Dan York

Today’s panel features Jen McClure, who founded the Society for New Communication research; business blogging pioneer Lionel Menchaca; and PR agency president Sherrilynne Starkie. Our topics included…

• Whether the Epi-Pen crisis would ever have happened without social media and how companies now need to think about “business as usual”
• The value of some kinds of hashtags (or lack thereof)
• AT&T’s self-righteous post reacting to Google’s fiber decision
• Mattel’s Barbie is now a paid Instagram influencer
• How times have changed! Four out of five journalists rely on social engagement
• Kimberly-Clark’s hit YouTube series based on a 17th-century vampire novel
• A consortium of tech companies is exploring ethics for Artifical Intelligence, which is bound to be used by communicators sooner than you may think
• Dan York’s report look at two Facebook announcements: Messenger now lets you share video while you’re texting and Facebook says your site must be mobile-friendly or your ads will suffer

Connect with our panelists on Twitter at @jenmcclure_JEM, @lionelgeek, and @sherrilynne.

Links to the source material for this episode are on Contentle.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

About today’s panel:

Jen McClure is CEO of JEM Consulting & Advisory Services. Prior to founding JEM, Jen was Vice President of Digital & Social Media and the head of the Digital Center of Excellence at Thomson Reuters. In 2005, Ms. McClure founded the Society for New Communications Research, a nonprofit research and education foundation and think tank and was President of the Board of Directors from 2005-2016, when the organization merged with The Conference Board. She now chairs the Advisory Board of the new organization.

Lionel Menchaca serves as director of Corporate & Strategy for W2O Group. In this role, he helps clients of all sizes to develop content and engagement strategies so they can connect directly with customers. He’s worked extensively on social media training for organizations and on helping organizations build and launch employee advocacy programs. He also works with teams of developers to build tools companies need to manage an increasingly complex flow of content. Before W2O, Lionel worked at Dell for 18 years and was the founder and chief blogger of Direct2Dell, Dell’s main corporate blog. Over the last 7 years, Lionel authored hundreds of posts on behalf of Dell. He helped expand it into several continues to extend Dell’s global presence. Before the blog, Lionel was one of the main architects behind Dell’s blog monitoring process begun in April 2006. He was Dell’s first full time employee paid to handle social media efforts.

For more than 20 years, Sherrilynne Starkie has been providing communications consulting and services to blue-chip organizations in Britain, Canada and the United States. She focuses on helping clients leverage digital and social media to achieve organizational objectives.  As President at Thornley Fallis, Sherrilynne is responsible for the profitable operation of the communications business including client strategy overview, business development, HR, quality assurance, marketing and team development. She is a blogger, an occasional contributor and is very active on social media. Recently, she’s been a speaker at the IABC World Conference, SXSWi, WTC and the UA Canada National Conference.  She is an active volunteer with IABC Ottawa has volunteered with many other organizations.

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