A hack into 22Seven isn’t a hack into a database of credit cards, it’s a hack into full database of precise banking information. If your details where compromised you’d have access into every access of a banking profile with the ability to still every cent of your entire capital worth.

The failure of 22Seven to me is the lack of any surety. I got in touch with the 22Sevens team to ask about their insurance against a security breach, in short there isn’t any but their word. They do not offer any insurance against an online hack on your profile even if it’s their system that is compromised.

If you could upload your statements to 22Seven like some of its competitors or it authenticated with your banks through an API (like Twitter for example) I’d be sold on what promises to be a very useful tool. Another alternative is ExpenZa by  Apposition Consulting which promises to be a pretty handy looking app.

76% of local companies are currently using social media as a business tool, most noticeably Linkedin, then Twitter followed by Facebook are the noted as the most suitable for business use. Zoopy and MySpace even cracked the list!

Surprisingly 82% of respondents indicated that their companies allowed the use of social media within the organisation yet 55% of respondents claimed their employer did not have a social media policy or they did not know of one.

Check out the full survey here.

Update your company status

Company Status Updates are a powerful way to engage directly with followers (think Facebook friends or fans). Post relevant updates, like company news, product promotions, videos, and industry articles. Giving the ability to amplify your brand message and benefit from follower engagement (likes, comments and shares), interactions that are virally distributed across a follower’s networks

Review analytics

Company Pages come with an Analytics Tab visible only to administrators. Graphs dynamically populate with information about visitors to your Company Page, which you can segment by industries, functions and companies. With the Analytics Tab, you learn not only who is visiting your Company Page and which content is of most interest, but also how you compare against similar companies.

Include products & Services

The Products & Services Tab of your Company Page is where you can list your products and services and collect recommendations from your best customers. When customers recommend your product or service, their endorsement is added to your Company Page and spreads virally throughout their network. These are also customisable, so you can create different landing pages for different industry professionals.

Recruit

The Careers sections allow a unique opportunity to interact with millions of passive and active job seekers on LinkedIn. Paying for a Silver or Gold Careers Page allows you to feature additional content about your employment brand and your company’s culture, showcase your best employees, and tailor your messaging and job postings to target audiences.

Click here for the NSFW image

Dealing with that type of content is simple, it’s offensive and violates Facebook terms of use and can immediately be removed. If your Facebook page has no published guidelines of what content is acceptable on your page becoming a censor is a bit controversial. The group is heavily moderating the comments appearing on their feed, blocking fan comments and deleting many comments with no warning or transparency.

Although it has no legal backing, I always post the following guidelines under the info tab of the brands I help engage on Facebook:

Keep comments on topic; no personal attacks; don’t submit indecent, inflammatory, political or religious hatred, slanderous, uncivil or irrelevant comments; spam, advertise; inappropriate comments will be removed or edited.

When a conversation is a risk of turning south we direct users to the guidelines and always message them with the reason why we are deleting their comment before we kill the comment.

Transparency is the base ingredient in all on and offline communication.

The game has smart difficulty settings that allow for just about any level gamer to feel capable making their way around the racetrack, with new rival mode and multi class races Forza 4 is as much fun to play on your own as it is with your mates.

Going round and round a track can get pretty repetitive, this game feels like it never ends with World Tour mode hosting numerous tournaments those determined to ‘finish’ games will be kept up for hours in front of their TVs.

Forza 4 allows for Kinect integration, albeit gimmicky it’s great to see another lifeline to Kinect, the real winner appears to be the speed wheel (I hope to get my hands on one at some stage).

Of course there is very little difference between Forza 3 and Forza 4, but who doesn’t want to own the shiny new one!

I can’t wait to take on @MissVallun on the track!

Disclaimer: Xbox is a client of the company I work for

Why RSS feeds are useful on Twitter

A while back Twitter removed its RSS feeds from Twitter Search, RSS feeds are useful for continuous monitoring on a topic. For example if you sell fridge repairs, you might want to know every time someone in Joburg’s fridge breaks so that you could get hold of them on Twitter as a potential sales lead (a bit of a random example, I know). You’re certainly not going to want to log into Twitter daily to run a search, so subscribing to a service that alerts you of every new Tweet is useful and that’s exactly what and RSS feed will allow you to do!

How to generate an RSS feed for Twitter

You need to do a little bit of URL building to get the RSS feed. Start off with the generic URL for a Twitter search with a feed:

http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=

Then include your search term, remember this is a URL so no spaces. To include two words use %20 to represent a space:

http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=Your%20%search%20term

That will bring in a global search of every mention on Twitter of the phrase your search term, in order to add location to searches, you’d need to include the Geo Code (for more info on this, see the post over here) followed by the distance from that pinpoint location to include in the results. The example below uses the Geo Code for South Africa with a 500 miles radius.

http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q= Your%20%search%20term%20geocode:-26.201654,28.028183,500mi

Remember to not leave any spaces. You’ll need an RSS reader to interpret the feed you have just generated, you can choose the one you like the most over here.

The World of Social Media 2011

The platform does have a flaw for us trying to monitor reputation, follow a trend or just keep an eye out for a topics that interest us that is, you can’t add location to your search columns by default.

How to add geo location to your Tweetdeck searches:

Localising your searches is possible, you need to add your search phrase in a particular format:

<Phrase> geocode:x,y,<km/mi>

That’s the search word or phrase followed by a space, then the word geocode with a colon and the latitude and longitude comma and then the kilometres or miles from that specific location that you want to run your search from.

So for example if you wanted to search for happy people in Johannesburg, you would add the following search phrase into the Tweetdeck search column:

Happy geocode:-26.201654,28.028183,150km

Important: there is a space between the search phrase and the word geocode, and no other spaces in the phrase.

The centre of South Africa is about -28.825425,25.532227 and 500miles would let you cover the country. Use Google Maps to find your coordinates (or geocode), browse to the location you want to focus on, then right click, choose ‘Whats here’ and then copy the coordinates that appear in the search bar.

Happy Tweetdeck searching!