Twitter Imposters - Watch Out

Over the past few days I've received about 10 follows from various people in Twitter. I found it strange when reviewing their past Tweets all had the same single tweet. I was getting suspicious and then today I got a follow from someone I knew (and followed), but the Twitter ID looked different.

Upon checking out the Twitter account I knew it wasn't him. So I decided I was going to investigate and write a detailed post about it. During my investigation I came across this blog post which details the problem in great detail http://news.cnet.com/8301-13515_3-10146731-26.html.

So be aware that like all good technology Twitter is being exploited by those who want to trick us to make a buck.

K'nechtology or Connectology or Konnectology

How do people spell your company name when they have only heard the name and have to idea how to spell it? Believe it or not, this is a very common problem relating to search. For example, my company's name is K'nechtology which is pronounced Connectology.

On Tuesday, during a series of 10 radio interviews the name of my company was given out and only once was the spelling of the company name given out. This means that anyone who wanted to check out the company's web site for more information on the company or on myself had to guess at the spelling as they used Google or any other search engine and would most likely first spell it "connectology". While you might think this won't happen to you or your firm, try asking a stranger to spell your company name or product. I've seen this problem on many occasions.

Here are some solutions that we've come up with over the years:

1. Register multiple domains and set-up micro web sites that explain the situation and forward the user to the proper web site (hard to do for us when connectology.com is already taken by a legitimate company in the UK);
   
2. Write a humours web page that pokes fun at the various spellings or company or product name;
   
3. Leverage your corporate or personal blog (just like this post) and write a post about the situation;
   

So if you heard me on the CBC radio on Tuesday, and are looking for "connectology" or "Konnectology" or "alan connect" or "allan connect" or "allen connect" or "alen connect" or even possibly "alan Konnect" take comfort that you are in the right place and you can find my company's web site at www.knechtology.com

Google Virus - Good Luck For Me

For the best couple of days a virus that I'll call the "google virus" has been slowly spreading. The impact of this virus is that it hijacks your Google search results and redirects you to a spam site.

Fortunately, I didn't get hit by this virus but a call from CBC radio here in Toronto alerted me to the virus. For a brief moment it looked like CBC Toronto was being infected. The good news was they weren't either they had just trip a red flag at Google by having a large number of employees conduct lots of searches in a very short time period. Google then just wanted to verify that the searches were indeed coming from humans and not machines. So they got prompt with a CAPTCHA screen. You know these screen where you have to read a bunch of garbled letter and type them.

So what's the good news about this virus, well I did my research and as a result of helping CBC radio out, I'm being interviewed today across Canada on different local CBC radio stations about Google and viruses. I do need to tip my hat to Twitter, as it allowed me to isolate the virus and the details of what was going on.