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Paul kicks off with a short rant about the lack of rigor and news value of surveys, and how marketers should spend more time vetting their results to determine what questions/objections they’re likely to get. With the release next week of the Verizon Data Breach Report setting a high bar, it is a timely topic.

This week we saw a tweet from Chase bank that not only fell flat but incurred many folks’ antipathy. It was so tone deaf that it was hard to even understand how the bank could have put it out there. This incident, combined with the offensive NY Times International edition political cartoon that was published last week,  reinforces the need to be more careful about what your brand shares socially.

Speaking of social shares, this article by Bloomberg’s BHive research outfit has a lot to say about ways they found to increase the sharing of their news articles from mobile devices. As more and more news is read on these devices, content providers have to do a better job of not cluttering up  small screens with extraneous ads and other diversions. Bloomberg was able to improve engagement by a significant amount with just doing a few simple tweaks to their stories. One key point: They interviewed actual readers.

The Workamajig blog’s post on how Voice Search is Changing B2B Marketing (And What You Can Do About It) is well worth your time. Consider that voice searches are by definition conversational. People don’t speak in keywords. They ask “What’s the height of the Empire State building?” not “Empire State building height”. Voice opens up new opportunities for content marketing. Republishing your content as an Alexa skill, for instance, can bring you a whole new set of listeners. In fact, if you look at the best reviewed Business & Finance skills on the Alexa store right now, you’ll see content-focused skills dominate the list. David met one vendor called VoiceXP that can help you create your own voice apps. Clearly this will grow in importance in the near future.

Finally, we note this analysis by our colleague Mike Vizard in the Barracuda blog about how the Russian hacking of the DNC back in 2016 went down, as documented in the Mueller report. It all started with a spear phishing email. You have been warned.

About David Strom

David Strom is a former editor-in-chief of Network Computing and Tom's Hardware who has written two computer networking books and thousands of articles about B2B IT.

About Paul Gillin

Paul Gillin, host of FIR B2B, is a veteran technology journalist and a thought leader in new media. Since 2005, he has advised marketers and business executives on strategies to optimize their use of social media and online channels to reach buyers cost-effectively. Full bio