'I’ll admit that I was taken in the first time I got a tweet like this: “You gotta see this! lolol  bit.ly/ZUT… ZUT… ” I haven’t been fooled since, but I’m sure plenty of people are fooled every day, particularly when the come-on is from a person they know. The difference between the Nigerian princess plea, the PayPal password reset email and other famous online security scams we know and love is that social networks make it appear as if the requests are coming from your friends. Also, I received no compensation for this post. MORE >>

'Time Inc.’s ’s party at the White House Correspondents Dinner. With the specter of the Boston Marathon bombings still looming large in the rear-view mirror, the lack of security at last night’s White House Correspondents Association dinner surprised me. My host for the event – Thomson Reuters – had prepared me for a gauntlet of checks, and the Washington Hilton was indeed swarming with Secret Service and hotel security personnel. mean an invitation printed from my office computer. However, that cover turned out to be an e-mail attachment. MORE >>

A client asked me to prepare a one-hour seminar on the basics of search engine optimization (SEO), and I thought it was worth sharing. This is more than your standard chalk talk. pulled together slides from several presentations I’ve used over the last few years, updated them and wrote a complete script, which is included as slide notes in the in the PowerPoint. You can download the presentation and read the notes or watch the video. I’m not an SEO expert by any stretch, but I’ve learned a lot by osmosis. Search Essentials – What You MUST Know from Paul Gillin. MORE >>

Stand Out Social Marketing starts a little slow, but if you stick with it you’ll be rewarded with truly actionable insight that can help your whole company become more social. This new book comes from Mike Lewis, who is head of marketing at Awareness Networks, a personal friend and one of the nicest guys I know. Stand Out builds on the premise that a great online presence is a function of distinctive content delivered through multiple channels with the assumption that interactions with constituents are part of the process. This book is worth its cover price for chapter 4 alone. MORE >>

'The type is about as small as they could make it and the quote comes from 2007, but this research report does bear the Harvard Business Review logo, so I’m going with that. The publication date is 2010, but I didn’t find out about it until just now. Thanks for my old pal John Dodge for pointing it out. guess Google Alerts doesn’t find everything.  Here’s the study if you’re interested, entitled “ Taking Social Media from Talk to Action.” ” Social Media flagrant self-promotion Harvard Business Review MORE >>