Selasa, 03 April 2012

A fast, accurate, and affordable way to do online market research

Posted by yuspi irawan at 10.00

From international brands to local food trucks, every business wants to make important decisions with their customers’ feedback in mind. Which version of your new logo will people like better? How much interest do dog owners have in organic dog food? Is your brand awareness growing over time?

We now have a new option for companies looking to answer these types of questions and more: Google Consumer Surveys. Whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or a local bike shop, Consumer Surveys makes market research fast, accurate, and affordable.

You can create an online survey in minutes, have responses within hours and fully analyzed results in days. We do all the heavy lifting for you, finding interesting nuggets of information (or “insights”) and providing you with tools for digging deeper.

Here’s how it works: people browsing the web come across your questions when they try to access high quality content like news articles or videos. Answering the question gives them near instant access to the page they want. All responses are anonymous; they aren’t tied to users’ identity or later used to target ads. This provides an alternative to the traditional paywall model: site visitors don’t have to pull out a wallet or sign in, publishers get paid as their site visitors respond, and you gain insight into what people think -- for just $0.10 per response for the general US population or $0.50 per response for custom audiences.

We’ve already been working with a number of companies researching everything from online shopping behavior (Lucky Brand Jeans) to gluten-free baking mixes (King Arthur Flour), and using Consumer Surveys to track brand awareness (Timbuk2) and inform product development (479 Popcorn). Check out google.com/insights/consumersurveys to learn more.

Posted by Brett Slatkin, Software Engineer

Rabu, 08 Februari 2012

Protect your passwords, protect your business

Posted by yuspi irawan at 08.30

Managing your business, even if it's a real-world store with a physical address, is increasingly moving into the online space. With that comes the need to maintain good online security practices to protect both your own information and that of your customers. Behind your password lies a wealth of data that can be very interesting to your competitors and criminals. You should see this data as a commodity, just like the product you are selling. And just like your product, you don’t want it to fall into the wrong hands.

Here’s what you can do to help protect your business online:

Use strong, unique passwords. Cyber-criminals use sophisticated tools that can rapidly decipher passwords. Did you know that one of the most common passwords is actually ‘password’? It’s recommended to use a password with a mix of letters, numbers, and symbols. Create a unique password that's unrelated to your personal information. For example if you sell flowers, don’t have ‘flowers’ in your password.

Memorize your passwords or keep them secret. Would you leave the key to your office in the door when you leave? Obviously not. Yet many people leave notes by their desks with their most used passwords or leave their screens unlocked. This leaves the door to your systems available to be unlocked by anyone who discovers its passwords. If you have to write down your passwords, keep them in a secret place. If you have to save your passwords on your computer, avoid giving the file an obvious name, such as ‘my passwords.’

Don't re-use passwords for important accounts, especially important accounts like email and online banking. Re-using passwords is risky: if someone figures out your password for one service, that person could potentially gain access to your private email, address, and even your money.

Add extra security. If you have a Google Account, you can install 2-step verification which will add an extra layer of security by requiring you to have access to your phone--as well as your username and password--when you sign in. This means that if someone steals or guesses your password, the potential hijacker still can't sign in to your account because they don't have your phone.

Run regular anti-virus scans. If you get malware on your system, it may be programmed to look for passwords either typed in or saved. And it doesn’t hurt to change your passwords every once in awhile too.

Share these resources with your colleagues to help keep them safe and secure online: