#thirdpartycontent

[marketingas-blog]

Ultimate List of Social Media Competition Ideas

http://blog.hellosocial.com.au/blog/social-media-competition-ideas

[themediatrust]

Ecommerce--What’s happening on your site?

Wayward third-party vendors impact site performance, collect first-party data and expose site visitors to malware

Online shopping is now a primary revenue source for many retailers, and its growth trajectory is forecast to continue its double-digit growth rate. With their high-volume traffic and access to consumers’ credit cards, these sites also serve as revenue sources for hackers and fraudsters, who find retailers’ reliance on third-party vendors especially appealing. They gain access to sites by compromising legitimate third-party vendors.

Pinpointing the third-party vendors

Everyday ecommerce sites are rife with third-party vendors, many of them not clearly visible to site owners. These services provide the interactive and engaging experience consumers have come to expect and also enable the site to be monetized. Unbeknownst to many retailers, the third-party vendors they use to render these critical services—product reviews, content recommendation engines, payment systems, automated marketing services, analytics, content delivery networks, social media tools and more—can unintentionally function as a conduit for a host of unsavory activities including malware drops, first-party data collection, and latency-causing actions.

The challenge is to quickly identify the point of compromise, yet most ecommerce site operators don’t have a clear grasp of the vendors actively executing on their digital properties. The following infographic of a typical ecommerce site provides clues to where vendors can be found.

[Get your pdf copy at www.TheMedia.Trust]

Check yourself before you wreck yourself

How do you control these vendors and what they do on your site? The ability to effectively manage an ecommerce site requires intricate command of the technology, processes and vendors needed to render pages that not only meet revenue goals, but do so without compromising the user experience. This means the site must be free of malware, performance-sapping vendors and privacy-violating data collection activity.  To protect against third-party code’s inherent risks, ecommerce teams must work with their IT, information security, and legal teams to constantly monitor—in real time—the code executing on their sites. Otherwise, a host of activities can be underway without your knowledge which can negatively impact the user experience, your brand and your revenue stream.

[themediatrust]

Guess what? Corporate websites are out of your control

Recognizing how websites and mobile apps have transformed business models

Marriott. Toys R Us. Darden Restaurants. Wal-Mart. Kraft. Neiman Marcus. Dell. What do these diverse companies have in common? They are all digital publishers.

As highlighted in a recent article, Dell spends millions of dollars each year developing content for their public-facing website. From placing advertisements to writing stories about women in technology to creating informative videos, Dell recognizes the power of digital content as an important part of the sales process. And their public-facing website serves as the primary communication channel to their most valuable asset—the customer. Dell isn’t alone.

Once relegated to traditional media companies, the concept of a digital publisher has morphed to encapsulate any organization that uses digital channels to promote their business—either directly with coupons, product reviews and ecommerce capabilities or indirectly via promotional videos, polls and recipes. In effect, any firm with a digital property—website or mobile app—should consider themselves a digital publisher.

Digital content is outside your control

Digital content and the channels through which it is acquired and delivered requires a new approach to security.

High-quality, informative websites and mobile apps attract visitors, and this attention draws evildoers. Looking to capitalize on your hard-won customers and website traffic, these bad actors mine for poor web code to exploit. They redirect visitors outside your page, launch malware downloads, and steal valuable visitor data, to name a few actions that no reputable business wants. In fact, online and mobile channels are the primary vectors for malware, with 85% of all malware distributed via the web.

Securing public-facing digital properties should be easy, right? The challenge is that most of the code delivering the interactive and engaging user experience that renders on the site visitor’s browser is from a third party and therefore outside your control. As a matter of fact, third-party code makes up more than 78% of the code found on Fortune 1000 websites. Think about it. Almost every corporate website uses video, blog, talent acquisition and social media tools in addition to the standard backend data analytics and marketing platforms. Though incorporated into your website design, these third-party providers execute outside your website’s technical operation thereby minimizing your ability to control their security or activity. And they are often compromised. (Read more about third-party code providers.)

Responsibility of Securing public-facing digital properties

Viewed from a digital publisher lens, strategic business growth depends on delivering a top-notch user experience to website visitors and mobile apps users—customers and employees. Securing these digital properties means closely monitoring third-party activities to ensure they are not dropping malware, collecting unauthorized user data or negatively impacting site performance.

With digital publishing comes responsibility. Embrace it.

[themediatrust]

Leaving the light on...and exposing visitors to malware

Hotel websites are vulnerable to malware and data leakage

The hotel industry is poised for continued growth in 2015,coming off a stellar 2014 which saw occupancy rise to levels not seen in morethan 20 years. With the World Tourism Organization projecting more than 1.4 billion international journeys in the year 2020, you can bet that hotel websites will play a central role in fulfilling these travel needs.

What are hotels doing to secure a share of this volume? Many incorporate video, add feedback collection and recommendation features, leverage blogs, or enhance the content management system. These various services provide for a more interactive and engaging website, as well as enable the site to be optimized. But, did you know that they also represent an entry point for malware and data leakage that can expose a customer’s personally identifiable information?

Yes, hotel ecommerce sites are rife with third-party vendors. As outlined in our recent blog post, brand and ecommerce site managers are not doing enough to protect the online and mobile environment FOR their customers. And hotel websites are no different. In fact, current industry rumors point to a manipulation of an account-checking tool used by a major hotel chain. The compromised tool, in concert with stolen passwords, allowed fraudsters to open new accounts and transfer rewards points which were then exchanged for gift cards. So that got The Media Trust thinking about other website vulnerabilities faced by hotels.

In early December, The Media Trust analyzed the 34 top hotel websites, as listed in STORES magazine’s annual “2013 Top 250 Global Hotels” report published in January 2014. Analysis involved the scanning of all public-facing website pages and the capture of all third-party vendors, domains and cookies present on each hotel’s site.

Over a seven-day period, The Media Trust’s Media Scanner scanned each hotel’s website homepage and major sections 250 times a day—a total 1,750 scans across each site. Each scan executed the web page as if being viewed by a typical consumer, and collected and analyzed all third-party code, content and text for security, latency and data leakage issues. Leveraging our presence in more than 500 global locations, The Media Trust replicated a true user experience as if a real consumer visited the website, and therefore did not have the ability to collect actual visitor data.

The results were interesting. The average site utilized 47 different domains, 31 vendors and 65 cookies; however, some outlier hotel sites used as many as 134 domains and 148 cookies.

                                      Average       High

            Domains:             47              134             Vendors:              31                57             Cookies:              65              148

What does this mean? That’s a good question. In theory, low numbers are preferred from a manageability perspective as each domain, vendor or cookie represents an access point to or action on a site—the fewer utilized in site operation, the fewer to manage. However, the reality is that a sizeable number of third-party vendors, domains and cookies are found on most sites as they provide the interactive and engaging functionality executing on browsers.

This functionality comes at a cost. Each third-party vendor represents an access point that could be compromised and serve malware; or, redirect visitors to another, possibly malicious, website or app; or, secretly collect website visitor (first-party) data. In addition, each third party can call dozens of fourth or fifth parties which exponentially increases the risk to site visitors.

Browser cookies provide essential site functions, including the ability to navigate without repeating data entry such as destination, travel dates and room requirements. However, the process of dropping the cookie can easily be compromised by an unauthorized party piggybacking on the cookie. In addition, some third-party vendors drop cookies to collect website visitor/first-party data without website owner/operator knowledge. Known as “data leakage”, these cookies track valuable user behavior—data about guests, their interests and travel periods—which can be resold into the online ecosystem for customer targeting by competitors or industry partners. If that data includes personally identifiable information (PII) the website owner/operator could be subject to data privacy violations. With state attorneys general and the federal government cracking down on PII, hotels must be mindful of public-facing website properties and what is executing on visitor browsers.

Hotel websites are vulnerable to data leakage and malware, and this vulnerability opens the door to litigation and significant brand damage. For these reasons website owner/operators need to thoroughly identify, approve and monitor third-party vendors and their activities at all times.

The big question is: How are the major hotel chains managing their public-facing websites to protect their customers?