How Social Media Can Impact Trade Show Traffic

With the powerful force of social media supporting you, you can generate traffic to your trade show like never before. All it takes is knowledge to harness this power before, during, and after the trade show. You can maximize exposure and generate interest in what people have to gain by attending. Below is everything you need to know to use social media to draw the crowds.

Create Buzz Leading Up to the Event

Buzz Photo via Shutterstock

Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Linked In, Pinterest and YouTube are excellent tools to get the word out about your trade show. Don’t just announce it, generate buzz about it. Write high quality copy about who will be there, free giveaways, and how people can benefit from attending.

It’s best to do this in small bursts instead of a single press release with all of the information. Create an account on each of the social media sites listed above, and post one or two times per day with exciting news, unique information and teasers leading up to the event. Make it exciting so people will want to share your page and your posts with others.

Generate Excitement During the Event

Excited Photo via Shutterstock

Make it possible for users to check in to the trade show on Facebook. Make a hashtag so people can keep up with what’s going on via Twitter. Designate someone at the event to keep up with the social media conversations, so you’ll know if the response is positive or negative. After all the planning involved, you want to make sure people are enjoying themselves.

Regularly post updates to all your social media accounts during the event. Announce giveaways, special appearances, entertainments, drawings, freebies and other things to lure folks over. Be sure to include high quality photos and videos, because people pay more attention to visual cues than written content only.

Post to Pinterest, YouTube and other highly visual sites where people interested in your topic are likely to see what you can provide them. Encourage attendees to engage in the conversation by hosting voting polls and online contests, in addition to the drawings and giveaways at your booth.

Keep Up Communications After the Event

Thank You Photo via Shutterstock

Promotions don’t end when the trade show closes. Use your new contacts from the event to keep people involved and interested in you and what you have to offer. Post highlights of the trade show on YouTube and other social media. Send out a hearty “thank you” to those who attended on Twitter and Facebook.

Don’t leave out the people who, although interested, were unable to attend the trade show for some reason. Reach out to them with information they’ll find helpful, such as videos of demonstrations or speeches they could learn from. Give them as much of an experience as possible without actually having been there.

Trade shows and social media have one thing in common: They’re both excellent opportunities to build relationships with customers.

Today’s consumers aren’t just looking for one-way advertisements. They want to feel like they’re a part of the conversation. Trade shows are a great way to gather followers for your social media marketing messages, so make it worthwhile by giving them something valuable and useful.

How Social Media Can Impact Trade Show Traffic

With the powerful force of social media supporting you, you can generate traffic to your trade show like never before. All it takes is knowledge to harness this power before, during, and after the trade show. You can maximize exposure and generate interest in what people have to gain by attending. Below is everything you need to know to use social media to draw the crowds.

Create Buzz Leading Up to the Event

Buzz Photo via Shutterstock

Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Linked In, Pinterest and YouTube are excellent tools to get the word out about your trade show. Don’t just announce it, generate buzz about it. Write high quality copy about who will be there, free giveaways, and how people can benefit from attending.

It’s best to do this in small bursts instead of a single press release with all of the information. Create an account on each of the social media sites listed above, and post one or two times per day with exciting news, unique information and teasers leading up to the event. Make it exciting so people will want to share your page and your posts with others.

Generate Excitement During the Event

Excited Photo via Shutterstock

Make it possible for users to check in to the trade show on Facebook. Make a hashtag so people can keep up with what’s going on via Twitter. Designate someone at the event to keep up with the social media conversations, so you’ll know if the response is positive or negative. After all the planning involved, you want to make sure people are enjoying themselves.

Regularly post updates to all your social media accounts during the event. Announce giveaways, special appearances, entertainments, drawings, freebies and other things to lure folks over. Be sure to include high quality photos and videos, because people pay more attention to visual cues than written content only.

Post to Pinterest, YouTube and other highly visual sites where people interested in your topic are likely to see what you can provide them. Encourage attendees to engage in the conversation by hosting voting polls and online contests, in addition to the drawings and giveaways at your booth.

Keep Up Communications After the Event

Thank You Photo via Shutterstock

Promotions don’t end when the trade show closes. Use your new contacts from the event to keep people involved and interested in you and what you have to offer. Post highlights of the trade show on YouTube and other social media. Send out a hearty “thank you” to those who attended on Twitter and Facebook.

Don’t leave out the people who, although interested, were unable to attend the trade show for some reason. Reach out to them with information they’ll find helpful, such as videos of demonstrations or speeches they could learn from. Give them as much of an experience as possible without actually having been there.

Trade shows and social media have one thing in common: They’re both excellent opportunities to build relationships with customers.

Today’s consumers aren’t just looking for one-way advertisements. They want to feel like they’re a part of the conversation. Trade shows are a great way to gather followers for your social media marketing messages, so make it worthwhile by giving them something valuable and useful.

Pinterest Adds Analytics Verifying It’s Contents Impact Is Worth Measuring

Pinterest has launched a free analytics tool, which is big news for those of you who sell visually interesting products! For those of you who don’t know what Pinterest is, it’s the fastest growing social media site to date and basically users see things they like online and “pin” them to their “boards.”

Potential uses for Pinterest include making a wishlist (pinning products that you like to your board), or planning a trip (pinning pictures of monuments and landscapes around the world), or any other thing you can think of. There are Pinterests for burger toppings, homes on stilts, art, sweaters, and a whole lot more. Good design and aesthetics go a long way on Pinterest.

As Ad Age says, “Marketers are keen to know what content is popular on Pinterest, since it gives them a window into consumers’ ever-changing preferences. For example, for marketing purposes, a retailer might want to know that red is the most popular color of a particular style of shirt.”

Now, any user with a verified website can use Pinterest Analytics for a comprehensive view of content and traffic performance.

Jim Tobin, of Ignite Social Media, writes, “The dashboard shows analytics including top performing content (repins, clicks) and exposure (reach and impressions) generated from content and from visitor traffic. All of the information is exportable, making it easy to slice and dice the data. Overall, it’s one of the better analytics tools we’ve seen so far provided free by a social channel. Why Twitter, which is now 7 years old, still can’t provide impressions is beyond me.”

Ad Age reported “Cat Lee, Pinterest’s product manager for platform, said the idea is to help brands with their content strategy. Now they can see which pins are popular on a given day, for example, and highlight those on their website to juice Pinterest sharing even further.”

For more on social media analytics, check out our archives.

Has Pinterest helped your business Tell us about it in the comments!

Pinterest Adds Analytics Verifying It’s Contents Impact Is Worth Measuring

Pinterest has launched a free analytics tool, which is big news for those of you who sell visually interesting products! For those of you who don’t know what Pinterest is, it’s the fastest growing social media site to date and basically users see things they like online and “pin” them to their “boards.”

Potential uses for Pinterest include making a wishlist (pinning products that you like to your board), or planning a trip (pinning pictures of monuments and landscapes around the world), or any other thing you can think of. There are Pinterests for burger toppings, homes on stilts, art, sweaters, and a whole lot more. Good design and aesthetics go a long way on Pinterest.

As Ad Age says, “Marketers are keen to know what content is popular on Pinterest, since it gives them a window into consumers’ ever-changing preferences. For example, for marketing purposes, a retailer might want to know that red is the most popular color of a particular style of shirt.”

Now, any user with a verified website can use Pinterest Analytics for a comprehensive view of content and traffic performance.

Jim Tobin, of Ignite Social Media, writes, “The dashboard shows analytics including top performing content (repins, clicks) and exposure (reach and impressions) generated from content and from visitor traffic. All of the information is exportable, making it easy to slice and dice the data. Overall, it’s one of the better analytics tools we’ve seen so far provided free by a social channel. Why Twitter, which is now 7 years old, still can’t provide impressions is beyond me.”

Ad Age reported “Cat Lee, Pinterest’s product manager for platform, said the idea is to help brands with their content strategy. Now they can see which pins are popular on a given day, for example, and highlight those on their website to juice Pinterest sharing even further.”

For more on social media analytics, check out our archives.

Has Pinterest helped your business Tell us about it in the comments!

Scanning Has Just Become As Easy As Swiping A Mouse!

Mice have provided us with an unprecedented amount of flexibility in interface navigation since their invention. It doesn’t seem like the status quo of using a mouse will change anytime soon, either. The mouse has been so deeply implanted into the computer that many people end up ditching the trackpads on their laptops and getting mice for the convenience of being able to navigate smoothly with these little devices.

One company has decided that using a mouse simply for navigation isn’t enough. I.R.I.S., a company specializing in optical character recognition (OCR), has made a mouse that can be used as a navigation aid while simultaneously acting as a scanner small enough to sit on your palm. Known as the IRIScan Mouse, this little device will scan any paper you put on your desk while you move around it. The swiping motions you make will reveal new pieces of the document on your screen.

IRIScan’s mouse costs $79, in contrast with the world’s first scanner mouse (the LG Mouse Scanner), which costs a penny under $130.  Both mice are designed to scan documents all the way up to the A3 size specification and they are well revered by happy consumers who have purchased them.

For small businesses, these mice are a must-have. They remove clutter in your office by eliminating the need for another chunky device that scans papers. You can quickly scan documents and use the OCR software that comes with them to import the scanned text into word processing programs such as Microsoft Word. You’ll never be too busy to whip out the scanner since you have one right at your fingertips.

The conveniences brought by such devices makes them very sensible purchases. Their size limitation conforms with the size limits of most flatbed scanners, so there’s really not much of a difference between the two technologies, save for the fact that you save a ton of space and have the ability to take your scanner with you everywhere you go!

Scanning Has Just Become As Easy As Swiping A Mouse!

Mice have provided us with an unprecedented amount of flexibility in interface navigation since their invention. It doesn’t seem like the status quo of using a mouse will change anytime soon, either. The mouse has been so deeply implanted into the computer that many people end up ditching the trackpads on their laptops and getting mice for the convenience of being able to navigate smoothly with these little devices.

One company has decided that using a mouse simply for navigation isn’t enough. I.R.I.S., a company specializing in optical character recognition (OCR), has made a mouse that can be used as a navigation aid while simultaneously acting as a scanner small enough to sit on your palm. Known as the IRIScan Mouse, this little device will scan any paper you put on your desk while you move around it. The swiping motions you make will reveal new pieces of the document on your screen.

IRIScan’s mouse costs $79, in contrast with the world’s first scanner mouse (the LG Mouse Scanner), which costs a penny under $130.  Both mice are designed to scan documents all the way up to the A3 size specification and they are well revered by happy consumers who have purchased them.

For small businesses, these mice are a must-have. They remove clutter in your office by eliminating the need for another chunky device that scans papers. You can quickly scan documents and use the OCR software that comes with them to import the scanned text into word processing programs such as Microsoft Word. You’ll never be too busy to whip out the scanner since you have one right at your fingertips.

The conveniences brought by such devices makes them very sensible purchases. Their size limitation conforms with the size limits of most flatbed scanners, so there’s really not much of a difference between the two technologies, save for the fact that you save a ton of space and have the ability to take your scanner with you everywhere you go!

Reclaim Your Gmail Inbox Space With ‘FreeSpace’ App From Backupify

If you’re a Google Apps power user, you’ve probably noticed how easy it is to fill up that Gmail inbox. With a full inbox, you cannot send or receive emails, which really grinds things to a halt. Having to go through your emails and reclaim all that space is time-consuming and a chore, which is why Backupify launched the FreeSpace application for Google Apps users.

FreeSpace keeps your inbox from filling up by helping you easily delete or save your emails and attachments locally. If your inbox is full right now, FreeSpace can rank which emails contain the largest attachments. You don’t have to go searching. Best of all,  the app is free.

“As a backup provider for Google Apps we have seen first-hand the incredible data accumulation within our customers’ domains,” said Rob May, CEO of Backupify. “We built FreeSpace to ease the burden of managing these growing accounts while still being able to preserve the valuable company data that they contain.”

What’s great is that FreeSpace doesn’t just identify large Gmail attachments, but allows you to delete oversized mail attachments without removing the original Gmail message. Your inbox gets smaller, but the email history stays intact.

FreeSpace offers benefits for both Google Apps users and administrators:

• For Google Apps administrators, FreeSpace provides complete visibility of their users’ Gmail usage, and enables admin control by making it easy to alert users to take action when they run low on storage space;
• For Google Apps Gmail users, FreeSpace saves time by identifying large attachments so that the users can choose what to delete or securely offload;
• FreeSpace leaves conversations intact no matter whether you delete, download or ignore the attachment.

Backupify, the company that made FreeSpace, offers backup and recovery services for Google Apps, Salesforce, Facebook and Twitter accounts. For more on backing up your vital data to the cloud, check out Charles Costa’s article, Backing up the Cloud to Your Computer - Saving Vital Social Media and Website Data, from our archives.

Have any tips for keeping your inbox tidy Let’s hear ‘em in the comments!

Reclaim Your Gmail Inbox Space With ‘FreeSpace’ App From Backupify

If you’re a Google Apps power user, you’ve probably noticed how easy it is to fill up that Gmail inbox. With a full inbox, you cannot send or receive emails, which really grinds things to a halt. Having to go through your emails and reclaim all that space is time-consuming and a chore, which is why Backupify launched the FreeSpace application for Google Apps users.

FreeSpace keeps your inbox from filling up by helping you easily delete or save your emails and attachments locally. If your inbox is full right now, FreeSpace can rank which emails contain the largest attachments. You don’t have to go searching. Best of all,  the app is free.

“As a backup provider for Google Apps we have seen first-hand the incredible data accumulation within our customers’ domains,” said Rob May, CEO of Backupify. “We built FreeSpace to ease the burden of managing these growing accounts while still being able to preserve the valuable company data that they contain.”

What’s great is that FreeSpace doesn’t just identify large Gmail attachments, but allows you to delete oversized mail attachments without removing the original Gmail message. Your inbox gets smaller, but the email history stays intact.

FreeSpace offers benefits for both Google Apps users and administrators:

• For Google Apps administrators, FreeSpace provides complete visibility of their users’ Gmail usage, and enables admin control by making it easy to alert users to take action when they run low on storage space;
• For Google Apps Gmail users, FreeSpace saves time by identifying large attachments so that the users can choose what to delete or securely offload;
• FreeSpace leaves conversations intact no matter whether you delete, download or ignore the attachment.

Backupify, the company that made FreeSpace, offers backup and recovery services for Google Apps, Salesforce, Facebook and Twitter accounts. For more on backing up your vital data to the cloud, check out Charles Costa’s article, Backing up the Cloud to Your Computer - Saving Vital Social Media and Website Data, from our archives.

Have any tips for keeping your inbox tidy Let’s hear ‘em in the comments!

10 Ways To Stand Out, Get Noticed and Be Remembered

In creating and building an online presence, ultimately we want to stand out, get noticed and be remembered for the right reasons.

A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well. ~ Jeff Bezos

This requires a thoughtful, strategic, purposeful process and most importantly, consistency.

We remember negative things more than positive, and we always remember people by how they make us feel. Mary C. Lamia, Ph.D. in clinical psychology, from “Emotional Memories: When People and Events Remain With You” says:

How fortunate that the mind can summon emotional memories of exciting and unsullied love, pride in endeavors or joy that was felt at an amazing moment in time.

We can create and control these positive emotional memories for our community and clients. It doesn’t happen quickly or overnight, and even when we notice someone, if you research them, usually they have been working at it for a while. But, it does happen:

If you don’t do it and create it there’s nothing to be found.

Do an Internet search of yourself to see how you are branded and see how everything you are doing is working. The search engines simply publish what you create, they don’t edit anything.

What’s your hub and home for your brand and content marketing Where do you point people

Ask:

• What do I create and publish

• How do I want Google to brand me

We are connectors, publishers, curators and authors who now have several ways and means to promote and market what we do and create.

• A clearly defined visual brand that tells people what you do and what you stand for.

• A branded business card that delivers that promise.

• An engaging website or blog site that showcases your mission, vision, value, products, services and spirit.

• An integrated marketing and social media platform that you use to connect, engage, interact and serve.

• A fully developed and active LinkedIn profile.

• A consistent content marketing strategy and delivery system that articulates your content mission and vision.

• In person and face to face professional affiliations that you join and attend regularly.

• Industry conferences, workshops and events that you attend annually for professional development.

• Be a mentor and a mentee to advance your professional path.

• Volunteer and serve your industry and community.

If you want to stand out and be found, do things and create things that people will remember you positively for. Show up, join in, get involved.

A colleague and fellow blogger Lisa Baron in “How to Be Remembered,” talks about “using all the tools available to me so that I can be me as loud as I possibly can.” She offers some common sense, easy to do suggestions that anyone can use and follow to stand out.

What do you do to stand out, get noticed and be remembered

Apples Photo via Shutterstock

Four Essentials For Growing a Top Notch Contact List For Your Email Marketing Campaigns

While email marketing has the ability to deliver highly valuable, informative, and helpful content to your subscribers while keeping it personal and regular, new subscribers signing up for your email marketing list is a sure sign of your success in business - it’s a sign of trust, an intent to buy, or at least subscribers’ willingness to hear more from you. No wonder then that the need for building your contact list is relentless and all encompassing. Here’s our recipe for growing a top-notch contact list

Grow your list on merit

It’s easy enough to write out multiple series of emails with various intents and schedule them to arrive at your subscribers’ inboxes. The hard part is to develop emails with passion and purpose: what is the purpose of sending out emails that read like they’ve just been spewed out by a machine How do emails fetch results without a sliver of life within them Further, emails are just delivery vehicles but what really matters what you put in them. If there’s one way to grow a powerful, responsive, and high quality contact list, it’s to grow your list based on merit and hard work.

There are no shortcuts.

Exceptional contact list is built on value

Economics dwells on this lesson and pretty much all business runs on it: nothing of value can be traded with something, which is much lower in value. Every contact on your list is a highly valued, interested lead - a possible customer. To keep that interest alive and to ultimately help convert your leads into repeat customers, you’ll have to provide value - nothing less will do. Value exchange for your business could mean free trials or extended trials for your subscribers, exclusive information your customers don’t get anywhere else.

Be everywhere your customers are likely to be

There was a time when all you had to do was to have an email opt-in page on your blog, as a popup, or even as a landing page. Since the number of customer touch points have increased, it just makes sense to have “sign up pages”, “opt-in pages”, and “landing pages” at every possible point your customers are likely to be found: links to landing pages on forums, landing pages exclusive for every busy Q & A site, social media networks, etc.

Use Mobile Apps

Most leading email solutions also provide mobile apps (for both iPhone and Android) to improve your opt-in rates and increase your email subscribers. iCapture for Constant Contact allows you to use iPad to capture subscriber names, emails, and even tweak customer preferences on the move. iCapture free even works offline. Need some Inspiration You might want to check out examples on how to grow your list to see how some businesses are building their contact lists. Vertical Response has an email marketing mobile application that you could use to manage your campaigns and even check on reports while on the go. GetResponse.com - another leading email marketing solution - also has a mobile app  available for free downloads.

How do you intend to grow your mobile list

Five Ways To Keep Your Businesses Wireless Network Secured

Cyber security is an important issue for businesses large and small alike. You customer’s data and your data is very important and a breach can cause untold damage, especially if you have passwords and credit card numbers on your system. There have been a number of high profile breaches this year, including Evernote and Yahoo!;  no one is immune.

But while everyone’s waiting for “the Pearl Harbor of cyber attacks,” the attacks that your business should be concerned with might not be so overt. Corey Nachreiner, CISSP and Director of Security Strategy at WatchGuard, says businesses need to filter out the hype of the media and focus on the more likely and relevant threats that affect their network security on a day-to-day basis.

Smaller and mid-sized organizations, Nachreiner says, are bigger targets than they have been in the past.

Nachreiner was kind enough to send us a list of five ways you can best protect your business. Check it out:

1. Take a Multi-Layered Approach: Defense-in-Depth. When combined together, firewalls, intrusion prevention services, proactive anti-virus (AV) solutions, anti-spam and anti-phishing protection, and cloud-based reputation defenses maximize the chance that one or more security controls will catch part of an APT attack.

2. Filter egress rather than just ingress. Companies need to carefully monitor and restrict the flow of outbound information. If the data doesn’t match the organization’s security policies, the packets should not be allowed to be distributed.

3. Open your network’s eyes. Visibility helps organizations enforce acceptable use policies that are mandated by industry regulation, legal and political jurisdictions as well as corporate culture.

4. Segment by trust and security. Businesses need to set thoughtful, strategic governance and access policies to protect privileged information while allowing full access to other information.

5. Treat your wireless network the same as your wired network. More and more companies are incorporating bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies in order to benefit from a mobile workforce and enhance productivity. With threats on the rise and growing amounts of corporate data stored on workers’ personal devices, it is more critical than ever that steps be taken to thoroughly secure wireless infrastructure.

We’ve covered network security a lot, because it’s such an important issue for business owners. See our archives for more tips on making your network as secure as it can be.

Let us know what you do to keep your data secure in the comments!

Government announces sharing partnership between police and private sector

Police, private sector, MI5 and GCHQ are to form a joint Cyber Security Information Sharing Partnership (CISP) to allow access to shared information.

Allowing all to better coordinate responses to modern cyber threats, the concept is to encourage firms to share information. This follows a successful pilot scheme that included over 160 companies across a range of UK sectors.

Launching the CISP, Francis Maude, cabinet office minister responsible for the Cyber Security Strategy, said: “This innovative partnership is breaking new ground through a truly collaborative partnership for sharing information on threats and to protect UK interests in cyber space.

“The initiative meets a key aim of our Cyber Security Strategy - to make the UK one of the safest places to do business in cyber space. As part of our investment in a transformative National Cyber Security Programme; we are pleased to provide a trusted platform to facilitate this project.” 

The concept is a secure virtual ‘collaboration environment' where information can be exchanged on threats and vulnerabilities in real-time, which will be complemented by a ‘fusion cell' that will be supported on the government side by the Security Service, GCHQ and the National Crime Agency, and by industry analysts from a variety of sectors.

The fusion cell will be cyber attack monitoring operations room at an undisclosed location in London.

Welcoming the announcement, former White House cyber security adviser Howard Schmidt, said that the launch of the CISP was an important step in forging an ongoing partnership between industry and government, promoting information sharing by providing the ability to analyse and redistribute information in a timely, actionable and relevant manner.

“In the US, we have seen the emphasis that President Obama has placed on cyber security and in particular steps to protect our critical infrastructure. Many senior leaders in private sector companies are supporting it and recognising it is not only a security issue but a business imperative,” he said.

Terry Greer-King, UK managing director at Check Point, said: “This is a key step forward for both governments and business in fighting web attacks, and reducing their impact. It's essential that organisations collaborate and share intelligence with each other to track emerging threats, mitigate their severity or block them before they cause damage. Fighting threats together is much more effective than fighting alone."

Graeme Stewart, director of public sector strategy at McAfee, said: “Information sharing is imperative to countering cyber threats. As cyber crime itself is global in nature, the need for a strong public-private partnership is critical, and McAfee is broadly supportive of such initiatives. 

“We would however like to see the scheme provide outreach to include smaller and SME organisations. This sector makes up the supply chains of large corporate and government organisations and therefore a substantial portion of their risk comes from this supply chain failing to understand the threat posed by nefarious cyber activity.”

Neil Thacker, information security and security officer EMEA at Websense, said: “The collaboration between businesses and government to fight cyber crime can only be commended. Companies need to put aside the stigma associated with being targeted by cyber criminals and understand that its reality. It's not a case of if, but a case of when.

“Only when companies shift away from relying on basic security controls that can be bypassed, can we say that we are making real advances in fighting cyber crime.”

Greater intelligence is needed to combat stronger attacks

Shared intelligence is needed by businesses as threats become more sophisticated.

Speaking to SC Magazine, Proofpoint CEO Gary Steele said that along with the challenge of threats and information sharing on them, the sophistication of those threats requires more sophisticated teams.

He said: “Organisations need intelligence to help bridge the gap and businesses need expertise as security postures are not thought through and businesses need to step up, as what is given is not exposed.”

Talking about the concept of information sharing, Steele said that there was a "broader willingness" to share as people want to be educated and want to collaborate with their competitors, but figuring out how do it required confidence as there was not a complete or clear perspective on how it could be achieved.

He said: “With the CISO at the table, you can set up agreements and ways of sharing insights with your competitors, but these things are not built from industry intelligence, it is about trust on both sides without conflict.

“It is harder in the security industry because of the nature of our business and determining whose data is whose, and how you communicate to customers and the end-user at the enterprise, especially when it is intelligence captured and contributed to the threat landscape.

“If we are seeing a new form of threat and we have knowledge of it; we know how to manage it so we communicate it.”

China accused of spreading Android malware

The Chinese government has often been accused of hacking into computers belonging to other nation states and even individuals, but now evidence has been uncovered that it also uses smartphones to track targets.

A security research company has uncovered evidence of malware targeting Tibetan activists spreading via Android devices, and China is the main suspect.

According to Citizen Lab, a security research group based at the Monk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, the malware is designed to steal text messages and contacts, as well as monitor the user's location.

The group's research has found that the target of this malware was a prominent member of the Tibetan community. According to Citizen Lab a Tibetan security expert sent an email containing a legitimate Android application package file (APK) to a member of the Tibetan parliament-in-exile, based in India. It is likely that person's email account was compromised and the same message was forwarded to another prominent member of the Tibetan community. However, this time the legitimate attachment had been replaced with a compromised app.

The app in question is Kakao Talk, a messaging and chat application developed by a South Korean firm. It is popular with the Tibetan community because it is considered more secure than a similar app called WeChat          , which is developed by a Chinese company called Tencent. Users were worried that the Chinese government would be able to monitor communications through WeChat.

Citizen Lab said the compromised version of Kakao Talk worked in the same way as the legitimate app but contained a much longer list of permission requests. As Citizen Lab points out, Tibetan activists often circumvent the official Google Play app store to get around restrictions placed on it. This leaves them more open to the possibility of installing malicious apps.

The compromised app would periodically download the user's contacts, call history, SMS messages and cellular network configuration to an encrypted file, which is then sent to the attacker.

Another aspect of the compromised app, which Citizen Lab calls “troubling and curious”, is its ability to intercept text messages and search them for a specific code sent by the attacker. If it is detected, the app replies to the text giving technical information such as the base station ID, tower ID, mobile network code and mobile area code. It does all this without the user's knowledge.

“This information is only useful to actors with access to the cellular communications provider and its technical infrastructure, such as large businesses and government,” the blog explains. “It almost certainly represents the information that a cellular service provider requires to initiate eavesdropping, often referred to as ‘trap & trace'. Actors at this level would also have access to the data required to perform radio frequency triangulation based on the signal data from multiple towers, placing the user within a small geographical area.”

Although Citizen Lab refrains from accusing China directly it seems clear that is where the suspicion lies. Not only has the Chinese government been accused of being too close to the country's telecoms providers but its attitude towards Tibetan activists is well known.

Speaking to Forbes, Citizen Lab director Ron Deibert was more explicit in his accusation. “We don't have a smoking gun that this is the Chinese government. But let's face it, when you add it all up, there's really only one kind of organisation for whom this information is useful. And we know that the Chinese have a very strong interest in tracking Tibetans, so it's a strong set of circumstantial evidence.”

It is the second time in a matter of days that Android malware targeting Tibetans has been uncovered. Kaspersky Lab revealed details of a very similar attack, although Citizen Lab claims the two are not technically related.

Attacks on Tibetan activists are not rare, but before these two examples the vast majority had been Windows-based attacks. “These examples demonstrate the risks communities face from targeted mobile malware. Attackers will continue to adopt new methods and widen targeting of platforms,” Citizen Lab warned.

Google facing European privacy investigation

Google is facing European-wide investigations into its controversial privacy policy after failing to meet a four-month deadline to address concerns raised by the French data watchdog CNIL.

The concerns were originally raised in October 2012 following Google's decision earlier that year to combine the privacy policies from all of its products and services into a single, overarching policy. This allowed Google to share data collected in one service, such as Gmail or YouTube, with any of its other platforms.

In October last year CNIL said it wanted Google to address questions of “lawfulness and fairness” within four months.  “After this period has expired, Google has not implemented any significant compliance measures,” CNIL said on its website, adding that it warned Google at a meeting during March that action against the company was possible. “Following this meeting, no change has been seen,” CNIL said.

Consequently authorities in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain have started investigations, while in the UK the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has confirmed its own investigation into Google's privacy policy. The ICO has been heavily criticised in the past for not coming down hard enough on Google.

“All the authorities composing the taskforce have launched actions on 2 April 2013 on the basis of the provisions laid down in their respective national legislation,” confirmed the CNIL statement. “In particular, the CNIL notified Google of the initiation of an inspection procedure and that it had set up an international administrative cooperation procedure with its counterparts in the taskforce.”

In a statement released to the BBC Google said it would continue to work with European authorities. “Our privacy policy respects European law and allows us to create simpler, more effective services. We have engaged fully with the DPAs involved throughout this process, and we'll continue to do so going forward.”

CNIL had previously fined Google €100,000 over the collection of personal data by its Street View cars.

The news comes as Google's privacy director Alma Whitten steps down from the role. London-based Whitten, who was Google's first hire in that role, will be replaced by software engineer Lawrence You, who is based at Google's HQ in Mountain View, California.