Why Does eBay Need My Information? (A Phishing Scam Story)

I was involved with an eBay phishing incident yesterday. Someone had purchased something from eBay and I received the invoice / receipt, along with a notice that my PayPal account was charged. The email was very well done, so I called eBay to make sure they were aware of this.

This is where things turned a little weird for me.

Firstly, I don’t have an eBay account. I do have a PayPal account, so maybe they are tied together. I don’t know. I don’t use eBay.

I mentioned this to the eBay support person I connected with.

Continue reading

How To Build A Marketing Plan For Your Small Business

In today’s hyperactive markets, small businesses need to move quickly. They need to be ‘agile’. (My Code Year lessons are sinking in!) And a big part of the ability to be agile today is to plan, plan, plan.

On the marketing side, we’ve been taught to utilize a marketing plan to help guide our upcoming decisions based on previous learnings of the marketplace. In other words, what happened and do we want the same thing to happen in the future?

We’d build the marketing plan with an overview that looked something like:

Continue reading