Chris Woods
Head of Digital at hanovercomms.com.
Views are my own.
chrismwoods.com
Tweet
Google+
-
-
Infographic: An Amazing, Invisible Truth About Wikipedia
Every Wikipedia entry has an optional feature we take for...
-
House of Cards - 1x03
-
-
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...
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.
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)
**** UPDATE June 13, 2013 ****
Information on how to set-up two-step verification is now available via LinkedIn and Twitter.
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.’
Go Ahead and Gossip - Amy Gallo - Best Practices - Harvard Business Review
Principles to Remember
Do:
- Use your informal relationships to gather information about what’s happening at your company
- Choose your medium wisely — gossiping over email can be particularly precarious
- Think about how your words will reflect back on you
Don’t:
- Dismiss gossip as useless or petty — it can be a good way to connect with others
- Gossip in front of your superiors who may frown upon such behavior
- Turn a blind eye to negative comments about a colleague, especially if they’re unfounded
The day @BurgerKing was hacked
Last night my colleague, Hanover marketing manager Karan Chadda, spotted that the Heineken Corporate Twitter account (@HEINEKENCorp) has employed Twitter’s free-to-brands age screening service.
Launched quietly in July 2012, this appears to be a great way for companies and organisations with age-restricted products, content or campaigns, to be, or at least appear to be using social media responsibly.
Twitter should place more emphasis on promoting this joint initiative with Buddy Media/salesforce.com. Searching Twitter for age.twitter.com shows that there’s not a huge amount of awareness of the feature.
How Twitter age screening works
- Follow an age-screened Twitter account
- Immediately you’ll receive a direct message from that account asking you to click on a link to verify your age
- Click the link that will look like https://age.twitter.com/… and input your information
- You are then directed back to the Twitter account concerned
*** update May 3, 2013 ***
I wrote another post on this topic for the Hanover website: Tweet responsibly.
Meet the kind of social media consultant your company DOESN’T need! [VIDEO]
It appears as if there might have been a security breach on Facebook. Towards the beginning of this week, French language Facebook users reported seeing their once private messages posted to their Timelines.
However, most of the people who have come forward to bloggers, journalists and Facebook itself claiming a privacy breach, are actually wrong. For the most part, it’s actually public (or between friends) posts on each other’s Facebook walls that they can see, byscrolling back in time on their Timeline.
It is clear that even if there were such a breach affecting a small number of users, Facebook will have worked hard to fix it overnight. If the scare was real – and I’m still to be convinced through evidence – then most likely Facebook engineers were testing a new or improved feature elsewhere on the social network which lead to an element of the website breaking. As Fred Wolens of Facebook told Mashable:
“While not quite a technical impossibility, these systems are run on two separate backends which would require a non-trivial amount of work for this bug to be real.”
As I always say in social media training sessions to clients, it’s advisable to avoid posting anything that could reflect badly on you, even if it’s private, as one day, it may not be. This can be particularly important for VIPs, companies, NGOs and public bodies with reputations to protect – and a sensible social media policy should be adopted however small the organisation.
At a PRCA event next week, speakers from the Huffington Post, the BBC and others will take a look at social media crises. You can find information about the event including RSVP details here.
Aside from privacy scares, let’s consider public posts to social media. A writer in the Guardian yesterday put forward what for some could become a nightmare scenario.
What are your thoughts? Did you suffer a privacy breach on Facebook overnight? Does your organization need advice on creating a social media policy and employee training in the area? Please email or Tweet me.
Originally posted at hanovercomms.com/news-events/blog/…
Have you noticed strange messages popping into the direct message inbox of your Twitter accounts or those you manage for your company or its clients? They may read similar to this:
lol see this video about you t.co/fgjwogj
- Log into Twitter on a PC/Mac/Tablet via a browser (if you are unable to do this, skip to (B) below)
- Visit Twitter’s Settings: Applications page and click ‘Revoke Access’ to every third-party app listed (even if you trust it – because you can always add access to apps the next time you need to use them)
- Delete any Tweets that were posted by ‘you’ while your account was hacked (e.g. those that the real you did not post). Find your Tweets on your profile page, e.g. twitter.com/yourname
- Delete any suspicious direct messages sent by/to you (warning: do NOT click on any URLs within suspicious DMs). Find the DMs within Twitter by clicking on the icon of a head and shoulders which you’ll find towards the top/right of the page, then click on ‘direct messages’. Once you are in that area, click on the name of the person who sent the message and you’ll find a trash icon – click on trash to remove each message.
- Visit Twitter’s Settings: Account page and make sure the email address listed for you is the correct one (if not, change it) then scroll down ensuring the tick box marked HTTPS only is selected. Then within the field below that, tick the box to Require personal information to reset my password. Scroll to the bottom of that page and click Save. You will then be asked to re-enter your password.
- Reset your password to something different at Twitter’s Settings: Password page and please be careful to use something difficult to guess. E.g. if your previous password was Hello1 please don’t change it to Hello2. And definitely do not use ‘password’ or ‘twitter’ or your user name. (*** UPDATE: Twitter published a useful blog post about password security on February 19, 2013 - A friendly reminder about password security ***)
- Visit Twitter’s Account: Reset Password page and submit a password reset request
- Check your email and follow the instructions
- If this doesn’t work the first time, try it again but use the alternative method (e.g. your user name rather than your email address in B1 above)
- If you still have no joy, then I’d suggest contacting Twitter directly by lodging a support ticket by following the steps listed on its Submit a Ticket regarding Hacking page
- Once you have regained control, please go back to (A) above and carry out all the steps there.
Originally posted at: http://www.hanovercomms.com/news-events/blog/post/Twitter-hacked-Steps-to-fix.aspx
Gavin Megaw is taking part in a live Guardian Q&A on reputation management.
