Mediaboss Marketing

Twitter has been on a journey following CEO Jack Dorseys declaration last year that the brand had struggled to identify whats its core function should be.

Despite now being a 12-year-old company, it was only after 10 years that the brand stood back and asked the question what is Twitter?, according to Joel Lunenfeld, Twitters global vice-president of brand strategy and Oliver Snoddy, senior director of marketing, talking to Marketing Week at the Cannes Lions Festival last week.

If you talk to 100 different people, theyll tell you 100 different use cases for Twitter thats what we were trying to go after, says Lunenfeld.

The marketing team has spent the past 18 monthsredefining the brand and clarifying what Twitter is and how people should use it, an approachchampioned by the brands first CMO Leslie Berland who joined the company from American Express last February.

Its amazing how one crystallised decision can help be the filter for everything else we do

Leslie has been driving this heavily since she came on board, says Snoddy. How do we simply communicate what, why and how Twitter? If we can do that at the very highest level everything else fits into it. There are products that help tell that story but we just wanted to step back and tell our brand story in a simple way.

READ MORE:Twitters new CMO kicks off marketing push to lure new users

Twitter is now looking to shift perceptions around the brand and what it should be used for, part of which involved changingits category on the app store from social networking to news.

A lot of people still see us as a social network and have other misperceptions about the brand, Snoddy explains. So our focus is to shift some of those misperceptions. We know thats not how our users are using Twitter. As a brand we need to do a better job at mirroring that back to people.

People do network on Twitter but it is not the main reason people come, adds Lunenfeld.

To promote this new messaging and position as a news brand rather than a social network, Twitter has gone to market with its first brand-level campaign in the US.

The message is quite simple, its around seeing every side of whats happening but its almost a product demonstration wrapped up in a brand film, says Snoddy. The hope is that you get to see what Twitter is for and also get to see howit makes you feel when conversations are happening. When things are firing up and trending theres that sort of joy that we refer to as the Twitter smile.

The first TV spot is around music but the brand plans to introduce further iterations focused on entertainment, sport and news. Similar activity will be launched in other parts of the world too, including in the UK.

This is the first time weve really led with a brand-level message, Snoddy explains. So rather than centring the message on individual products were trying to message the entirety of what Twitter is. Thats something we havent done before. To us at least, thats what we saw as the big opportunity.

Its amazing how one crystallised decision can help be the filter for everything else we do, adds Lunenfeld.

Simplifying the product was one aspect of that, which involved making peoples timelines more relevant to them, as well asmaking video a first class citizen on the platform.

Twitter has so far announced 16 live streaming partners, with everything from a 24-hour news network on Bloomberg and a partnership with NFL, to the launch of an original show called #WhatsHappening.

Its the first time weve done something like this, says Lunenfeld. Were powering it, not hosting it. It will be a daily show built exactly for Twitter.

Its just one way the brand is looking to shift peoples perceptions from it being a social network to a news site.

If you come to Twitter for the first time and dont know what to do it will be a great way to catch up with a voice telling you whats happening and narrating it. It will be good for user growth, it will be good for our brand and it will be great for sponsors, he adds.

Rather than centring the message on individual products were trying to message the entirety of what Twitter is.

In the first quarter of this year Twitter streamed more than 800 hours of live premium video content from partners across more than 450 events. This reached 45 million unique viewers, according to the brand, an increase of 31% from the last quarter of 2016, its first full quarter of live streaming premium content.

Of these hours, 51% were sports thanks in part to the tie up with NFL while 35% was spent watching news and politics, and 14% entertainment. Around 60% of unique viewers were based outside the US, with approximately 55% of unique viewers under the age of 25.

Making this shift and redefining its core proposition is also helping the platform fight fake news, according to Snoddy. Twitter has policies in place to prevent the spread of false information but he claims the way people use Twitter means it is less of a problem for the platform than some other networks.

There is an openness to Twitter and it is structurally quite different to other networks, he claims. We definitely see people fact checking and people taking part in the conversation. Truths organically rise up in the platform.

One of the powers of Twitter is how quickly journalists, the media, influencers whoever might be best placed can actually correct errors and spread true information to counteract misinformation.In some ways the best approach to misinformation is more information and an open dialogue coupled with policy that obviously takes down misinformation.

The brand will be hoping that its new, better defined positioning will help it boost user numbers, which after rising rapidly initially have now slowed. Over the past two years the platform has only gained an additional 31 million users, according to data from Statista. By comparison, Facebook attracted 467 million.

The brands revenues have also suffered in recent months. Itreported a loss of $167m (133m) in the final quarter of 2016, compared to a $90m (72m) loss in the same period in 2015.

And despite a boost in the run up to the US presidential election at the end of 2016, it still only increased active users by 4% to 319 million.

READ MORE:Can Twitter turn its influence and impact into ad revenues?

In order to bring new people to Twitter and reach the right potential audience the brand has been working on a lookalike segmentation model.

Its not as simple as finding as finding 18 to 34s and just going after them, says Snoddy. We looked at people who are current healthy Twitter users and did extensive segmentation of them their behaviour, their value on the platform.

Then we did a lookalike to find people out there that actually look like our current happy users but the one difference being they dont currently use the platform. Its quite a broad group of people but they have commonalities in terms of their interest, mindset and attitude.

As Twitter continues to roll out its brand-level messaging time will tell whether the new approach pays off.

Read this article:
Twitter insists it is 'not just a social network' with launch of first brand campaign - Marketing Week

UPDATED: Thu., June 29, 2017, 9:05 p.m.

A man pulled from his home and arrested at gunpoint after two Spokane County Sheriffs deputies went to the wrong address achieved a partial victory this week when a federal judge ruled that the deputies violated his Fourth Amendment seizure rights and used excessive force.

Conner Griffith-Guerrero filed a federal civil lawsuit against Deputy Robert Brooke, Deputy Evan Logan and Spokane County in 2015, two years after the incident at his home on North Five Mile Road. Both sides filed summary judgment requests and this week U.S. District Court Judge Thomas O. Rice ruled that a portion of each request would be granted.

On Dec. 13, 2013, a resident on North Five Mile Road called 911 to report that there was a suspicious car parked at his neighbors house and his neighbor was in Arizona for the winter. He provided the address to the house, but deputies couldnt find the house and instead went to another home. They drew their guns and walked around the house, testing doors and shining their flashlights in windows, according to court documents.

Griffith-Guerrero was in the basement watching television when he saw the flashlights shining in. He said he was afraid he was about to be burglarized so he went upstairs and hit the front door to let whoever was outside know that someone was home, the lawsuit said. He went outside to look and saw someone with a gun. He screamed and ran into the house.

Brooke then identified himself and Griffith-Guerrero opened the door and was ordered outside the home and told to kneel in the front yard while he was handcuffed. He said that one of the deputies was pointing a gun at him the whole time, but the deputy testified in a deposition that he was merely holding his gun in the low ready position.

After it was determined that Griffith-Guerrero lived there, Brooke reportedly told him Youre lucky I didnt (expletive) shoot you, the lawsuit said.

According to court documents, Brooke received a shift counseling, described as the lowest level of discipline, for going to the wrong address.

Heather Yakely, the attorney representing Spokane County and the deputies, argued that the deputies had reasonable suspicion to approach the house and detain Griffith-Guerrero. The deputies were checking for signs of a burglary and Yakely argued there was no violation of the Fourth Amendment because deputies never crossed the threshold into the house.

Rice said the deputies did have the right to check the home for signs of a break-in, but ruled the deputies committed a warrantless seizure and used excessive force. Searches and seizures inside a home without a warrant are presumptively unreasonable, he wrote. It does not matter that the officers did not actually enter the house to make the arrest.

Ordering plaintiff out of his home is a categorical violation of his Fourth Amendment rights whether it is called a temporary detention or an arrest, it was a seizure.

Rice wrote that he found the defenses arguments that the deputies did not use excessive force unconvincing.

Pointing guns at plaintiff, ordering him out of his home at night and onto his knees in his own front yard to handcuff him was objectively unreasonable under the circumstances, Rice wrote.

Rice did agree with Yakely on another issue. He ordered Spokane County dismissed from the lawsuit because Griffith-Guerrero didnt show that there was a pattern or practice of officers conducting illegal warrantless searches.

Rice ruled that Griffith-Guerreros claims of assault and battery, false arrest and imprisonment and negligence in the lawsuit can be pursued.

Read the rest here:
Federal judge rules two deputies used excessive force - The Spokesman-Review

It is hard to imagine more fitting names for code-gone-bad than WannaCry and Eternal Blue. Those are just some of the computer coding vulnerabilities pilfered from the National Security Agencys super-secret stockpile that have been used in two separate global cyber attacks in recent weeks. An attack on Tuesday featuring Eternal Blue was the second of these to use stolen NSA cyber toolsdisrupting everything from radiation monitoring at Chernobyl to shipping operations in India. Fort Meades trove of coding weaknesses is designed to give the NSA an edge. Instead, its giving the NSA heartburn. And its not going away any time soon.

As with most intelligence headlines, the story is complicated, filled with good intentions and unintended consequences. Home to the nations codebreakers and cyber spies, the NSA is paid to intercept communications of foreign adversaries. One way is by hunting for hidden vulnerabilities in the computer code powering Microsoft Windows and and all sorts of other products and services that connect us to the digital world. Its a rich hunting ground. The rule of thumb is that one vulnerability can be found in about every 2,500 lines of code. Given that an Android phone uses 12 million lines of code, were talking a lot of vulnerabilities. Some are easy to find. Others are really hard. Companies are so worried about vulnerabilities that manyincluding Facebook and Microsoftpay bug bounties to anyone who finds one and tells the company about it before alerting the world. Bug bounties can stretch into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Writing the Rules of Cyberwar

The NSA, which employs more mathematicians than any organization on Earth, has been collecting these vulnerabilities. The agency often shares the weaknesses they find with American manufacturers so they can be patched. But not always. As NSA Director Mike Rogers told a Stanford audience in 2014,the default setting is if we become aware of a vulnerability, we share it, but then added, There are some instances where we are not going to do that. Critics contend thats tantamount to saying, In most cases we administer our special snake bite anti-venom that saves the patient. But not always.

In this case, a shadowy group called the Shadow Brokers (really, you cant make these names up) posted part of the NSAs collection online, and now its O.K. Corral time in cyberspace. Tuesdays attacks are just the beginning. Once bad code is in the wild, it never really goes away. Generally speaking, the best approach is patching. But most of us are terrible about clicking on those updates, which means there are always victimslots of themfor cyber bad guys to shoot at.

WannaCry and Eternal Blue must be how folks inside the NSA are feeling these days. Americas secret-keepers are struggling to keep their secrets. For the National Security Agency, this new reality must hit especially hard. For years, the agency was so cloaked in secrecy, officials refused to acknowledge its existence. People inside the Beltway joked that NSA stood for No Such Agency. When I visited NSA headquarters shortly after the Snowden revelations, one public-affairs officer said the job used to entail watching the phones ring and not commenting to reporters.

Now, the NSA finds itself confronting two wicked problemsone technical, the other human. The technical problem boils down to this: Is it ever possible to design technologies to be secure against everyone who wants to breach them except the good guys? Many government officials say yes, or at least no, but In this view, weakening security just a smidge to give law-enforcement and intelligence officials an edge is worth it. Thats the basic idea behind the NSAs vulnerability collection: If we found a vulnerability, and we alone can use it, we get the advantage. Sounds good, except for the part about we alone can use it, which turns out to be, well, dead wrong.

Thats essentially what the FBI argued when it tried to force Apple to design a new way to breach its own products so that special agents could access the iPhone of Syed Rizwan Farook, the terrorist who, along with his wife, killed 14 people in San Bernardino. Law-enforcement and intelligence agencies always want an edge, and there is a public interest in letting them have it.

As former FBI Director James Comey put it, There will come a dayand it comes every day in this businesswhere it will matter a great deal to innocent people that we in law enforcement cant access certain types of data or information, even with legal authorization.

Many leading cryptographers (the geniuses who design secure communications systems) and some senior intelligence officials say that a technical backdoor for one is a backdoor for all. If theres a weakness in the security of a device or system, anyone can eventually exploit it. It may be hard, it may take time, it may take a team of crack hackers, but the math doesnt lie. Its nice to imagine that the FBI and NSA are the only ones who can exploit coding vulnerabilities for the good of the nation. Its also nice to imagine that Im the only person my teenage kids listen to. Nice isnt the same thing as true. Former NSA Director Mike Hayden publicly broke with many of his former colleagues last year. I disagree with Jim Comey, Hayden said. I know encryption represents a particular challenge for the FBI. ... But on balance, I actually think it creates greater security for the American nation than the alternative: a backdoor.

Hayden and others argue that digital security is good for everyone. If people dont trust their devices and systems, they just wont use them. And for all the talk that security improvements will lock out U.S. intelligence agencies, that hasnt happened in the 40 years of this raging debate. Thats right. 40 years. Back in 1976, during the first crypto war, one of my Stanford colleagues, Martin Hellman, nearly went to jail over this dispute. His crime: publishing his academic research that became the foundational technology used to protect electronic communications. Back then, some NSA officials feared that securing communications would make it harder for them to penetrate adversaries systems. They were right, of courseit did get harder. But instead of going dark, U.S. intelligence officials have been going smart, finding new ways to gather information about the capabilities and intentions of bad guys through electronic means.

The NSAs second wicked problem is humans. All the best security clearance procedures in the world cannot eliminate the risk of an insider threat. The digital era has supersized the damage that one person can inflict. Pre-internet, traitors had to sneak into files, snap pictures with hidden mini-cameras, and smuggle documents out of secure buildings in their pant legs or a tissue box. Edward Snowden could download millions of pages onto a thumb drive with some clicks and clever social engineering, all from the comfort of his own desktop.

There are no easy solutions to either the technical or human challenge the NSA now faces. Tuesdays global cyber attack is a sneak preview of the movie known as our lives forever after.

Talk about WannaCry.

Read the original:
The NSA Confronts a Problem of Its Own Making - The Atlantic

Enlarge / A computer screen displaying Eternalromance, one of the hacking tools dumped Friday by Shadow Brokers.

The people behind Tuesday's massive malware outbreak had access to two National Security Agency-developed exploits several weeks before they were published on the Internet, according to evidence unearthed by researchers from antivirus F-Secure.

On Thursday, F-Secure researchers said they have evidence that the still-unknown developers of Tuesday's NotPetya malware had access to EternalBlue and EternalRomance as early as February, when they finished work on the malware component that used the stolen NSA exploits. The timeline is all the more significant considering the quality of the component, which proved surprisingly adept in spreading the malware from computer to computer inside infected networks. The elegance lay in the way the component combined the NSA exploits with three off-the-shelf tools including Mimikatz, PSExec, and WMIC. The result: NotPetya could infect both patched and unpatched computers quickly. Code that complex and effective likely required weeks of development and testing prior to completion.

"February is many weeks before the exploits EternalBlue and EternalRomance (both of which this module utilizes) were released to the public (in April) by the Shadow Brokers," F-Secure researcher Andy Patel wrote in a blog post. "And those exploits fit this component like a glove."

Whereas the two other main components of NotPetyaan encryption component and a component for attacking a computer's master boot recordwere "pretty shoddy and seem kinda cobbled together," Patel said the spreading component seems "very sophisticated and well-tested." For developers to finish work on the spreader by February, they clearly had the NSA exploits in hand by then. By contrast, Patel added:

WannaCry clearly picked [the NSA] exploits up after the Shadow Brokers dumped them into the public domain in April. Also WannaCry didn't do the best job at implementing these exploits correctly.

By comparison, this "Petya" looks well-implemented, and seems to have seen plenty of testing. It's fully-baked.

The weeks leading up to February's completion of the NotPetya spreader was a particularly critical time for computer security. A month earlier, the Shadow Brokers advertised an auction that revealed some of the names of the exploits they had, including EternalBlue. NSA officials responded by warning Microsoft of the theft so that the company could patch the underlying vulnerabilities. In February, Microsoft abruptly canceled that month's Patch Tuesday. The unprecedented move was all the more odd because exploit code for an unpatched Windows 10 flaw was already in the wild and Microsoft gave no explanation for the cancellation.

"Meanwhile, 'friends of the Shadow Brokers' were busy finishing up development of a rather nifty network propagation component, utilizing these exploits," Patel wrote.

When Patch Tuesday resumed in March, Microsoft released a critical security update that fixed EternalBlue. As the WCry outbreak would later demonstrate, large numbers of computersmainly running Windows 7failed to install the updates, allowing the worm to spread widely.

If the timeline is correct, it would mean the NotPetya developers had some sort of tie to the Shadow Brokers, possibly as customers, colleagues, acquaintances, or friends. It would also make NotPetya the first piece of in-the-wild malware that had known early access to the NSA exploits. Patel didn't say how the NotPetya developers got hold of EternalBlue and EternalRomance prior to their public release in April.

Early speculation was that Shadow Brokers members acquired a small number of hacking tools that NSA personnel stored on one or more staging servers used to carry out operations. The volume and sensitivity of the exploits and documents released over the next several months slowly painted a much grimmer picture. It's now clear that the group has capitalized on what is likely the worst breach in NSA history. There's no indication the agency has identified how it lost control of such a large collection of advanced tools or that it knows much at all about the Shadow Brokers' membership. The group, meanwhile, continues to publish blog posts written in deliberately broken English, with the most recent one on Wednesday.

The F-Secure evidence adds a new unsettling entry on the Shadow Brokers' resume. The world already knew the group presided over a breach of unprecedented scope and leaked exploits to the world. Now, we know it also provided crucial private assistance in developing one of the most virulent worms in recent memory.

Go here to read the rest:
NotPetya developers obtained NSA exploits weeks before their public leak - Ars Technica

A pared-down version of President Trumps travel ban took effect Thursday night, barring immigrants and refugees from six majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States unless they can prove a relationship with a U.S. citizen or entity; late adjustments to the administrations rules included fiancs but not grandparents and other extended family. In an emergency filing, the state of Hawaii asked a federal court to clarify the scope of the ban, saying the governments latest restrictions go further than the Supreme Court allowed. [Tony Romm / Recode]

This weeks international malware attack has raised concerns that the National Security Agency has rushed to create digital weapons that it cannot keep safe or disable. [The New York Times]

Airbnb is launching a new service for luxury vacation rentals at mega-homes, mansions and penthouses. Airbnb Lux will begin testing in some markets at the end of the year. [Bloomberg]

Meal-kit delivery company Blue Apron raised $300 million in its first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange, opening at about $10 a share. The five-year-old New York City-based company slashed its IPO price amid questions about the long-term feasibility of its model. [Jason Del Rey / Recode]

Blue Apron CEO Matt Salzberg will join Bonobos CEO Andy Dunn and Williams-Sonoma CEO Laura Amber at Septembers Code Commerce event in New York City, where retail and commerce industry leaders will explore the convergence of digital and physical in the realm of buying and selling stuff. [Jason Del Rey / Recode]

No single device will have as much impact as the iPhone in the next 10 years. Heres a look at which products in the market today might have a comparable effect over the next decade. [Jan Dawson / Recode]

A former Binary Capital employee is suing Justin Caldbeck and the VC firm.

Ann Lai alleges defamation and other claims.

Facebooks internet-beaming drone completed its second test flight and landed perfectly.

Its first Aquila flight ended in a crash landing.

A new drone route is now open in Malawi.

Drones can soar over roads in the flood-prone region to help deliver supplies to remote areas.

This new movie about an Instagram stalker looks both hilarious and terrifying.

Remember: People can see your public social media posts.

Google is still mostly white and male.

Thats according to the latest diversity report.

Kids these days.

On the latest Too Embarassed to Ask, Kara Swisher and Lauren Goode talk with The Verges Casey Newton and Karas older son, Louie Swisher, about how teens are using (or not using) apps like Instagram, Snapchat, Musical.ly and more.

Nice day for a Crunchwrap Supreme wedding

This lucky couple won a glamorous, all-expenses-paid wedding at Taco Bells chic Las Vegas Cantina location, catered with Doubledillas, Gorditas and a hot-sauce-packet bouquet. They werent the first; the fast-food company is now offering anyone the chance to get married at the Vegas franchise for $600. [Eric Vilas-Boas / Thrillist]

More:
Recode Daily: Trump's 'travel ban' goes into effect, and can the NSA control the cyber weapons it creates? - Recode