Future Crimes exposes the ways criminals, corporations and countries are using new and emerging technologies against you – and how this makes you more vulnerable than you ever imagined.
Here are two excerpts that stand out:
If you don’t own and control your own online persona, it’s extremely easy for a criminal to aggregate the known information about you and use it for a wide variety of criminal activity, ranging from identity theft to espionage. Indeed, there are many such examples of this occurring, especially for high-profile individuals.
The more data you produce, the more organized crime is happy to consume. Many social media companies have been hacked, including LinkedIn (6.5 million accounts), Snapchat (4.6 million names and phone numbers), Google, Twitter and Yahoo. Transactional crime groups are responsible for a full 85% of those data breaches, and their goal is to extract the greatest amount of data possible , with the highest value in the cyber underground.
In 2013, the data broker Experian mistakenly sold the personal data of nearly two-thirds of all Americans to an organized crime group in Vietnam. The massive breach occurred because Experian failed to do due diligence.
Goodman concludes Future Crimes with an appendix of tips that will help readers avoid more than 85 percent of the digital threats that they face each day. (Turning off your computer at night is one.) Reading the book will help you understand why they are so important.
Customer reviews on sites such as Yelp and Google My Business (formerly Google Places for Business) are a growing concern for most companies. They often have little choice whether they are listed on these sites. Then one day a review appears at the top of a Google search of their company’s name. And it stays there, whether it is authentic, verifiable or anonymous.
In response, services have emerged that help companies track and manage their online reviews. They offer tools to monitor reviews, multiple ways to attract positive feedback from customers and the ability to publish those positive reviews on several websites.
Birdeye is one such company offering these services. We interviewed co-founding CEO Naveen Gupta, a Silicon Valley veteran, on the state of the industry.
How many review sites now exist online? We track more than 100 review sites. I believe there are thousands, but only about 100 are influential. Of those, 50 or so are applicable to every type of business. The rest are in vertical markets — niche sites dedicated to specific industries like dentistry, law or finance.
Which do you consider the most important? Tier 1 directories like Yelp, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo have the most traffic. In Tier 2 are the verticals – sites devoted to specific industries. Avvo, a site that ranks and reviews attorneys, is in this tier. Tier III sites are general business listings such as Yellow Pages, Insider Pages and Super Pages.
What do you consider the most common misunderstanding of business owners about online reviews?
What we see across all verticals is that businesses small and large have been caught unaware of customer feedback because of the proliferation of review sites. As a result, they don’t know which sites to participate on. Depending on your type of market, the importance of the sites differ. Often, business owners don’t know where, and when, their reviews have appeared.
Authenticity of reviews is a concern. Many sites are not good at validating the identity of users. Or the customer’s review does not include the full issue – just their take on it.
Remediation is another big issue we see. Most review sites are not remediation vehicles. They are just one-way venting platforms. Studies show that happy customers generally don’t write reviews – only the unhappy ones do. Unless business owners actively encourage their feedback, satisfied customers don’t provide it. Proactive services enabling business owners to attract them have become necessary to succeed in this environment.
Review sites are often accused of manipulating results so that only negative reviews show up unless businesses pay a fee to the company. What advice do you give to business owners in such situations?
Not every business owner feels they have the time or resources to invest in managing their online reviews. Yet, your brand is your #1 asset. Don’t outsource it. Pay attention. Rather than focus on ratings, invite and focus on the feedback from your customers. Then address it. Use tools to automate the process. It’s about providing great service, correcting any problems and turning your customers into your advocates.
Larger enterprises and franchises are more concerned with monitoring reviews across the spectrum, comparing customer satisfaction across locations or regions, then feeding the data into their systems so they can make customer management adjustments.
There are new tools to help business owners manage all of this. It has become nearly impossible to handle manually. Fortunately, that is now unnecessary.
Naveen Gupta has had senior executive roles at RingCentral, Monster, Yahoo and UTStarcom. He studied in the Executive Education program at Harvard Business School; has an MBA, Finance from NYU Stern & London Business School; and a B.S.in Electrical Engineering from BITS Pilani.
This is the first in a series of interviews with experts whose work relates to online reputation management.
Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s departure reminds us just how relevant—and delicate—credibility and a sense of authenticity are.
One line on his resume, in which he incorrectly claimed to have earned a computer science degree, resulted in his dismissal. Hedge fund Third Point uncovered the inaccuracy via a “a rudimentary Google search,” making this controversy a powerful example of why executives must be sure that all information that they make available to the public is honest and factual. Driving the point home even more sharply, he won’t be receiving a severance package.
Lost Credibility
Opinions on the issue vary. On Forbes.com, Davia Temin said that, if this was an isolated “little lie,” he should be off the hook. “Let’s hope the Yahoo board has the courage to stand up to bullying by the dissidents and not fire its CEO over a minor technicality,” wrote Businessweek’s Larry Popelka. Jena McGregor weighed in on the Washington Post’s PostLeadership blog:
“In the end, it doesn’t really matter how great Thompson’s experience in his former jobs might have been, or who may have first cast doubt on his resume, or how disruptive his departure could be at a company that has had six CEOs (four designated and two interim) in five years. When credibility is called into question, everything else comes second.”
Interim CEO Ross Levinsohn, who previously served as its global media head, offers a new vision for Yahoo’s future. Reestablishing the company’s identity and reputation when internet hubs are declining in importance will be a daunting task, but Levinsohn appears intent on moving ahead. “In spite of the very bumpy road we’ve traveled, we are achieving genuine and meaningful successes in the marketplace every day and heading in the right direction,” he told Yahoo’s employees on Sunday.
