Eye on Messaging

Social Media Marketing Attractive to Businesses

By Stephanie Jordan
in

Given how much we talk about and participate in social media these days, it’s easy to forget just how recently it came on the scene. Phenomenal interest in Facebook has propelled the average user to have 130 friends each. Last month the company announced it had achieved its 500 million member milestone. That’s impressive growth since its 2004 launch.

With that growth, it is reasonable to expect that it is only a matter time before the medium infiltrates the business world. The business-to-consumer market is a natural extension, but increasingly business-to-business markets are also adopting (or at least considering) the channel too. At this point of social media’s evolution, a company has two options: to either embrace or ignore. While organizations may opt to stall, the second option may not be a choice for much longer.

Facebook, with its roots for the young, is growing up. Along with its maturity however have come growing pains – like trying to figure out its privacy policy to being more protective of its members from those who might threaten spam and online abuse. To that end, Facebook recently joined the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) at its highest level of membership and will serve on the MAAWG Board of Directors. The social media site is expected to play an active role in MAAWG’s future work.

The question many business organizations face today is how to make this relatively young channel work for them. In the latest issue of Messaging News cover story, Social Media Grows Up: Connecting Email and Social Marketing, we explore a few ways to integrate social media into overall marketing goals and how it needs to be treated differently than email marketing.

As we have done with other emerging technologies and services, Messaging News will monitor and report how this evolving messaging channel is being used and share best practices. 

Published August 25, 2010

Archiving E-Discovery Supplement to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Offers Legal Hold

By Stephanie Jordan
in

As already widely reported, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 offers archive features. Archiving solution vendors have been working on ways to support Exchange 2010 and yet also differentiate from what Microsoft now includes. Proofpoint is one such vendor, and this week it announced a major upgrade to its SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) email archiving solution, Proofpoint Enterprise Archive, an enterprise-grade solution that helps organizations reduce legal discovery risk and costs. According to the company, Proofpoint Enterprise Archive provides a secure, searchable repository of all email messages and enables organizations to easily and consistently perform early case assessments, instantly preserve data in active legal holds and enforce retention policies.

“There has been a lot of interest in companies around e-Discovery in general and legal hold capabilities as it relates to Exchange 2010,” says Andres Kohn, general manager, archiving for Proofpoint. “What we are hearing from customers is that while Exchange 2010 has gone a long way in reducing the burden of large mail boxes, and in many ways reducing the need for archiving to do mailbox management, it has not provided an easy way to put data on legal hold. That is where solutions like ours are migrating towards compliance and e-Discovery. We have done a lot of work around that capability.”

In addition to full support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, including support for Microsoft Outlook Web Access, access to stubbed attachments and advanced search capabilities, and support for mixed environments that use multiple Microsoft Exchange server versions including 2003, 2007 and 2010, Proofpoint Enterprise Archive now offers near real-time e-Discovery search. The product can take not only historical data, but can also automatically put new data, as it is being sent and received, on hold so you can keep an ongoing sampling of current data for a litigation matter.

Another new feature is support for EDRM (Electronic Discovery Reference Model) XML, which helps improve interoperability and the transfer of electronically stored information between applications involved in different phases of the discovery process. “There are many solutions across different steps,” explains Kohn. “We are the source for all email that the company has sent and received. If there is a pending litigation and they need to produce data to opposing council, the company has to cull through and find the relevant data and send it to an e-Discovery tool, and then go through the full review, before presenting to opposing council. So we can facilitate that transfer of data.”

When does a company need to consider a solution like Proofpoint Enterprise Archive? If a company expects just one lawsuit a year, Kohn believes it may not be worth it. “However, if a company thinks it may get two or more lawsuits a year, the costs of dealing with those are so high, having an archiving solution in place is really beneficial,” he says.

Kohn also notes that there are very few companies that don’t feel like archiving is something they should do, but companies have not justified the work. But that seems to be changing, “We are seeing IT budgets starting to open up and greater pressure around e-Discovery and legal holds. One reason for the reluctance is the perceived high cost to archiving, and that is where SaaS archiving comes in. There are no up front costs, but security is a concern. A Proofpoint benefit is that we have a hybrid model, with an appliance that sits on the customers premises that holds an encryption key, so that the data going out to the cloud is encrypted.” Kohn points out that Proofpoint does not have the key. “All that data is impossible for us to read. The user can search through that encrypted data from their Web browser and be able to get results back as if it wasn’t encrypted. That has been a real differentiator for us.”

While Exchange 2010 is a main focus of this announcement, moving forward Kohn says that Exchange is just one source of data. “We estimate that 80 percent of all discoveries are towards email, but lately we are seeing a lot more e-Discovery from other data sources—whether it be Sharepoint or file servers or instant messaging communications. Our archive and legal hold capabilities will move from just being on email to other data sources.”

The new version is available now with beginning pricing at $30 (USD) per user per year, including support and storage.

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Eye on Messaging is written by Stephanie Jordan, editor in chief of Messaging News. If you have story ideas or news to share, email her: sjordan [at] messagingnews [dot] com

Published August 13, 2010

Word to the Wise: Users Can Identify the Intent of Unsolicited Email by Wording

By Stephanie Jordan
in

Recently Symantec completed an interesting exercise: scrutinize the words most commonly used in the top four spamming techniques and look for distinguishing characteristics. The result? It seems that each technique—general spam, phishing, malware and targeted attacks—has its own distinct pattern of word usage. Here is what Symantec Hosted Service’s MessageLabs Intelligence unit found:

  • Spam—The goal of general spam is to get recipients to buy something as quickly as possible. As a result, this type of spam messaging relies on words having to do with selling something (“discount”, “price”, “sale!”) and urgency (“today”, “special”, “featured”).
  • Malware—Malware isn’t about making money, so in order to get a piece of code installed on the victim’s machine for ultimate control, the words used are informational (“update”, “mail”, “attached”) and sound official (“account”, “verify”, “contact”), all in an attempt to lure victims to click a link to a website hosting malicious code.
  • Phishing—Cybercriminals are trying to access a victim’s bank account, email account, or social network account. Word usage in phishing emails show a pattern geared towards collecting personal information from the victim (“address”, “paypal”, “personal”) and often claims that something has gone wrong (“error”, “apologize”, “suspend”).
  • Targeted Attacks—This group of emails are crafted to trick specific individuals and groups to open a malicious email. As a result, most words relate to political or current events, organizations or financial matters (“human”, “president”, “nuclear”).

It is interesting to note that the word “please” appears in all four categories. (If nothing else, these are very polite people.)

This exercise brings home the point that users should always try to verify if a source is genuine, and never click a link or open an attachment from an unsolicited email, even if it appears genuine. If you are interested in learning more, read the entire findings

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Eye on Messaging is written by Stephanie Jordan, editor in chief of Messaging News. If you have story ideas or news to share, email her: sjordan [at] messagingnews [dot] com

Published August 5, 2010

EEC Adopts New Email Measurement Standards, Encourages Industry to Follow

By Stephanie Jordan
in

The Email Experience Council (eec) is the email marketing arm of the Direct Marketing Association and its members are professionals that represent trade organizations, agencies, advertisers, technology partners and others that focus on electronic marketing. Its founding came about for a few reasons, but mostly because email is largely unregulated when it comes to marketing. The council believes this lack of regulation has allowed what they term “unscrupulous marketers” to abuse email.

A function of the ecc is its member roundtables, which set standards and seek initiatives pertinent to email marketing and communications practices. One issue it recently tackled is measuring email campaigns. Email marketing success has traditionally been driven by measurement, however the metrics used have not been standardized across the industry.

“Industry standard metrics is so foundational that many marketers don’t even think to ask if an open is always an open or if delivered doesn’t mean reaching the inbox,” says eec Measurement Accuracy Roundtable vice-chair and Return Path, Inc. VP of Global Market Development Stephanie Miller.

The Measurement Accuracy Roundtable worked to create standardized metrics for industry adoption. The two-year effort ended in March, when the eec introduced eight email marketing measurement standards that it hopes marketers will adopt.

As of late last month, just two vendors (AllWebEmail and Email Transmit) have actually adopted the standards, but the ecc notes that 11 others have promised to implement the standards in the coming six months.

“I believe in this standard because it provides four main benefits to the email marketers. It improves testing validity by limiting environmental variance, improves industry benchmarking through increased data conformity, improves internal reporting for benchmarking by easing the transition between vendors and finally use of the standards will normalize data across the industry, a key assumption required for any statistical analysis”, said eec Measurement Accuracy Roundtable co-chair Luke Glasner of Glasner Consulting.

The new measurement standards include eight definitions for reporting on Accepted, Render and Click-through. In the past, not only were multiple names and terms used that confused some marketers, but also different vendors used different calculations for the same terms.

Project co-chair John Caldwell of Red Pill Email believes, “The email industry has long been without measurement standards, using terms and definitions that make it impossible to benchmark properly or compare vendor performance with confidence. The good work of our volunteer eec member committee is the first time the industry has rallied around a common set of measurement standards.” 

Organizations that adopt and conform to the eec’s email marketing measurement standards will be given an official seal to display on the company’s Web site. Those interested in participating will find an application on the ecc site.

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Eye on Messaging is written by Stephanie Jordan, editor in chief of Messaging News. If you have story ideas or news to share, email her: sjordan [at] messagingnews [dot] com

Published July 15, 2010

Consumer Influence on Enterprise IT

By Stephanie Jordan
in

Striving to understand the impact of social networking on the enterprise, Cisco conducted a survey earlier this year of 512 IT security professionals across the U.S., Germany, Japan, China and India. The results reflect, as I would expect, that consumer influence on IT is growing and that more employees are bringing personal devices and applications into the network.

“Increasingly, unapproved and unmanaged personal devices in the corporate environment are hastening the need for more intelligent security management,” believes Chris Christiansen, program vice president, Security Products and Services Group at IDC. “These ‘solutions’ must deal with the difficulty of protecting individuals and corporations, while providing a positive user experience and corporate data access from any device, anywhere, anytime.”

Exploring the security implications of consumer-oriented technology in the enterprise, the survey found that employees are consistently working around information technology security policies to use unsupported devices and applications.

Additional key findings included:

  • More than half of the survey respondents have determined that their employees use unsupported applications, including:
    • Social networking  – 68 percent
    • Collaborative – 47 percent
    • Peer-to-peer – 47 percent
    • Cloud – 33 percent
  • Nearly half (41 percent) of the respondents have determined that employees have been using unsupported devices, and more than one-third of that number said they have had a breach or loss of information due to unsupported network devices.
  • Despite these trends, about half (53 percent) of the IT respondents said they are likely to allow personal devices on the network in the next 12 months and 7 percent already support personal devices.
  • More than half (51 percent) listed “social networking” as one of the top three biggest security risks to their organization, while one in five (19 percent) considers it the highest risk.
  • Nearly three out of four survey respondents said that overly strict security policies have a moderate or significant negative impact on hiring and retaining employees under age 30.

It is not unexpected that unsanctioned tools, like social networking, are so prevalent. As the report notes, social media is an unprecedented and highly beneficial tool for many parts of an organization, especially human resources, marketing and customer service. There is a clearly a place for the technology, and it appears that users are making the choice on behalf of the organization.

“As the lines between personal and business computing increasingly blur, it is becoming clear that employees are going to use social networking and personal devices whether permitted or not,” observes Fred Kost, director, security solutions for Cisco. “The best strategic approach is to focus less on restricting usage and more on effective solutions to ensure highly secure, responsible use. These solutions involve more than technology. Organizations should develop education programs, corporate policies and best practices in order to realize the extensive business benefits of social networking, while protecting against the variety of potential threats that it can present.”

The survey results are available now.

Published July 8, 2010