Social Media Marketing is Great on One Condition.

Have you heard enough about using Social Media to showcase your business?

Well, it’s true that using Social sites like Facebook, Twitter and Blogging can help your business but there’s one caveat.  You better be damn good. You better plan on treating your customers right.  If you’re not prepared to play by the rules you’ll find your business blacklisted and your marketing efforts will do more harm than good.

We’ve all heard of customers being treated poorly by companies and consumers are fed up. Years ago, America Online suffered major embarrassment when someone trying to cancel their account recorded the conversation and later posted it on YouTube. If that same event happen today, it would have taken a tenth of the time to generate ten times the audience. The popularity and real-time content generation of Twitter may help get your good news out quickly but if you have bad news it will make your head spin.

Recently, I found that one of my newest WinPatrol users had a dispute with Symantec via one of their phone support representatives. In the process WinPatrol was maligned and the user was billed $99 USD.
See “Symantec Support says WinPatrol is a virus”.

In an effort to blow off some stream my first reaction was to Twitter my story. Within an hour my message was Re-tweeted by others including a couple above who directed their RT toward a Symantec rep they knew via Twitter.

The next time I signed on Twitter I had two new followers who worked for Symantec. In less than 24 hours I was contacted by Noah from Symantec PR for more information and an offer to help.

“Symantec Security Response does not classify WinPatrol as a threat.  We’re actively investigating this customer’s experience to learn more about why the support agent provided incorrect information to ensure it doesn’t happen again.” 
In later communications he added,  “The head of worldwide support has been made aware of this and we’re taking it seriously. “

I asked for no apology and none was given but by the end of the week a credit was provided for $99 to our mutual customer. I’m happy to acknowledge Symantec listened and did what they had to do to make things right.

I’m still not a big fan of Symantec software or support but I give their PR folks five stars. It’s obvious they recognize how important it is for their people to monitor social networks and prevent any bad news from spreading.

So, if you’re looking at using Social Media to help your image, you better be ready to back it up.

Additional References to prove my point…

8 Tips to Help Companies Image Fiascoes on Twitter

Twitter Proves its Worth as Killer App for Local Businesses

Will P. R. pros take the baton of investigative journalism?

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Symantec Support says WinPatrol is a Virus

Over the years I’ve had the pleasure to meet many other professionals who spend their time helping consumers protect their computers. Most of the time, my new friends work for companies which might be considered competitors. In consumer security there isn’t the same competition as other industry's. There’s mostly cooperation and friendship with others who came into the profession because of a sincere interest in helping.

Some of the bigger companies don’t have the same philosophy and have been known to pick on the little guys like me.  In October 2006, WinPatrol users were letting me know that Symantec was telling them they had to remove WinPatrol to install Norton Internet Security. It turns out if you read the screen, it was only a recommendation but it was confusing and rude. I wasn’t the only victim, they recommended folks remove SpyBot Search & Destroy and others.

Click here for previous article.

This week I was surprised to hear that a Symantec support rep actually told a customer that WinPatrol was a virus and during a remote assistance phone call they deleted WinPatrol from their system.

It appears WinPatrol had detected and removed a questionable file for the user and logged the action in our history file. Apparently, the mere mention of the filename in our history text file was enough for the Symantec rep to wipe out anything associated with WinPatrol. This wasn’t a false-positive caused by a new signature file. It was quick attempt by a support rep to dip into the pocket of an uneducated customer.

For their assistance Symantec charges its victim $99.  Apparently Symantec is having tough economic times. They’ve even dishonored themselves by partnering with Ask.com to generate additional revenue at the expense of their customers.

Needless to say, this is unacceptable. The customer deserves a refund and an apology.  I welcome appropriate action by anyone at Symantec interested in doing the right thing.

Security Garden: Symantec What are you doing?

PC Mag: Symantec Support Gone Rogue

 

 

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Is Vista Really More Secure?

First, I’ll admit as much as I’d like to be, I’m not a fan of Vista. I do find myself saying that Vista is more secure and that’s not a bad thing. I’ve noticed that most people associate the increase in security to User Account Control. There’s actually more to Vista security than UAC.

Everyone loves to hate User Account Control because it’s so annoying. Ars technica recently referred to WinPatrol as being UAC for Windows XP which motived me to create some new annoy-proof features. (Coming soon). I was pleased to see that even Vista evangelist Ed bott recently wrote “How Microsoft can fix UAC”. Ed pointed to comments by Sunbelts Software’s Alex Eckelberry who shares my own “cry wolf” fears with UAC. “Since over 80% of all infections are based on social engineering, the popups should focus on that weak point.”

Social engineering is when users are tricked into doing something and end up installing malware that they never wanted. I’ve mentioned many examples of social engineering but my favorite is the hacker who would leave a floppy disk with a virus/worm on it laying around at a company he wanted to infiltrate. On the label of the floppy disk, he hand wrote the words “Employee Salaries”.

Since social engineering isn’t addressed in Vista, is Vista really more secure?

Symantec recently published a number of papers on Vista security. While their work was balanced they weren’t shy pointing out some problems. For instance, most of the code that makes up Vista includes a compiler feature called GS Stack Protection which prevents a popular hack called “Buffer Overflow”. According to Symantec researcher Ollie Whitehouse “~150 binaries under the C:\Windows directory that do not contain GS protected code.”

According to AV-test.org, UAC stops many rootkits from being installed, and I know Microsoft takes these infiltrations seriously. One of my friends at Microsoft once told me, “They(root kits) scare the bejebers out of us”. Kernel Patch Protection prevents programs from hooking into the guts of Windows and is critical in the prevention of root kit infiltrations. Unfortunately, KPP only works with Vista x64 and breaks attempts at protection from many other security vendors. Thankfully, it’s not a problem for WinPatrol.

Microsoft also considers Windows Auto Update to be a security feature. They recommend users allow auto updates and when new security patches are available on Tuesdays, Windows users are automatically saved from possible threats by newly discovered vulnerabilities. If you’re a regular Bits from Bill reader you’ll know how I feel about auto updates. They’re just plain evil.

Vista Ultimate includes a feature called BitLocker. Essentially, this feature encrypts all data stored on your hard drive. This method has already been hacked by researchers at Princeton and sadly reminds me how much success I had with early Microsoft disk compression. I’ll pass for now.

Microsoft’s Strategy Director Jeff Jones recently published his “Windows Vista One Year Vulnerability Report” and the results show “Windows Vista has an improved security vulnerability profile over its predecessor.”

• Windows Vista had 30% fewer Security Bulletins than Windows XP
  
• Windows Vista had 20% fewer vulnerabilities than Windows XP
  
• Windows Vista had 28% fewer Critical and Important vulnerabilities than Windows XP
  
• 26 vulnerabilities on Windows Vista are less severe for any users running as standard user.

So, it appears for the 20% of non-Social Engineered vulnerabilities Vista has an advantage. Unfortunately, it’s still not enough for me. As long as any vulnerabilities are being found I’ll continue to be on watch using my favorite protection programs.

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