try them. They came back the next day to school, telling us how great they were, how much they loved them.

Soon after that, we all wanted a Rotring Tikky! It was a must to all of us and no other pencil could compare to it. We got them and when we lost or broke them (it took a lot of effort to break them, but kids manage to succeed in such dire conditions ), we wanted a new Tikky, not another one. The greatest part of my story is not the hype around our discovering Tikky, it’s the fact that our preference lasted through high-school and college. Even now, when I bought a new pencil, years after my last Tikky, I still went for the same brand.

Why such devotion when it comes to a simple pen? Simply because, other than the word of mouth recommendation that helped us decide what to buy, the product itself never disappointed. It was cool, it was amazing and everybody wanted one, although it was two or three times more expensive than the other pencils in the stores, but it also worked perfectly. It was enough to also convince our parents that it’s better to pay extra for the quality than buy us other 5 or more pencils for the same amount of time.

These days, Rotring Tikky looks a lot like the original pencil I fell in love with back in secondary school. The design and materials have been updated a bit to make it look slicker, more modern. But the original product is easily recognizable, otherwise brand enthusiasts would be unable to spot it in the see of pens and pencils usually sold together…

Popularity: 3% [?]

A five-part series on online branding for businesses by Ryan Chaffin

1. What’s in a Name? Everything
2. SEO: Marketing in the New Millennium
3. PPC as a Model of Smart Advertising
4. Social Media: Highly Accessible Advertising
5. Freshening Up: Maintaining Your Brand Image

New methods of advertising, particularly web-based ones, may be confusing to someone not acquainted with the different mechanisms of the web or well-versed in how they work. Take, for example, the classic Yellow Pages advertisement. Every year you buy your ad space for a fixed amount of money. In these ads, the more space you buy, the higher the price. Things, however, have changed. The advent of the Internet has led to many exciting new ways of advertising that are more affordable and sensible than the old, antiquated methods that essentially equated size with relevance.

One of the most exciting and cost-effective means of advertising on the web is PPC. PPC stands for “pay per click.” This type of advertising does exactly what you would anticipate it would do. As a business owner you pay for your ad space only when it is clicked through on the host’s website. Say, for example, your business specializes in a very specific service, such as vacuum pump repair. A savvy business owner would place an ad for vacuum pump repair on a website that sells vacuums. This kind of ad placement ensures you will get clicks from interested parties, bringing truly curious customers to your website and managing your advertising money smartly all at once.

Continue reading

Popularity: 1% [?]