March 15, 2020  

The Digital World Against COVID-19

COVID-19 has been declared by the World Health Organization as a pandemic virus on the 11th of March, 2020, which is obviously a threatening fact to our lives; work, education and even our basic daily communication.

Yet, have you considered looking at the bright side? Business leaders won’t let us collapse. They are here to support, empower and to stand hand in hand against this outbreak.

Google response to the situation was phenomenal, to help the people continue essential work and deliver the needed services for educators and IT administrators preparing for potential school closures. It is offering different ways to help the students engage through distance learning, as well as providing online training sessions and resources to ease the producers.

Moreover, Microsoft has stated that their commitment to their customers during COVID-19 is non stoppable, their solution for COVID-19 is a free Teams subscription for six months. Lori Wright, General Manager of Microsoft 365 Teamwork said; “We don’t necessarily think you should be an Office 365 subscriber to experience the power of the Teams solution.” Working from home in such a situation can be really challenging, but they are willing to provide the tools, the tips and all the information to alleviate the pressure we are facing through this difficult time.

Facebook has stated that health care is their number one concern during the COVID-19 outbreak, by launching a new Business Resource Hub which aims to provide support for all businesses affected – directly or indirectly – by this situation, with tips, links and resources to help people cope. Zuckerberg said. “We’re giving the WHO as many free ads as they need for their coronavirus response along with other in-kind support. We’ll also give support and millions more in ad credits to other organizations too, and we’ll be working closely with global health experts to provide additional help if needed.”

Continuing to help the community survive, Instagram has linked the hashtag #COVID19 and #coronavirus to The World Health Organization website to provide the most recent COVID-19 (coronavirus) updates and methods of virus prevention to the users.

The growth of online apps that serve business needs has elevated significantly during this outbreak as well, for example The Medical ID has been there since 2014 but COVID-19 has boosted its purchase on Google Play store, as the app allows creating medical profiles that are accessible from your lock screen in case of emergency.

THE TIME IS NOW!

It’s time to see things differently. It’s not only about a virus that is eating us alive; it’s how you manage the crisis, how you make it inevitable and how you contribute to the society and humanity. It doesn’t matter what you do for a living. All that matters is helping the world stay alive. Take action! Contribute.

March 13, 2019  

How To Make Your Story Go Viral

Telling a story to a friend is definitely entertaining, especially if you are gossiping about the newest fashion trends or the latest soccer news, but telling a story to your audience might be a bit challenging. How would you guarantee that you’ve created the perfect alignments between your business, your prospects and your audience? You have to spontaneously merge yourself within the barriers and know how to speak their language.

There is no doubt that different storytelling techniques are capable of making a huge turn over in the future of digital marketing. However, telling your brand’s story is much more than what you’ll write on your website, your blog or even your social media channels. It’s your value, your mission, your aim to capture your audience’s attention and stand out among millions of Google’s queries. Remember you don’t want to be “a part of,” you want to be “The Part.”

Here are some guaranteed tips to master storytelling!

  • Immersive Storytelling:

Immersive storytelling is creating a content that will easily catch the audience’s attention. This can be something relatable, something they can see themselves in, or something that is trending in this field. Your story should make your audience literally live the moment. Through the usage of technology and internet to create unique experiences through Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) to capture the attention of the world. Immersive storytelling is becoming one of the most interesting tools for brands to convey their message and not only get audience to interact but to make them enjoy the interaction as well.

  • Dark Social:

Some social sharing can’t be tracked by web analytics platforms. That’s where dark social plays a huge role. It’s the idea of sharing of content and associating links to content that is visible to brands, which is a small percentage of what is happening in the digital social space.

Most brands are waking up to the fact that they are missing a lot of information that can’t easily be measured on different platforms, which undermines the way in which audience interact.

So the solution to this, is the ability to track links that are shared through private conversations on different media platforms by focusing on personification.

  • Customer – Led Storytelling:

Individuals nowadays have many different platforms to share their thoughts and point of views. Moreover; our target audience interact more with the word of mouth and peers rather than the traditional advertising. Thus, we need to get the best usage of it and encourage them to tell a story about our brand. And that’s how we can boost our analytical results in ways that were never imagined to be possible and that’s through highlighting our audience’s interactions.

  • Philanthropic Storytelling:

Credibility and transparency! Who doesn’t crave those two in any content we lay our eyes on?

That’s what philanthropic storytelling aims to do. People want a good and honest story with a purpose. They want to know more about how you treat your employees and what’s behind the scenes of your work flow. Make your story worth telling, authentic and concise, not just amusing. This won’t only help you raise traffic and interactions, but will also help you understand your audience better and therefore steer your digital marketing campaigns with an effective approach.

  • Mini – Ads:

What is the first thing that pops into your mind when you think of the word “Advertisement?” It might be a video ad. right?

That’s because people want to feel the moment, live in the advertisement and explore themselves with the product or the service you are providing. However, you should come up with new ways to engage with your audience. We are all tight on time and sometimes we won’t spend it on watching long ads. That’s where the six seconds mini-ads come in handy. YouTube just jumped on this trend by launching its 6 seconds story challenge and the marvelous engagement cannot be unseen.

  • Data Driven Storytelling:

Can you imagine that the amount of content that is being produced either by a business owner or an individual in 2020 will reach 1.72 MB per second?

This huge amount of data can help us reshape any kind of information by creating an appealing story behind it. We have to grasp the hints of what the data is telling us and use it to get inspired and make some changes. You may also find some archived papers that you’ve never thought of reusing, but what if you recycled all the data into an info graph design with a heart touching caption, or something that will attract your audience and deliver your message smoothly? We don’t like to admit it, but as humans we are driven by emotions. It’s not actually the information that satisfies us, it’s the emotional impact behind it. In other words; the story behind it.

Stories can be medicine or poison. It’s how you tell it that makes the difference. You will either raise your traffic, grab your audience’s attention and emotionally bond with them, or the other way around. If you want to create an outstanding story that will boost your traffic, you certainly came to the right place.

Contact us through aws.tl/contactus and we will make sure that your content is going places.

December 19, 2018  

Why Ransomware Can Make You Want To Cry

In this very moment, someone is clicking a link in a spam email or activating macros in a malicious document. In a few seconds, all their data will be encrypted and they’ll just have a few days to pay hundreds of dollars to get it back. It’s Ransomware!

Take this story from the New York Times:

MY mother received the ransom note on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. It popped up on her computer screen soon after she’d discovered that all of her files had been locked. “Your files are encrypted,” it announced. “To get the key to decrypt files you have to pay 500 USD.” If my mother failed to pay within a week, the price would go up to $1,000. After that, her decryption key would be destroyed and any chance of accessing the 5,726 files on her PC — all of her data — would be lost forever.

Sincerely, CryptoWall.

So, what is Ransomware?

Ransomware is a complicated malware that blocks the user’s access to their own files, and the only way to get back the files is to pay a ransom. WannaCry vulnerability in Windows OS, first discovered by the NSA, and then publicly revealed to the world by the Shadow Brokers. In the first few hours, 200,000 machines were infected. Big organizations such as Renault or the NHS were struck and crippled by the attack.

Ransomware has been a growing trend for the past two years, and this is just a culmination, a grand reveal to the wider world of just how big of a threat it is. But we’ve been writing about this for a while now.

Why they target businesses?

Because simply that’s where the money is! They know well that this infection can cause major business disruptions especially that they can affect servers too, which will increase their chances of getting paid.

This Chart by statista sums up key numbers in relation to the WannaCry cyber attack.

How did it spread?

  • Spam email campaigns that contain malicious links or attachments
  • Security exploits in vulnerable software
  • Internet traffic redirects to malicious websites
  • Legitimate websites that have malicious code injected in their web pages
  • Drive-by downloads
  • Malvertising campaigns
  • SMS messages (when targeting mobile devices)
  • Botnets
  • Self-propagation (spreading from one infected computer to another)
  • Affiliate schemes in ransomware-as-a-service (Basically, the developer behind the ransomware earns a cut of the profits each time a user pays the ransom)

Is it over yet?

Unfortunately NO! These attacks get more enhanced by the day, as cyber criminals learn from their mistakes and tweak their malicious code to be stronger, more intrusive and better suited to avoid cyber security solutions.

The WannaCry attack is a perfect example of this since it used a widespread Windows vulnerability to infect a computer with basically no user interaction.

Promise yourself to do these things:

On your PC:

  • Have a backup for important files
  • Don’t turn on The Dropbox/Google Drive/OneDrive/etc. application on your
  • computer by default. Sync the data and close them once done
  • Use an up to date operating system and software including security updates
  • Turn off macros in the Microsoft Office suite – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.

Online Behavior:

  • Remove plugins from your browsers such as Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, Java, and Silverlight. You can activate them only when needed
  • Adjust the browser security and privacy settings to increased protection
  • Definitely, use an ad-blocker to avoid malicious ads
  • Don’t ever open spam emails or emails from unknown senders (or download the files of course)
  • Use a reliable paid antivirus product with automatic update

May you all after reading this post be prepared anytime for a malware attack. Prevention is absolutely the best security strategy in this case.

Stay Safe!

February 26, 2016  

Top Trends in Internet Usage

The world seems to be becoming increasing digitalised with every second that passes. The stats back up that notion too – in fact over half of the world’s population are now Internet users and the figures have been growing for some time now.

This useful infographic highlights just how far we have come in terms of online This useful infographic highlights just how far we have come in terms of online activity. For example, there are now 3.2 social media users in the world. Given that there is an estimated population of under 8 billion people, that is a large percentage of people using social media. With the popularity of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat increasing all of the time, you wonder where it will stop. It is probably frightening for some people to think about how much time they spend on social media watching videos and generally being less productive than the days prior to social media!

The Internet is far from being an annoying distraction though as it has brought so many positive changes into the world. eCommerce has transformed the way that consumers buy products and services, with 80% of UK buyers using online commerce research before they buy a product online. Interestingly, eCommerce sales have rocketed by 13% over the last two years.

The next big development in commerce will be the increased usage of drones, with an estimated 600,000 to be in use by the end of 2018. Voice search is another trend that will be on the rise, currently there are over 1 billion voice searches performed each month and this figure will be even higher in the future. The popularity of Alexa and other voice command devices is growing, accounting for much of this projected increase in voice searches.