Chris Woods
Head of Digital at hanovercomms.com.
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Playing with Food, with @idafroskWant to see more of Ida’s food creations? Be sure to follow her on Instagram @idafrosk.
Just a few months...
Quote above from Will we start to see the rise of the social business guru? by Andrew Grill of Kred.
Andrew is right to worry. However, as I speak to more and more senior social media managers, particularly on the corporate side, what’s apparent is the shift in thinking, in conversation and experience.
They are definitely talking about how social media can drive wider business aims and importantly, be aligned with a company’s overall objectives. They are not just focused on the latest cool campaign that will have short-term repetitional impact at best.
As social media starts to become ‘social business’, through its influence in helping to improving functions outside of its current corporate incubators of communication, maketing, customer services or recruitment, its key people will rise up the food chain and be taken more seriously. As well as having influence — or Kred as Andrew might call it — externally, social media bosses need to become better internal communicators and internal achievers.
Maybe if they focus less on being a ‘guru’ and more on their business (or client) they’ll be ready for the transition from social media to social business.
On May 13, 2013 I fronted #CommsChat. If you weren’t able to join in and share your expertise or ask questions on the topic of cyber security, here’s the transcript (tweetscript?!).
- The Marketer: After building an online community, how can you continue to keep them engaged with your company if the product/service is a one-off purchase?
- Chris Woods: Even if it’s a one-off purchase, there is a value in creating strong customer advocates. Providing customer service and support to your online community, tips and examples of different uses for the product, and wider content that explores things that the community are naturally interested in are all excellent ways to keep community members engaged online. The Nike+ range of products could generally be labelled as standalone purchases, but there’s a huge community built around using them.
- The Marketer: How do you prevent customers from joining the community, buying the product and then leaving because they no longer feel they need to be part of that community and receive communications that are no longer relevant to them?
- Chris Woods: People are always going to have a cull. Ultimately, the only thing you can do to keep people engaged is provide interesting content and engage with them in a way they find useful. Those are the core behaviours for creating a community in the first place. If people do leave, it’s our job to ensure that they keep a good impression of the company and/or the product and would hopefully become a net promoter. Social can play a beneficial role for marketers, even when they are losing an audience from more traditional channels. It can help keep existing customers engaged, albeit more lightly and on their own terms. When people opt out of email marketing from your brand, do you give them the option of staying in touch via your social media channels rather than disappearing entirely?
- The Marketer: A number of people seem to recycle other peoples content, without even commenting on it, as part of their social media strategy. Do you agree with this or suggest a completely bespoke content led strategy?
- Chris Woods: Sharing and engaging through sharing others’ ideas, views, needs, wants and interests is what social media is all about. It is where there’s a real value for people and brands – learning and changing through listening. I’d always advise clients to give a mention or hat tip to the source, ideally the writer themselves; also, why not pull out the most interesting part of the article or other form of content, rather than just replicating the headline? The key question is, what makes this interesting enough to share? The answer to that is probably the line you should tweet or post. A well-thought-out social media strategy should not just be focused on content marketing but also on crowdsourcing value for your client, company, product and ultimately your customers.
- The Marketer: Would you say that social media is better able to deliver effective CRM than it is to drive sales?
- Chris Woods: At Regus my team proved that it can do both very effectively. The problem is that it can be harder to fully measure the latter, at least initially, across offline and online sales funnels.
- I would say that it’s easier for social media to deliver CRM from day one and where an organisation has lots of customers, it can be a very effective channel – but only when joined-up with offline customer services processes and people.
- The Marketer: What are the key issues/challenges faced in integrating digital and traditional marketing strategies?
- Chris Woods: In the consultancy world, securing value for the client. Helping them to meet their business goals whatever the channel.
- The Marketer: How do you rank companies' web reputation?
- Chris Woods: We use the Hanover Corporate Digital Reputation Index. It pulls around 20-30 mostly open source metrics – some already values and others based on evaluation verses a sector average performance – and then benchmarks one company against its competitors. We then make recommendations based not only on the Index but on whatever we know (a) the client’s business goals are and (b) digital communications best practice across the web, mobile, social media, apps, etc.
Behaving responsibly is a core driver of reputation. For the Hanover website I looked at how companies using social media to directly communicate with the public can demonstrate that they have given due consideration to their online behaviour.
iTunes turns 10 tomorrow
Richard Thompson, former Chief Constable of the Civil Nuclear Constabulary talking on#cybersecure at #nextbigthing twitter.com/chrismwoods/st…
— Chris Woods (@chrismwoods)
My article below was originally published on the PRCA website.
This week, the government released statistics showing a cyber attack can cost an SME six per cent of its turnover. Worryingly, it found that 87% of SMEs and 93% of companies with more than 250 employees experienced a cyber security breach between 2012-13. The overall financial cost to businesses of cyber attacks has tripled in just a year. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) report released alongside the data is one that IT heads at consultancies of all sizes should be reading and acting on.
As people who help build, protect and manage clients’ reputations, PRs have a responsibility to ensure that our businesses and our clients’ social and digital properties are as secure from cyber attack as can be reasonably expected. If a client is hacked via you, you only have yourself to blame and it will have an impact on your reputation. As Wired’s Mat Honan wrote after he was famously hacked in 2012: “Those security lapses are my fault, and I deeply, deeply regret them.”
Increasingly, as communications consultants we are seeing the importance of cyber security for clients. IBM’s Peter Jopling has said they monitor 13 billion cyber events targeted at their clients each day for possible threats. Do you know how your consultancy’s IT network is being targeted? At Hanover we have conducted detailed audits of our IT setup during pitch processes. For one client, we organised for a third party to conduct a mock cyber attack against our digital infrastructure to ensure we had sufficient resilience in place to protect both us and client concerned. For another, our consultants go through multiple layers of security in order to access the client’s systems and adhere to an agreement to open our physical and digital doors for snap inspections.
The smaller, independent consultancies and freelancers shouldn’t, as journalist Mat Honan did, stick their collective heads in the sand, and as Oxford University’s Sadie Creese said, there’s no magic bullet: “There’s no once piece of tech that can protect us online.” There are some simple steps that can be followed such as making consultants change their computer passwords monthly, knowing how to handle a Twitter-based hack, ensuring mobile devices have keypad locks, moving towards two-step authentication and making sure firewalls and anti-virus software is installed and up-to-date.
According to Richard Thompson, former Chief Constable of the Civil Nuclear Constabulary, the cyber security threat primarily comes from:
- Hacktivists and the Anonymous network;
- Organised crime; and
- State-sponsored crime and particularly, espionage and critical asset disruption.
If you can imagine a scenario where any of these sources might want to target your client – perhaps they are a government or work in the defence sector – then there is additional incentive to act.
Speaking at a Policy Exchange/Nesta event on 23rd April, Thompson said that it is “… not just up to the state but up to the individual to protect themselves online”, with Peter Jopling agreeing: “There’s no legislation to say you must lock your door so why should there be legislation to make you lock your digital door?” As the event began, FIFA Sepp Blatter was being targeted by the Syrian Electronic Army. The same network that claimed a cyber attack against the BBC in March and the Associated Press this week, when it compromised @AP to Tweet, inaccurately, that there had been explosions at the White House with President Barack Obama being injured.
As @pxdigitalgov discusses #CyberSecure as #NextBigThing: MT @huffpostuk: @seppblatter & Fifa Twitter accounts hacked huff.to/17SsTSM
— Chris Woods (@chrismwoods)
For professional communicators, there is a problem in the message too – cyber security seems rather geeky, like it must be someone else’s problem. Reputationally, it is our problem and we must make cyber security relevant within our business and to our clients. Sadie Creese concluded at Monday’s event by asking, how can cyber security be made relevant? She wants your views @sadiecreese.
Richard Thompson: Not just up to state. Up to individual to protect themselves, but hard#nextbigthing#cybersecure twitter.com/chrismwoods/st…
— Chris Woods (@chrismwoods)
Source: telegraph.co.uk via Chris on Pinterest
I joined speakers from Microsoft and Code Computerlove to present at a webinar for the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s magazine, The Marketer.
The April 10, 2013 recording will help you understand:
- How to encourage internal change through new technology
- How business aims can be met through focusing on digital
- Why building and managing communities matters
Specifically, I talked about:
- Conducting a digital reputation audit
- Deploying a senior manager
- Creating an internal environment for success
- Using guest bloggers to drive a digital community
- Building and using a digital KPI dashboard
- Using social media advertising to grow your audience
I also recommended the one book that I believe every social media manager and head of digital should read.
The webinar can be viewed here.
My comment on the Paris Brown affair can be found in this PR Week article.
Chris Woods, head of digital at Hanover, also warned against the police preventing Brown from tweeting in the future.
Emphasising the importance of guidelines when it comes to social media output, he said: ‘The way to turn this around and go forward on it is not to cut off her use of social media, as her use of it is a key way of engaging with young people. She needs to be part of showing how social media can help police listen and relate to people.’
On Wednesday April 10th I’m joining Matt Ballantine, Microsoft’s principal evangelist, and Louis Georgiou, owner of Code Computerlove, for a webinar hosted by The Marketer, the magazine of the Chartered Institute of Marketing.
We’ll discuss:
- How to encourage internal change through new technology
- How business aims can be met through focusing on digital
- Why building and managing communities matters
Please sign up here.
If like me you are affected by the decision to shut Google Reader, then chances are you might be an avid fan of Dropbox too.
Quickoffice has been an elegant way to edit Microsoft Office format files on the go. It has integrated fully with Dropbox, allowing the user to download from the cloud storage service, edit and then upload, replacing the original file. Being able to do so on an iOS device has until now made Quickoffice Pro the bee’s knees of productivity apps across the iPad/iPhone ecosystem — better than Pages, Numbers and Keynote. It has been a great tool for business travel, as I wrote about in Business Review Europe after a Eurostar hop to Brussels in May 2012. Dropbox integration was why I purchased the Quickoffice app in the first place.
Google bought Quickoffice in June 2012 and has since integrated it with Google Apps for Business. Whereas Google has retained Quickoffice’s integration with its own cloud storage service Google Drive as well as rival services Box, Sugarsync and Huddle, on April 4 it announced that it is withdrawing support in Quickoffice for Dropbox. This announcement was made quietly within the iOS app via an in-app alert; on its own help forum; and within the Google products help forum.
The latter post advised:
Due to some technical issues between Quickoffice (versions 4.6 or earlier) and Dropbox, you will no longer be able to connect to Dropbox after April 30th. Please note: this issue affects both iOS and Android users and Dropbox files will not be affected. In the meantime, we recommend installing the Dropbox app on your device to access files.
-Your Quickoffice community
Within the iOS Quickoffice app, you no longer have the option of adding a Dropbox account:
(You can still add Dropbox in Quickoffice Pro HD on iPad.)
However, the help section of the iPhone app still details instructions for adding Dropbox:
Does this mean that a licence agreement between Dropbox and Google has ended in a similar way that Google and Twitter parted ways? Is this a technical issue that will be overcome in a future update of Quickoffice? Has Google decided Dropbox is a threat to Google Drive? Or perhaps simply too few people use Dropbox with Quickoffice to continue to support the integration? Whatever the case, from the end of April a workflow I use frequently will no longer possible. I will be asking both Dropbox and Quickoffice to comment on the matter and if they respond, I’ll update this post.
Google Reader’s demise makes it an exciting time for RSS service and app developers. The news that Google’s Quickoffice will say farewell to loyal Dropbox customers at the end of this month is an opportunity for Dropbox to add edit functionality to its own apps. Or another provider to come along and fill the gap. In an ideal world of wishful thinking, Apple would allow Dropbox to operate alongside iCloud in its iWork productivity suite or Microsoft would do the same alongside SkyDrive in its reported upcoming Office release for iOS.
*** UPDATE MAY 16, 2013 ***
Thanks for everyone’s comments to this post. Firstly, it should be noted that QuickOffice Pro HD (iPad app) still integrates and works well with Dropbox (which is the good news). The problem is with QuickOffice Pro (iPhone app) which no longer supports Dropbox. Which is odd, considering the QuickOffice HD features webpage still claims that Dropbox is supported.
Modern Friendship Chart Shows the Depth of Online Relationships
Our friends on New MySpace feel left out.
Twitter at Seven takes a look back at the biggest moments on the microblog since it was founded in March 2006. The video above by Twitter is worth a watch too.
