In this podcast, we talk to EFF Intellectual Property Director Corynne McSherry (@cmcsherr), who spent the weekend pouring over FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's proposal (@TomWheelerFCC), which is now available for public comment through DearFCC.  

Topics discussed include:

How could the concept of paid prioritization impact news media diversityArgument in favor of regulating ISPs like phone companiesArgument agasint regulating ISPs like phone companiesReclassifying ISPs as telecommunications servicesAl Tompkins's (@atompkins) article about the impact of Net Neutrality on jouranlismWho's the blame for where we are and how we got hereShould the Federal Trade Commission be involved to regulate unfair competitionPublic threat of consolidated ownership of ISPs and content providersBest practices for mobilizing the public behind thicker policy issuesHow to file a public comment on the proposal to the FCC

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash

This is a deep dive interview with Marcia Stepanek. She is a journalist, new media strategist, NYU professor and an award winning news and features editor.

Eric:  Tell us about yourself.  

Marcia:  I have been covering the intersection of technology and its impact on society and business, for pretty much the past 25 years. I did a new media fellowship at Stanford and went out there all primed from Hearst Media in Washington to cover the shrinking middle class in America and the increasing division between the haves and have‑nots.  

Instead, when I got out to Silicon Valley everyone said, "Are you crazy? We are in the middle of Silicon Valley, and there's a revolution happening here." Certainly, there was at the time I was out there with the rise of e‑commerce and with the rise of technology.  

I switched my entire curriculum in order to study the impact of communications and new media technology and the law on business, on technology itself, and on the way people advocate for social change. Even back then, we saw the center of power moving from the center of establishment organizations to outside the organizations.  

The evolution and implications of that happening, as you well know, has been going on for over a decade and is still continuing.  

Eric:  You had to shift from class warfare to digital revolutions.  

Marcia:  Often, they're the one and the same.  

Eric:  Now you've got this book coming out about digital swarms, which talks about digital swarms becoming even more powerful and more sophisticated.  

Marcia:  It's more about how networks and communities have been evolving and scaling. As they mature, a more sophisticated and permanent presence is created.

We're seeing a lot of people organizing themselves into networks. Certainly this is also occurring politically around various interest groups. It also occurs in more of these informal communities and around communities of political interest.   In many ways, we have seen them start to exercise their muscle.

I'm not talking so much about the Arab Spring.  I'm not talking about all of that.  I'm talking, now, about a communities ability to organize very rapidly as accountability networks.  

For example, a couple of years ago, the Komen Foundation, a foundation that was dedicated to fighting breast cancer, made some controversial decisions. 

The organization did not communicate these decisions very transparently or openly with so many of its supporters 

In fact,  it started trying to dissuade people when they found out about some of the decisions that were being made, from commenting.

This kicked up an angry swarm among supporters who, over the course of three days, were not only were able to hold some of the leaders of the Komen Foundation accountable for those decisions, but wouldn't stop organizing around this until some of the leadership had in fact been changed.  

We've seen this repeatedly. We've seen this when people get angry at Rush Limbaugh, or get angry at any number of incidents.

We saw this with the Stop SOPA campaign.

We can see communities organized very quickly to achieve something, a singular goal, very rapidly and very clearly. 

All in the course of a week or less. These aren't accidents.

This basically show that these networks have matured and that they're pretty consistent.

They don't organize overnight.

They don't always express themselves,

Anyone can create an online course. On the other hand, making it an engaging and educational experience is a whole other question.  

In this simulcast of FIR on Higher Education episode 7 Kevin Anselmo interviews Eric Schwartzman talks about how to make content interesting and educational in an online learning format.

Eric has been conducting social media trainings in different parts of the world for several years.

He recently took his courses online through his company which helps employers manage risk and scale engagement through innovative online social media training courseware. 

He talks about how to deliver curriculum online versus in person, the importance of high quality production and the future of MOOCs, among other related topics.  

Also on episode 7, Harry Hawk gives an update on how he has integrated Twitter into his classroom, while I provide a short book review on why Gini Dietrich’s new book Spin Sucks is an important read for higher education communicators, administrators and academics.  

Get this Podcast:

Download the MP3 file (39.8 Mb, 41:18)Subscribe to “FIR on Higher Education with Kevin Anselmo RSS feedGet the show at iTunesGet the FIR app for your mobile device - iPhone | Android | Windows

Kevin Anselmo is the Founder and Principal of Experiential Communications, a consultancy focused on education.

He helps brands within academia - whether individual or corporate - communicate with stakeholders. He also teaches communications and public relations workshops to different individuals and groups.

Previously, Kevin was Director of Public Relations for Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and prior to that managed the media relations for IMD Business School in Switzerland. In addition, he was an adjunct communications professor at Nyack College in New York.

Currently based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Kevin lived and worked in Switzerland for eight years and in Germany for two years.

He has led public relations initiatives in various countries around the world.  

Find Kevin on Twitter: @kevinanselmo.  

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash

Earlier this week the Los Angeles Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America hosted a panel discussion on what it takes to prevent a social media crisis.  

In my opinion, PR spends too much time talking about crisis management and not enough time thinking about how to prevent them from happening in the first place.    

The panel was moderated by Karen North, Chair of the Online Communities Graduate Program at USC and this is an audio recording of the discussion.   Panelists

Siobhan O'Neill, VP, Edelman Digital (@angelcityblues)Chris Baccus, Executive Director, Digital, GolinHarris (@cbaccus)Laura Knapp, President, Social Spotlight Media (@LauraKnapp)Eric Schwartzman (@ericschwartzman)

Despite the PR industry's growing digital expertise, online crises continue to play out and leave professional communicators scrambling to minimize the damage.

This panel is about what can be done to prevent these volatile situations in the first place. 

This program examined recent high-profile digital disasters and what steps could have been taken to prevent them.   If you're interested in practical solutions for managing social media risk, check out my free social media training courses.

They're all online, self-paced and ready to go.  

Special thanks to chapter president Erik Deutsch (@ErikDeutsch) for producing the event and inviting me to participate.

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

So you're using social media for business. And sometimes customers and prospects actually notice. 

But you can't figure out how to scale engagement more consistently.  You need to get more people involved because on social networks, reach is a factor of engagement. 

You've thought about getting your coworkers involved.   But they don't all know how to use social networks for business. And they're not skilled in the art of public disclosure. 

They might make the mistake of saying something discriminatory or defamatory, or inadvertently leak proprietary information. And you could wind up a lot of hot water.  

Altimeter Group social media analyst Ed Terperning (@edterpening), Plein Air Artist and Anders Zoren loyalist can help.    

His new report Social Media Education for Employees, coauthored with Charlene Li (@charleneli), details how organizations design and implement social media training programs for employees that reduce social media risk and activate employee advocacy programs at scale.

In this exclusive audio interview, Ed discusses the four different types of social media education programs, managing risks through social media policy training, social media training formats and modalities, motivating employees to complete on-demand courseware, required resources for keeping social media training courses current, strategies for knowledge transfer assessment and more.  

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

In this podcast, I talk to IBM fellow Jeff Jonas (@JeffJonas) about Ironman Triathlons, how casinos catch card counters, the future of personal privacy and big data analytics.  

Jeff’s career is storied and diverse. 

He’s built systems to protect the gambling industry from card counters, technology that allows organization’s to collect and analyze personally identifiable information without invading personal privacy and ways to make sense of data as it happens.  

In this exclusive interview, sponsored by IBM, Jeff talks about:

Pulling useful business intelligence from big dataComparing data pointsWhy big data improves the accuracy of predictionsHelping casino operators bring down the MIT Blackjack Team with dataThe value of automated trading algorithms to Goldman SachsHow Watson uses contradictory information to eliminate false positivesShortcomings of pulling meaningful KPIs from social media monitoring services and sentiment analytics aloneFair Credit Reporting ActWhy insufficient an observation space leads to fantasy analyticsFuture of secrets and the importance of corporate training and business process improvement.

Marina Gorbis (@mgorbis) is executive director of the Institute of the Future and author of The Nature of the Future. 

In this podcast, she talks about how technology is changing the world of education, what motivates people to learn and digital literacy.

A text transcript of our discussion is below. 

Eric:  What is "socialstructing."  

Marina:  There’s a new way we are creating value. The ways we're doing things that were not possible before are, all of a sudden, possible.

The kind of things that previously you needed the whole organization to do, now you can do it with one person or a few people.  

Sometimes, we can do unimaginable things with the power of these technologies and connections with each other.

The idea is that we're creating. We're doing something in new ways. We're structuring things in new ways.  

The other part of it is that the way we're doing it is through connections with others, when you're using social media, social technologies and ultimately connections to multitudes of others who we can engage in whatever activity we're doing.  

Eric:  How do you see social media changing education in a professional context?  

Marina:  One of the important things that we see is that a lot of education is moving out of institutions, and the kind of resources that previously resided just in organizations or were closed are now widely available.  

Content itself has become a commodity.

There's a lot of content. Almost anything you want to learn is out there between Khan Academy, Coursera, all the MOOCs ‑‑ but not just MOOCs, but all kinds of other platforms where people share.  

WikiHow, Wikipedia ‑‑ you can think of Wikipedia as a learning resource.

The content is all out there. It's moving from institutions into these flows. Imagine that there is a river of resources out there, and it's always there.  

The challenge becomes, what makes people want to dip into those flows? What makes you motivated to dip into those information and content flows and ultimately learn?  

https://youtu.be/4ssvPH4rv5Y

Eric:  What motivates people to learn?  

Marina:  What motivates people are very different things for different people.

If you're a professional, and you need to learn, and you need to pass the test or exam, or you need it for your professional development, you can do that for that reason.  

I think for all of us, a lot of the motivation is ultimately social. If you're a young person, your motivation to learn is to be in a conversation with the kind of people you want to be in a conversation.  

If your social group is all about philosophy, you want to learn about philosophy. If your social group is about math or coding, you want to learn that. It's both for professional reasons, but a lot of that motivation is really social motivation for a lot of people.  

That's why what's interesting is what I see happening is people signing up for online courses but then organize the meet‑ups in physical spaces with the same people who are taking the same course.

There they engage in peer‑to‑peer counseling, and people learn from each other.   There's a lot of that going on.

What's interesting is that they're bringing this online content and bringing it into social spaces.  

Eric:  Several years back, people were speculating that,

Drawing the line between what’s okay to share and what’s just too risky to share, the potential impact of the NSA PRISM surveillance program on the private sector and the top 5 things not to share on social media.  

Ryan Garcia Associate General Counsel at Facebook talks about the impact of social media usage in the workplace of personal privacy and security.  

Ryan has spoken at and chaired numerous social media legal conferences around the country.

He has also been invited to speak on social media legal topics before American Bar Association committees, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association Summit, and the Game Developers Conference.

Ryan frequently blogs about social media legal issues at somelaw.wordpress.com.

New York Times technology columnist David Pogue has called Ryan the funniest Dell lawyer he knows.  

Topics Addressed:  

Staying ahead of the legal issues that pertain to enterprise wide social media usage.Future proofing corporate social media training programs.Challenges of relying on sensational headlines for corporate social media education.The lack of attention people pay to the terms of service screens when signing up for online services of downloading apps.Risks of content ownership versus granting a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license.Importance of teaching people about the security and privacy risks of publishing geo-data.Discussion of setting limits on setting boundaries of what you share, since “publication is a self-invasion of privacy” as Marshall McLuhan once said.The top 5 things not sure on social networks.Potential impact of the NSA’s PRISM program on private sector usage of social media.What BYOD means for personal privacy and organizational security.

   Reference Links:

Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore at SXSWNY Times: Those Wordy Contracts We All So Quickly AcceptStudy: Cybercasing the Joint by Gerald Friedland and Robin Sommer [PDF]

Photo by Nosiuol on Unsplash

What does it take to help a company become a social business? It takes the support of management and employees, and that requires education and enablement.

Which is why Intel launched their Digital IQ social media training program.  Because they knew that without the buy-in of Intel’s 100,000 employees, social marketing would never be truly effective.  

But where do you start? 

You can’t boil the ocean. So Intel focused on training marketers first, before rolling the program out broadly.   

Rather than launch a social media center of excellence, they opted to build a social business at all levels of the enterprise. Their objective was to tap the power of an internal advocacy program that enabled everyone to help prospects and customers via social networks.  

The Digital IQ program at Intel is organized like a higher education program with 60 classes organized into 4-tiers or levels of training. Some course are required, others are elective. 

Entry level courses were digital so everyone had access on-demand. Intermediate courses were focused on enabling social media practitioners with live training. And advanced were very high-touch, one-on-one, interactive training sessions targeted to executives and SMEs.  

How did they decide what was basic, and what was advanced?  Basic trainings were focused on answering the question of why. 

Intermediate classes answered who and how.  And advanced classes really dug deeper into how at an even deeper level.   In this podcast, former Intel social media strategist Ekaterina Walter (@ekaterina). 

Ekaterina was a member of the team that spearheaded the development of Digital IQ University at Intel.    

Topics Addressed:  

Strategies for organizing tiered social media training programsInside the different courses in the Digital IQ programHow to design high-level, advanced social media training programsCrisis communications trainingSocial media marketing training programs Benefits of classroom social media training vs. online social media trainingBiggest challenges associated with live social media training programsThe biggest challenge of social media training programsRecommended lengths for online social media training courses

Ekaterina is the best-selling author of Think like Zuck, The Five Business Secrets of Facebook's Improbably Brilliant CEO Mark Zuckerberg, which details why purpose, people, process and partnerships are the keys to success in the modern age.  

Ekaterina Walters is Partner and CMO at Branderati. which provides software as a service to manage online advocacy programs though influencers relations.

Social media marketing at scale requires engagement at scale and few organizations do a better job social media training their workforce to engage en masse than Dell Computer.  

The PC-maker’s Social Media and Community University (SMaC) has already social media trained thousands of employees from virtually all segments of the enterprise.  

Whether you’re a social media manager or shipping and receiving clerk, Dell has a social media course that’s right for you.  

In this episode, former Director of Social Media & Community at Dell Liz Bullock (@lizbbullock) goes beyond social media marketing to discuss the practical aspects of driving enterprise wide adoption through social media.  

There may not be any organization with more experience implementing a custom social media training program for the whole company than Dell and this discussion drills down on the reasons behind the decisions that led to the social media training they currently have in place.    

Topics Addressed:

Business case for enterprise wide social media management training

Best practices for designing social media training program curricula.

Inside the Dell Governance Portal, which was used for password management of branded social networking accounts and communicating ongoing best practices.

How Dell designed a tiered social media training program with basic, intermediate and advanced levels.

The different training modalities Dell used to deliver their social media training program with classroom and self-paced courses.

How Dell deals with the challenges of keeping their social media training program up to date.

How Dell assesses and certifies social media training participants.

Why Dell launched a channel partner social media training program and the company’s recent decision to expand that initiative.

Liz Bullock currently serves as CEO and Co-founder of the Social Arts & Science Institute in Austin Texas.