Marketers flocking to Facebook and Twitter without even a hint of a social media policy are discovering a disturbing truth: It takes only a few ill-placed tweets and posts to get your feathers plucked.

Businesses that rely heavily on web marketing are in for a rude awakening in the coming year. That’s when privacy advocates will begin crippling the ability to easily track visitor activity on a company’s own website as well as across the Internet. In practice, the backlash against visitor tracking—commonly known as “Do Not Track”—is expected to make it tougher for a company to monitor which visitors are using its website and how they are using it.

Hacking, once the province of teenage boys spreading graffiti for kicks and notoriety, is done today by organized, financially motivated gangs, said researchers of “Security Threat Report: 2010,”

While e-retailers have made a sport of predicting when mobile e-commerce should really be taken seriously, a new report from market researcher Gartner indicates that the time for guessing games is over.

While YouTube has emerged as a marketing juggernaut for businesses, many firms are also discovering that the free video-sharing service has scores of other uses—all of which are also free for the taking.

SEMA is continuing in its goal to help the specialty-equipment industry pave the way forward with a recently added member benefit: MySEMA, a social networking tool available on the SEMA website.

Business web users looking to speed up their web-browsing experience—and perhaps do it a bit more securely—may want to check out the latest offering of Google’s free Chrome browser.

A new virtual edition of SEMA News is now available online via SEMA’s website—www.sema.org.

While most businesses have soundly rejected Vista and are tenaciously hanging on to Windows XP until Microsoft comes up with a better operating system (OS), the day of reckoning approaches.