Mediaboss Marketing

Every second, 5,787 tweets are published. Every minute, 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. These are just two of the more popular social networks, and among these data points are the occasional references to a specific organization, its brands, and even customers or employees.

For many, these brands have a marketing, communications, or even customer service team dedicated to interacting with people on social channels to ensure their reputation remains intact and flag any concerns, too. However, as these platforms continue to grow, so does the abuse from threat actors, and marketing teams are not equipped to handle it.

There are several reasons for this: marketing-driven social platforms are not designed to monitor for cybersecurity risks, digital threats need a rapid response but there are a lot of false positives, and marketers are not trained against malicious social engineering like phishing attacks nor technical attacks that contain malicious code.

Not all digital risks are created equal. One day, a threat actor may target a brands employees and customers by impersonating said brand in an attempt to steal their credentials. The next day, an angry ex-employee could publish a threat against the company, and the day after a current employee could accidentally share private company data to a code repository.

Ultimately the most common cybersecurity and digital risks associated with social media are:

And, while marketing listening apps or software may pick some of these activities up, typically there is no process in place for handling them or they may not even be aware of what it is. Because of this, the threat is ignored or the response time is delayed. When this happens, the alert falls into a haystack and filtered out as it does not meet the goals of the marketing team.

New tweet about a product? Marketing has that covered. Someone is disparaging the brand due to a negative experience? Marketing can handle it. An angry person starts threatening an executive? Its something that happens hundreds of times a day on these unfiltered networks, and in many cases, they are laughed off and lost in the alert haystack.

Plain and simple, different teams have different priorities, and a security team has to clear hundreds if not thousands of social alerts to find validated digital risks.

According to a recent report, five times as many SOC analysts this year believe their primary job responsibility is focused on reducing the time it takes to investigate flagged alerts.

70% of respondents investigate 10+ alerts each day (up from 45% last year) while 78% state that it takes 10+ minutes to investigate each alert (up from 64% last year). In addition, false-positives remain a struggle, with nearly half of respondents reporting a false-positive rate of 50% or higher, almost identical to last year.

In total, thats about 15 minutes of wasted effort per false positive, and all of this effort adds up quickly. Now, its important to note that its not wasted effort, as all potentially malicious analysis is important in a process designed to find true threats; however, it is obviously an efficiency concern. Mix this in with a marketing team that is not equipped to handle these threats, and the review period is only extended further. Multiply it by the number of forums, blogs, social media sites, and the other social sites that get used by 42% of the global population each day, and you have a lot of false positives.

For teams with their own internal SOC, a simple process that results in social media managers quickly forwarding on suspicious alerts is a good first step, but ultimately security teams still need their own solutions.

The example above shows a representation of how PhishLabs handles social media threats. Our automated Digital Risk Protection platform constantly compiles data points from more than 6,300 social media sources, refines them and filters them, and then ultimately a threat analyst confirms the validity of the threat. Because of this approach, our partners receive none of the false positives and only intelligence around social media threats targeting their brand, customers, or users.

One of the largest hurdles a security team will face is the lack of time. In fact, around 49% of surveyed team members stated that time and a lack of skills available are the biggest barriers to threat hunting.

Lastly, security teams may also be great at creating and sharing memes, but the same argument can probably be made about not letting them run your social accounts, either.

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*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from The PhishLabs Blog authored by Elliot Volkman. Read the original post at: https://info.phishlabs.com/blog/marketing-teams-not-equipped-monitor-social-media-threats

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Marketing Teams Are Not Equipped to Monitor Social Media Threats - Security Boulevard

Conversational marketing platform LivePerson has announced the launch of EmailConnect and SocialConnect. The solutions seek to allow brands and marketers to manage customer conversations and interactions across different channels from its centralized hub.

Emails, social mentions and direct messages will be accessible through the same conversational platform that LivePerson customers use to manage Apple Business Chat, WhatsApp, SMS and Facebook Messenger among other channels.

SocialConnect currently supports public and private Twitter and Facebook messages and plans to add more social channels in future releases.

The user interface of EmailConnect and SocialConnect allows users to switch between email threads to a messaging conversation, or from a Twitter mention to a direct message with one click. The ability to move a conversation to the consumers preferred platform delivers improved customer experiences and better results for brands, says LivePerson.

Bringing social and email into the same platform with other channels could significantly improve and streamline processes for marketers and their counterparts in service and sales.

SocialConnectand EmailConnect make it possible for any brand to easily bring social andemail into the cutting-edge world of conversational commerce, saidAlex Spinelli, CTO of LivePerson. Even better,they help brands lower costs and improve outcomes, all while cutting outadditional systems to deploy, learn, and manage.

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LivePerson adds social and email to its conversational platform - MarTech Today

Despite having one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa and often cited as one of the most impressive cases of post-conflict recovery, Rwanda is widely known for one horrific event, said Sunny Ntayombya, the marketing and communications manager for the Rwanda Development Board. That event, of course, is the 1994 genocide, in which 800,000 people, mostly ethnic Tutsis, were killed by the majority Hutus in 100 days.

Throw in the fact that theres only been one major Hollywood movie about Rwanda, which fuels the negative perception of this small African country thats kind of unknown already, so even if you know a little about Rwanda its probably in the prism of Hotel Rwanda, Mr. Ntayombya said.

The way weve tackled that is not by running away from our past, but rather by telling the world that Rwanda is not just one thing, not one event, not one series of events its a story of the depths of humanity, if people work together and are disciplined, Mr. Ntayombya said.

Although Colombias conflict was vastly different from Rwandas, the idea that drugs were everywhere and that a Communist insurgency also stoked violence have been fueled by popular shows like Netflixs Narcos and the Colombian telenovela Pablo Escobar, The Drug Lord. Much like in Rwanda, those charged with promoting the country could not ignore the past.

We didnt want to hide away from the fact that, yes, there was violence in the country and a guy like Pablo Escobar is associated with the country, said Julian Guerrero, vice minister of tourism for Colombia. Until this summer, Mr. Guerrero was vice president of ProColombia, a government agency in charge of promoting Colombian exports, international tourism and foreign investment to Colombia.

Rwanda and Colombias success might be instructive for the Dominican Republic, where the deaths of at least nine Americans caught the attention of the international media and resulted in a decline in tourism earlier this year. Foreign arrivals fell 11 percent and 7 percent in July and August compared to those months the previous year.

Specialists in crisis management said that the country mishandled the news from the beginning, arguing that the deaths were not statistically unusual and there was no cause for alarm, rather than getting ahead of the narrative. From the onset Dominican officials have had a defensive response, said Beck Bamberger, chief executive of BAM Communications, a public relations firm that deals with crisis management. That response doesnt instill any trust for travelers.

Read more here:
How to Rebrand a Country - The New York Times

They had yet to see the fruits of their investment, given what the opportunity was, and it was unclear for how long vaping was going to be lightly regulated, said Scott Dunlap, the chief operating officer at the time. They were excited and pushing hard.

Fidelity declined to comment.

The Juul, which looked unlike any other e-cigarette and delivered a far more powerful nicotine punch, was supposed to be the hit product for the company, then named Pax Labs, but a few months in, it appeared to be a bust. Convenience stores and vape shops were not getting their orders because of supply chain problems. Manufacturing defects left some customers with bad batteries, or worse, a condition nicknamed JIM juice in mouth with no one at the company quite sure how much of the toxic nicotine substance could be safely ingested.

In a meeting in San Francisco in the fall of 2015, the board of directors decided to remove Mr. Monsees as chief executive, dismiss other senior leaders and effectively take over the company. It would be 10 months before they named another C.E.O.

I was in that first meeting where you tell the board, We arent going to hit the numbers. There are issues; there are problems in the supply chain. Not a lot of good news, said Mr. Dunlap, who said he had advised the company to slow down and take the time needed to fix the problems. He was fired the next day.

The board meeting, which has not been previously reported, was a turning point for the company.

Over the next few years, the company which became Juul Labs after splitting from Pax in 2017 would reignite the stale e-cigarette business, grabbing more than 75 percent of the vaping market and tallying more than $1 billion in sales in 2018. At the end of last year, it was valued at $38 billion, more than the Ford Motor Company.

From 2016 to 2018, the years Juuls growth became astronomical, the number of adult nonsmokers who began using e-cigarettes doubled in the United States, according to an analysis of federal survey data by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Ciccarone Center for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease. The study estimates that six million adults were introduced to nicotine via e-cigarettes.

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Juul Says Its Focus Was Smokers, but It Targeted Young Nonsmokers - The New York Times

Help wanted: artist needed to help design and execute a new mural in downtown Williamsburg. The job pays $5,000, which includes the cost of supplies.

This white wall at the corner of Main Street and Fourth Street in Williamsburg will be the site of a new mural.

The Whitley County Community Green Dot program is seeking a muralist to design and execute a mural to cover the white wall at the corner of Main Street and Fourth Street in Williamsburg.

The Green Dot program, which is a bystander intervention program in part,

was developed at the University of Kentucky in 2006. It was then expanded into high schools across the state of Kentucky in 2009.

In a five-year research project between the University of Kentucky, the Center for Disease Control, and the Kentucky Association of Sexual Assault Programs, Green Dot was found to reduce the rates of perpetration of sexual violence by up to 50 percent.

The mural is part of a social marketing campaign that depicts components of the Community Green Dot program, according to the mural grant proposal.

The campaign will focus on the problem of power based personal violence. The rates of power based personal violence are high as evidenced by the following statistics. One in four women and one in ten men are the victims of sexual violence. One in three women and one in nine men are the victims of domestic violence. One in three children are bullied. Every ten seconds a child is abused, the grant proposal stated.

The mural must conceptually incorporate the 3 Ds of violence prevention: direct, delegate and distract.

It also must conceptually incorporate Williamsburg feels like home or the good things that happen in Williamsburg, such as empathy, respect, kindness, and inclusiveness of the entire Williamsburg community, according to the call for mural artists.

The mural must include at least one of the following hashtags: #greendotyall, #bekind, or #greendotneighbor.

The mural must also demonstrate an appreciation of the past and embrace the future, and preference will be given to interact murals.

The wall is about 17 feet wide and 20 feet tall.

The deadline for submitting proposals is 6 p.m. on Dec. 6.

A committee of five community members, who have an understanding of the subject matter and two of whom have training in mural development, will select the muralist.

The selection will be announced on Dec. 13, and the mural must be completed and installed by Jan. 17.

For more information about the application process, contact Cecelia White, victims services director for Cumberland River Behavioral Health, at cecelia.white@crccc.org.

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Community Green Dot mural coming soon to downtown Williamsburg The News Journal - The News Journal