Facebook and Phishing for Catfish

I am seriously wondering when the worlds attraction to social media will implode. I’ve been waiting for over a decade now. Take care of your own data!

I’ve just heard on the following podcast that Huber Engineered Wood Ltd. used Instagram to educate clients about improvements in building techniques and product use. The account got hacked and Facebook’s (owners of Instagram) answer to the help request was to shut down the entire account without notice. It’s a corporate account, which makes it very unprofessional when it suddenly drops dead from facebookitus.

Huber’s Instagram site is a great example of how to use the social media platform for marketing. But have your own website too! Sounds complicated? Time consuming? Not really if you set up some web automation you can send your content accross any number of social media platforms. Automatically! Instantaneous! Simultaneous!

Here are 3 sites that can do “web automations”. Some easy to use, others are more complex, but offer more powerful features.

  • Integromat. The most advanced automation platform I’ve looked at
  • Zapier very powerful and a full range of connected services
  • IFTTT Easy to use and is recommended by IOT users.

If you want even more convincing that you should take better care of what you post to these “free” social sites, here it is:

NATO Soldiers Manipulated by Facebook Fake Accounts

NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence is multi-nationally constituted and NATO-accredited international military organization, which is not part of the NATO Command Structure, nor subordinate to any other NATO entity. They created the Catfish accounts to study NATO soldiers.

The NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence (NATO StratCom COE) wanted to know how vulnerable troops were to social media. They did some social experiments on their troops (pardon the pun). I’d encourage you to read the white paper on their findings. It involves Catfishing, and if you don’t know what that is, read the World Economic Forums take on this study. I’ve saved a copy right here for you in PDF



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