Archive for 'Communication Tips & Trends'
Endangered social networking
Posted on 28. Aug, 2009 by Creatwood.
The world of social media that has become so integral to public relations professionals is under attack. Studies show that social media sites have had a 30 percent increase in hacking breaches since the beginning of the year. I’m sure we all can recall the recent Twitter outage that left so many feeling lost without constant status updates. What would we do if Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace were suddenly no more? How would we get our information to the public without these tools we have come to rely on?
Fortunately, there are ways to keep yourself and your networking accounts safe from hackers. We may not realize it, but many times, we actually give hackers the information they need to break into our accounts. Often times, social media users publicly display their birthdays, addresses and personal information on their accounts. How hard would it be to guess your password or security question with all of this information readily available? Even more disturbing is that once hackers can access your social media, they can often gain entry to e-mail and other password-secure accounts.
Social media designers have already begun implementing extra security precautions to ward off hackers. Facebook has included additional features, such as verification among network friends before you can publish a blog, additional password requests, and even software to ensure that you are not a computer programmed to enter sites. New users to Facebook now have to enter and re-enter passwords, verify e-mail addresses and decipher warped text during each step of the registration process.
Although it is quite cumbersome, isn’t the safety of Facebook and all its users worth it? There is still not much you can do to block a serious, spyware-savy hacker from accessing your accounts, but you can protect yourself by changing passwords frequently and making sure your personal information and photos are not available to just anyone on the Internet. Take these precautions and worry less about losing your electronic contact with society.
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Make your stories shorter, faster, stronger
Posted on 28. Aug, 2009 by Creatwood.
Today’s fast-paced world and our increasing need for instant gratification has affected the art of storytelling. As storytellers, we need to know that to capture and keep our audience’s attention, we must craft our stories to be relevant, personal and concise. Most good leaders have become master storytellers. The more charismatic we make our stories, the more our audience will listen. Stewart Friedman, leadership expert and author of several books on leadership, offers six tips to perfecting storytelling skills as a leader.