Today in Digital Marketing - So We’re Hacking PDF Contracts Now? Cool, Cool.

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, hackers can change your PDF contracts after they've been signed, some new data on how long it takes the average firm to reply to an RFP, Facebook Shops rolls out in two more countries, and how to get lead gen forms on LinkedIn without paying for an ad campaign. It's Tuesday, February 23rd, 2021. Happy Defender of the Fatherland Day, Russia. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. A big expansion today to Facebook's e-commerce platform, Facebook Shops, is now available to brands in Canada and the UK. Here's how Facebook describes it, quote,

Starting point is 00:00:40 The shop experience for consumers will feature curated collections, products, and recent posts from businesses of all sizes. People will be able to see personalized content from brands within the newsfeed and through in-product notifications or small business favorites they follow, unquote. So Canada and the UK now join America as countries where this is available. Could be enticing for companies that want to sell online but don't want the hassle of setting up Shopify or WooCommerce. That said, as socialmediatoday.com noted, quote, this does of course mean that you're building on rented land, which, as many Australian businesses recently found out, can be problematic. But with the addition of in-stream payment options facilitated by Facebook Pay, and with more people becoming increasingly accustomed with social shopping, it could open up new potential

Starting point is 00:01:28 to maximize your sales performance, unquote. Also, if this is something you'd be interested in, Facebook has a free training program on setting up a shop on its platform. Just Google Facebook Blueprint. LinkedIn continues to build out its company pages, this morning launching two new features. One, a big enhancement to those product pages you can set up to talk about what you offer. Now you can add lead gen forms to them.

Starting point is 00:01:56 Lead gen forms are usually an ad product of theirs, and still is, but when you drop one on one of your product pages, you will get it for free. The nice thing about these forms, of course, is they pre-fill lots of data from the user's LinkedIn profile, and upon submitting the form, you can send people to your brand site or any web page you want. And the second thing they added, the My Company tab gets a curation tool for page admins to find trending articles. Nine people and 23 hours. Those are the average resources poured into responding to RFPs. The new data comes from Lupio, which polled 650 executives across North America. Lupio sells RFP response software. That is an average though, so breaking that down a bit, more than 50% say their company spends 5 to 20 hours. 33% of them say they spend between 21 and 50 hours.

Starting point is 00:02:51 Fewer than 10% say they spend more than 50 hours in total. But the number we all really care about, win rate, only 13% of those polled say that they win more than four out of five RFPs that they work on. Well, this is shitty. Security researchers have discovered a way to change the content of digitally signed PDF contracts after they've been signed, which, you know, negates the whole purpose of a signed contract. The researchers explained the hack this way, quote, the signers of the PDF receive the document, review it, and sign it. The attackers then use the signed document, modify it slightly, and send it to the victims. After opening the signed PDF, the victims check whether the digital signature was successfully verified. However, the victims will see different content than the signers. In the analog world, the attack is equivalent

Starting point is 00:03:50 to deliberately leaving empty spaces in a paper document and getting it signed by the concerned party, ultimately allowing the counterparty to insert arbitrary content in the spaces. The attacker can build a complete shadow document, influencing the presentation of each page or even the total number of pages as well as each object contained therein, unquote. These so-called shadow attacks were found to be possible in 16 of the 29 PDF viewers tested, including, yes, Adobe Acrobat. Adobe patched the source of that exploit last year, but as of December 11th, 11 of those

Starting point is 00:04:29 29 PDF tools are still unpatched. The premium newsletter today has a full chart with a breakdown of every PDF app in the study and their most recent update status, as well as a link to the full study itself. The review site Yelp continues to try to move beyond its ratings origins and into a restaurant service platform, today announcing an update to its waitlist system. The new features include a way of indicating the make and model of a car a customer is driving, that's for curbside pickup, and the app now pre-fills data from guest profiles,

Starting point is 00:05:07 things like phone numbers, dietary restrictions, and so on. They also launched some new analytics and a beefier integration with your POS. The company says searches for restaurant takeout are up 3,200% since last March. Andrew Foxtwell, who produces some of the industry's best training on the Facebook ad platform, has launched a new course called Tried and True Testing. It covers how to set up tests within Facebook and Instagram ads, and as per all his courses, has some excellent in-the-trenches advice on testing creative, placement, bidding, audiences, and more. And he has offered a special $50 off discount to everyone who listens to this podcast.

Starting point is 00:05:47 Just use the code TODAYINDIGITAL at checkout. That's all one word, TODAYINDIGITAL. You can get there at b.link slash foxwell. This is not an affiliate deal, by the way. We don't get a penny if you sign up. And a handful of small items. Yes, Google Ads was down for a bit today, so if you were trying to get in and you couldn't,

Starting point is 00:06:11 it wasn't you. Also, some people are reporting that Facebook isn't showing thumbnail previews of your ad campaigns in Ads Manager. Also, if you manage the US online campaigns of anything related to politics, campaigns, civic issues, and the likes. Some good news. Starting tomorrow, you will be able to advertise on Google again.

Starting point is 00:06:34 Google banned political ads in the U.S. last month after the attack on the country's capital building. Facebook put a similar ban in place. That one is still there. They haven't said when they'll lift their restrictions. Over to Snapchat. It announced it's holding its third partner summit on May 20th. It's an online event, of course. Analysts expect it will focus on advanced augmented reality tools and other ways to digitally monetize your brand assets, like sponsored clothing for your Bitmoji avatars. Hey, laugh if you want. Just last week, I spent $8 of real money on some really cool armor for my ESO character. Shut up.

Starting point is 00:07:08 The event will be available on Snap's YouTube channel afterwards. And finally, if you're like me and you are getting sick of the same 200 songs in your work Spotify playlist, I noticed that SiriusXM has a pretty good deal on now. It's $1 for four months of their service. Yes, it'll renew at $8 a month after that. You can always cancel before, of course. That's the Canadian version of Sirius, by the way. I believe the American offer

Starting point is 00:07:27 is three months free before billing starts. Again, not affiliate, not a paid post. I just really do like their service. One tip, after you're in, go to your settings there

Starting point is 00:07:36 and change the audio quality to high or maximum because by default, it drops you into kind of muddy quality. Don't forget, you can get this podcast as a daily email newsletter too, complete with images, related videos, links to dive deeper, and newsletter exclusive content. And there's a free tier as well. You'll get a basic issue every Friday.

Starting point is 00:07:56 The newsletter comes out about an hour before the podcast drops. Just go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter to sign up or tap the link in this episode's notes. All right. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - So We’re Hacking PDF Contracts Now? Cool, Cool.

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