August 31st, 2010
This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.
For all the praise that brand advertisers have for social media, they must be aware that it’s very much a double-edged sword. And for all the free marketing, advertising and brand promotion via Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Linked In, and other platforms used to help build an identity and relationship with your customers, it can just as quickly turn on you and your brand.
Social media disasters occur for a number of reasons, the first being that your company probably messed up. It may not have been intentional, but something, somewhere down the line, went wrong enough for someone to complain and it was enough for others to vocalize that complaint en masse. One mistake is all it takes for social media to turn against your brand.
No one is perfect and you can’t expect to please everyone all the time, so the best trick is to be prepared for how to handle things if your company finds itself under attack in the social realm. Here are three examples of companies who were attacked by social media and how they handled, or should have handled the situation. Learn from their mistakes or successes so you can stay on social media’s good side.
Read more …
Posted in FL1, General, Marketing | No Comments »
August 6th, 2010
It’s the summer holidays for many, and things typically slow down.
Not for us I’m glad to say, as the internet gets busier and busier with more online business being done than ever before.
A key part of making any business work is being to measure its performance and make effective decisions on your findings.
The internet is no different.
Using tools such as Google Analytics, it’s possible to see what’s working and more importantly not working with your website.
We continue to get asked more questions about Google Analytics than any other subject, that’s why we’re offering a free training session throughout this August.
Drop us a line or follow this link if you’d like to know more.
Posted in FL1, General, Marketing, Search Engines, Technology | No Comments »
August 2nd, 2010
It’s been an interesting past few weeks at FL1 Group.
As well as building blogs, shops and content managed websites, we’ve been involved with securing a company’s website that wasn’t PCI/DSS compliant. The website stored credit card details in a database that was hacked into and the credit card details were retrieved. Two of them were used fraudulently, and that’s where the story began. The banks got involved with fines and costs to recover the costs of the fraud. Added to this the company has been forced to go through a programme of becoming fully compliant. To-date, adding the costs of consultants, website changes, fines, costs to re-issue cards, and significant amount of off-line processing changes and new equipment, the cost to the business at this current time runs in excess of £170,000!
This particular business is lucky enough to be owned by a much larger parent company that could absorb these costs, but these sorts of costs would easily put most small companies out of business.
It’s been an eye opening project that’s for sure, and based on what we’re learning from it, we’ll certainly be putting together a seminar to help more business understand what PCI/DSS is all about and how to stay on the right side of the banks.
It’s not all been about “the dark side” of the internet though…honest!
Ali’s been settling back in and taking to his new role as designer and project manager like a duck to water.
We’ve also teamed up with some a partner that will help our online stores excel using the shopping and affiliate portals, which has to be a good thing in these challenging times.
More on that next month!
As Google’s superb Analytics package gets better and better, we’re proud to announce some free workshops we’re running throughout the summer holidays. We install it on every single website we build, so if you’d like to know how to see how your website is really working, let us know.
The most important thing to consider, is tools like Google Analytics allow you to discover what’s working, but more importantly what’s not!
If you’d like to book a Google Analytics workshop or want to know more about PCI/DSS, drop us a line or call 01727 739812.
See you next month!
Posted in E-commerce, FL1, General, Search Engines, Seminars, Technology | No Comments »
May 6th, 2010
These are busy times here at FL1 and I’m pleased to report we’ve a few new faces.
Thanos joins us to replace Jason Margolin on the PHP development team. Claire joins us on the ASP.NET team, and Alex joins our design team.
The word on the street has it Ali might be re-joining us again soon too!
We’re also pleased to announce Jon joining our team. Jon’s a highly experienced graphic design, project manager and internet consultant with a vast wealth of knowledge and experience. He also makes a damn nice cup of tea!
So what have we been up to?
Well, building blogs, thanks for asking!
If you’ve ever thought about blogging, and wondered if it might work
for you, then you need to read this http://blog.fl1group.com/tag/blogging/.
To get you up and running, we’ve got a fabulous offer running this month that will get you and running with a top-notch professionally set up WordPress blog
See you next month!
Posted in FL1, General | No Comments »
May 5th, 2010
PCI DSS is a set of rules created by the PCI Security Standards Council with the intention of protecting credit and debit card data and enhancing awareness of these standards. The organization was founded by American Express, Discover Financial Services, JCB International, MasterCard Worldwide, and Visa, Inc.
Many people are confused about this so we have spent some time going through documents trying to un-ravel it for you. In short, if you are using a credit card terminal or are handling customer credit card details then you will need to research this further and probably either need to change the way you accept payments, or become PCI DSS Compliant.
Yes or No! – Do I need to be PCI DSS Compliant?
My web site stores card details for me to put into my credit card terminal. Do I need to be compliant?
Yes you do. If you store, see or handle credit card details, you need to be compliant.
I use a payment service provider to handle my credit card payments. Do I need my shop to be compliant?
No you don’t. If you are using a payment service provider and never see a shoppers credit card details, you do not need to be compliant.
To summarise
If you ever come into contact with a shoppers credit card details, be it using a terminal or a web site to store the data, you DO need to be PCI compliant.
If you never come into contact with a shoppers card details and use a third party like PayPal to handle your web site payments, you DO NOT need to be PCI DSS compliant.
We do, and always have, suggested that clients use third party payment service providers as it takes away the headache of PCI DSS compliance such as SagePay.
For more information visit The PCI Security Standards Council
Or
call us on 01727 739812
Posted in E-commerce, FL1, General, Technology | 1 Comment »