The Big Question: Who Owns Your Address Book?

Before we jump into the conversation on who actually owns your address book, we need to clarify what exactly your address book IS. It is not simply a compilation of your contacts’ email addresses, but much more. Our “smart” address books also hold phone numbers, birthdays, home addresses, and any notes we enter into a contact’s file. As a goldmine of potential networking opportunities, it is no surprise that debates have risen over the proper privacy and sharing practices involving address books.

Expectations

When we give someone our contact information, we presume it will be used solely for his or her own purposes, unless otherwise specified. We don’t think they will share it with random people or businesses do we? No. But at the same time, we share our own address books with others constantly. Have you ever allowed Facebook to access your address book to connect with other friends? How about Twitter, Instagram, Google+, or LinkedIn? When it comes to social media, everyone is guilty of allowing a third party access to their private contacts, but we’re okay with that. If it helps up connect with our circles, then great!

What Do They See

We think that when companies are asking for access to our address books, if they even ask at all, they are just using it to see which of our friends are currently using the same apps and websites. But the problem is, most do not clearly state what they do with the information afterwards. Do they store it? Offer it to third parties? Use it for data mining? Or do they delete it after you’ve found your friends? Some companies have even been found uploading calendars, the “name” of phones, and uniqueUDID identifiers. While this is most likely harmless, companies that gain access to your address book can develop a sense of who you are and whom you know. Now this begs the question; do you have the right to share your contacts’ information?

Black and White

Some people say no, absolutely not. The contact information in your address book does not belong to you, so you have no right to share it with anyone. Others, like us here at CloudSponge, believe that your address book is yours, and you should be able to do with it what you please.

The Gray Area

However, the grey area to this is you have a responsibility to protect them. Make sure you don’t share other people’s email addresses in an irresponsible way (publicly) or with companies that will abuse or sell them. In other words, treat other people’s email addresses with the same level of attention to privacy as you would treat your own.

Practice Safe Sharing

You can start protecting your contacts from unwanted commerce with random companies by doing a few simple tasks.

• Don’t publically post your email, or your contacts’ emails, online. Spiders are trolling the Internet for emails, and worms can access your entire address book, allowing spammers access.
• Don’t share your contacts with a company which you are unfamiliar with, or do not trust.
• Always be aware of the apps on your phone that access your address book. Use a program like AdiOS to find out which ones do; you might be surprised as to how many!

At the end of the day you have to decide who should have access to your address book. Will you do whatever you please with it? Or will you respect the privacy of the people who entrusted you with their information? Or, have you found the grey area, where you only share the information under the right circumstances? (ie. Entering their address in a referral program with a company you know they will appreciate, or to connect with each other via social media). There are pros and cons to either side of the argument, and the gray area seems to be increasingly popular. So we ask, who owns your address book?

Is Christmas a Good Time for Invite-a-Friend Marketing?

Companies have been preparing for the 2013 holiday season all year. This is the time of year where wallets are freely opened, gifts and services are purchased for loved ones, and, if there is time and money left over, even gifts for our selves! It’s the most wonderful time of the year for many people, and even more delightful for retailers.

Although it is a short period of time, defined as November 1-December 31, it is anything but short of profit. In 2012, holiday sales reached $579.5 billion, which allotted for 19.3% of the years’ total retail sales. This year it’s predicted to reach $602.1 billion. For some retailers, as much as 20-40% of their annual sales occur during these 61 days.

So why is this holiday consumer-splurge a good time for invite-a-friend marketing? I’ll give you a hint; it has to do with heavy online traffic.

Cybershopping is Hot

Each year the number of online holiday shoppers increases significantly.
Nowadays, most prefer online shopping to in-store shopping. Why? It’s easier, faster, usually cheaper and you can do it from the comfort of your own home. Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the early-to-mid-Christmas rush all have people scouring their computers, tablets and smartphones for that perfect purchase. This past Thanksgiving’s online sales totaled $1.1 billion for the day, while Black Friday brought in $1.9 billion. That’s $3 billion in online sales in two days! According to shop.org, you can expect that number to increase to as much as $82 billion during this holiday season.

What This Means For You

This huge influx in online traffic during the holiday season creates the perfect environment for businesses to grab the attention of new customers and further cement their relationships with current customers. The best way to do this is by enhancing, or establishing, a referral program that encourages happy customers to spread the word about you and your products. During the holidays, word-of-mouth marketing is the most cost-efficient method of bringing in new cliental.

The Final Touch

However, in order to get the most out of your referral program, you need to cater to the desires of your audience. Don’t forget why they started shopping online in the first place; it’s quick and easy. By augmenting your referral program with a contact importer widget like CloudSponge, you can ensure that satisfied shoppers will take a moment to refer their friends. With just a few clicks we’ve made referring as quick and easy as the shopping.

So is Christmas a good time for invite-a-freind marketing? The answer is, yes! The increase in consumer spending over the holidays, paired with the large upsurge of online shopping, creates an environment in which your referral-marketing program will thrive. So what are you waiting for?

Making Contact in the Digital Age

The digital age has allowed our address books to expand immensely. We can reach out and connect with almost anyone online, and since 80% of senior decision makers have a social presence, making certain connections can launch you higher in the business world. Making contact has mutated from the traditional face-to-face technique and is no longer simply about adding contacts to your Rolodex so you can dig them out one day. It is now about how you contact them. There are a few tips and tricks to making this digital networking work for you.

Making it Work For You

Just because you haven’t met in person, does not mean that you haven’t already made a first impression. We have the tools to thoroughly research people before we choose to, or choose not to, contact them. Spend the time researching who works for what company, who has similar interests, or who you could benefit from establishing a relationship with. However, this goes both ways. So make sure every thing that can be found online about you lives up to how you want to sell yourself. Spend the time making all your social media profiles true to who and what you are. Consistency is key.

Manners Matter

Only 7% of communication is truly passed on through the written word, while 93% depends on non-verbal body language, inflection, tone, and eye contact; all of which digital communication lacks. Don’t let hiding behind a computer screen affect how you approach your contacts. Remember to always show respect and decency to your recipients. Re-read your messages and allow an appropriate amount of time to pass before re-trying if you failed to receive a response. Once a two-way conversation has been established, you are ready to move forward.

Keep It Hot

The key to not letting a connection fizzle is keeping in touch. This lets the person know you value them and your relationship. An easy way of doing this is sending them articles, blog posts, photos, websites, or product information that they might be interested in. Or funny cat videos, those are always a hit.

Making it Work for Your Business

So far this entry has been geared towards individual people, but how do businesses benefit from digital contact? A great place to start is by following these guidelines and making sure you are building up positive digital connections for your business. Make sure to also extend some of these practices towards your customers; for example, opening up a two-way conversation with them is a great way to increase customer retention. By building a strong relationship with your customer base, you will generate higher customer satisfaction, a higher retention rate and, since that will transform into an advertisement that money can’t buy: word of mouth (or mouse) recommendations, you will build up your client base!

Whether you are an individual person looking to launch yourself higher in the business world, or a business looking to continuously increase its success, how you make contact, and utilize contacts, in the digital era will determine whether your online presence helps or hinders you.

Yahoo! Shenanigans

About a month ago I started to observe an annoying error with our Yahoo! imports. There were periodic failures at a very low rate. The failures were all identical; they looked like this:

{"error":{"lang":"en-US","description":"Please provide valid credentials. OAuth oauth_problem=\"signature_invalid\", realm=\"yahooapis.com\""}

It was very hard to reproduce the issue in development, although it did happen periodically. When I was able to reproduce it locally, I found that I would get a successful response if I resubmitted the same request, the only difference being that the random OAuth parameters were regenerated: nonce, timestamp and signature. Because of the visibility and the challenge in reproducing, I just followed my heuristic and built the retry logic into our application. For a while that was mostly successful, lowering the daily average failure rate well below 1%.

Over the past two weeks the failure rate started to slowly creep up again and I tried my best to ignore the problem. I did extend my retry logic to try a second and third time before giving up, producing some diminishing returns.

Finally, I could hide from the issue no longer yesterday when 100% of our Yahoo imports started to fail with the same issue.

Exactly what was happening on Yahoo's side during this time is anyone's guess. Maybe some bad code had been isolated to a portion of their servers managed to infect the rest of the farm. Maybe it's just Seasonal Jitters. Whatever the cause, we were unable to connect even once to Yahoo between 2PM yesterday to 6AM this morning. Then even more suddenly, everything started working again. Here's what the failure rates looked like:

This is not the first instance of this problem with Yahoo! In December, 2011 we had a 13 hour period of disruption with the same unexplained symptom: oauth_problem:signature_invalid. And we're not the only integrator who noticed the issue. At least 2 threads on developer.yahoo.com point out the issue with the Profiles API and the Contacts API. There's been no verbal response from Yahoo! but at least we know they found the fixed the issue for now.

Word-Of-Mouse: How Stuff Gets Red Hot Online

Viral marketing techniques entice others to spread your message for you. Every time we log onto a social media website, use a search engine, or even check our email we become hosts to a different strain of viral marketing attempts. The companies infecting us are trying to create such a buzz about their message that it spreads like wildfire; affecting everyone it comes in contact with (just like a virus.)

A successful viral campaign can be thousands of times more effective than a non-viral one. Why? Because the reachable online audience is almost unlimited. More than 30 billion pieces of web content are shared every month, including blogs, articles, videos, social media, search engines, TV, radio and email, creating the perfect environment for a campaign to go viral.

One way to demonstrate the real benefits of using viral marketing techniques is to look at an example of a company that has dominated our computers…and our hearts. In July 2010 Old Spice launched the first video of their viral campaign, with the gorgeous Isaiah Mustafa as the new face, and body, of Old Spice. Within 24 hours the video hit 6.7 million views, and within 36 hours that number rocketed to 23 million. Old Spice sales increased 107% by the end of the 52-week campaign. While results like this cannot be expected from all content that goes viral, it shows just how much a unique and entertaining idea can push a company to the top.

Making It Work


These benefits can’t be ignored, so the next step is to ask, “How can I do it?” The steps to a successful viral marketing campaign range from as many as 22 to as few as 4 depending on whom you ask. The most significant and consistent steps can be boiled down to 6.

1. Create A Message- Make your message memorable and interesting. Don’t be neutral; inspire emotions from the audience, whether it’s love, hate, happiness, or anger.


2. Be Unique- Do something unexpected that will catch people’s attention. Nobody cares about watching a video of a boring conference speech, but a video of a shirtless man offering you diamonds on a horse? Absolutely. 


3. Don’t Just Advertise- Don’t let your product be the focal point of the message. Create a “hook” then reel them in.


4. Be Accessible- Make it easy to access. Don’t require users to do any extra work, like register or download specific software. Use communication networks that are already in place to spread your message; Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, etc.


5. Bond with Comments- Allow your followers to influence your next message. Monitoring their comments will give you more information on what they want, while allowing comments to influence your campaign entices more to people to share.


6. Promote Sharing- make it quick and easy to share your message, or people won’t take the time to do so. Include all social media and email options.

Let’s Make it Hot!


While all of these steps are crucial to creating a thriving viral message; the sixth and final step may be the most important. A great campaign means nothing if it’s not being shared. If you want it to become red hot, you must make sure you incorporate any and all means of spreading your content. For example, remember to include all of the most common social media badges to promote quick and easy sharing.

Another way to spread of your virus is through email. The trouble with email sharing is, you must type in or copy/paste every address you’d like to send to; a process most people won’t waste their time on. You can eliminate this friction point by using a referral program that allows users to access their personal address books directly from your website. By integrating CloudSponge into your referral form, you can further increase the reach of your campaign by opening up another means of transferring your virus. There are currently 3.6 billion email accounts today, which is expected to increase to 4.6 billion by 2016. Think of all the possible prospects!

Tips

Some final tips to help your campaign get hot, hot hot:

• Use a URL shortening service to shrink your link. This promotes sharing as it takes up less room (great for Twitter and LinkedIn posts where you only get 140 characters).

• Leave extra room in your post to allow people to add their own comment when sharing.

• Keep it short: not everyone has time to read a 10-page article, or watch a 5-minute video.

Most importantly, do not simply expect something to go viral just because you followed all the “steps”; it comes down to equal parts of luck, magic, creativity, planning and promoting.

The #2 Best Tool for a Lean Startup

Getting a company off the ground with a tiny budget is not easy. A strong double-loop referral program, augmented by tools like CloudSponge, is probably the #1 best way to get the engine fired up through word-of-mouth marketing. But success is built on more than just marketing, and there are other excellent online business tools available to the Lean Startup. For example, Dropbox, Unassumer, Unbounceand Google Apps offer plenty of options. However, the title of #2 best tool for a Lean Startup goes to Lean Canvas. With it, you can create a one-page business model in around 20 minutes. Lean Canvas is particularly popular with entrepreneurs who need to focus on building a new business and have a limited amount of time to spend on a long and cumbersome business plan.

Saving Valuable Time

Compared to writing a 30-page business plan that could take weeks or even several months, Lean Canvas allows you to outline multiple alternative business models in one place in just an afternoon. You can easily examine important elements of your startup at the beginning of the process, such as pricing models, potential customers, and marketing strategies.

Appealing and Concise

If you’re launching your business, you’ve probably got all kinds of ideas as to how you should proceed. Lean Canvas forces you to condense everything, until you can describe just the core aspects of your product or service. In a face-to-face meeting, you have less than a minute to make an impression on a potential customer. On your website, you have less than 10 seconds to hook the visitor. Lean Canvas helps you to capture the very essence of what you’re promoting and communicate its features and benefits as effectively as possible.

Portable and Accessible

It’s much easier to share a single page business model than a lengthy and often complicated document. And unlike a traditional business plan, people will actually read the simplified model created with Lean Canvas. Your business model will not only be viewed by more people, but will also be more frequently revised. Lean Canvas makes updating your model very easy, so that people are encouraged to make recommendations, changes and additions.

Keeping Track

Once your business is up and running, you can use the built-in presenter tools to document your progress and communicate this to others. You can easily keep everyone updated, whether they’re potential investors, future clients or members of your own team. Once again, Lean Canvas allows you to concentrate on business instead of drowning in details.

You can learn more about how Lean Canvas can help you and your emerging business by clicking here.

A 300% Increase in Outlook.com Import Conversions because Windows Live Changes (again!)

Windows Live has made a lot of changes in the past 2 years, but if you were using CloudSponge, you probably didn't notice.

The happy news that accompanies this horn-blowing is that Windows Live has recently published their Outlook.com API which uses OAuth2.0 for authentication and provides access to raw email addresses once again. We have integrated with the new API and made it the default for all our customers.

What it means?

The data we've collected is positive, we've seen a 3- to 4-times increase in successful imports and a drop to near zero failed imports. If there was ever any question, this lower abandonment rate clearly indicates that the user experience is much better and more reliable than the CSV import.

For now the news is good but if/when Windows Live changes things again it will be our problem to fix it. CloudSponge will do its best to make sure you don't notice it.

In case you haven't been following this story for the last 4 years, here's a list of some of the bigger events in our Windows Live timeline:

• 2009 - CloudSponge integrates with Windows Live Contacts API, using Delegated Authentication to pull contacts from Windows Live, MSN and Hotmail address books.
• 2010 - Messenger Connect API 4.1 is released. It returns 'email_hashes' instead of useable email addresses. Windows Live argues that this gives users more control over their own data (i.e. their own email addresses inside someone else's address book).
• June, 2010 - Windows Live announces they will no longer support Windows Live Contacts API or Delegated Authentication. Integrators are directed to use Live Connect Contacts API v4.1 and v5.0. Windows blogs about why their new APIs return 'email_hashes' instead of actual email addresses.
• June 25, 2011 - Messenger Connect v4.1 is deprecated, replaced by Messenger Connect API v5.0
• April 11, 2012 - We reach out Microsoft asking for access to privileged APIs that return raw email addresses and are told 'no'.
• April 17, 2012 - Windows Live changes the root url for their OAuth2.0 endpoints.
• July 25, 2012 - Windows Live officially deprecates their old Contacts API. The API continues to function, but documentation is no longer available.
• August 14, 2012 - Messenger Connect v4.1 ceases working.
• March 2013 - Windows Live Contacts API actually stops serving requests. CloudSponge transitions to our backup plan: CSV upload.
• Oct 28, 2013 - Windows Live publishes documentation on their Live Connect Outlook.com API which permits access to raw email addresses (and email_hashes).
• Nov 7, 2013 - CloudSponge migrates the user consent flow to OAuth2.0 and reenables it on our site. 

This is not to complain about how often and unpredictably Windows Live has changed their MO. It is to let you know that we've been busy and kept on top of these changes, insulating our customers from the need to react suddenly to a broken import. As useful APIs have been removed, we've adjusted our integration so that we can continue to offer support for Windows Live address books.

Branding

The great news is that for customers who have branded the WL import UX, you don't need to do anything. The old Windows Live DelAuth Consumer Credentials just work with the new OAuth2.0 flows, so your users are using the better user experience and seeing your branding.

Into the Future

Our integration makes use of undocumented features. It's very possible that these features will change again and Windows Live will stop sharing email addresses with our application. However, if that does happen, our service will fall back to using the CSV import until a better option is available.

Microsoft is clearly having an internal debate about address book ownership. My guess is that they had enough feature requests from developers and users for the feature that they have decided to open it up. Is the move to permit sharing of other people's email addresses a signal that users don't worry about access to things like contacts? Will other big social networks follow suit?