Dan York

Welcome to episode #3 of For Immediate Release. This week’s panel includes Internet Society Senior Content Strategist Dan York (Dan is also the FIR Podcast Network’s tech correspondent), Scott Monty of Scott Monty Strategies, and 4L Strategies partner Jennifer Zingsheim Phillips. More details on the panel appear at the end of this post.

On today’s show, we explored the following topics:

• Volkswagen has brought four PR agencies on board to help deal with its self-made emissions cheating scandal. Does VW need PR or do they just need to start behaving ethically? And are PR practitioners out of line for writing posts and commentaries about the crisis?
• Peeple is an app due for release in November that will let people rate other people the way you can rate a restaurant on Yelp. The public response can be charitably described as outraged while the developers insist it’s nothing but positive.
• Business Wire released a report on the convergence if PR and investor relations. Is this consolidation or just a preferable business practice?
• It’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month and marketers everywhere are turning to pink to promote their brands’ solidarity. Most of it is just “pinkwashing,” though. How can brands be serious about their commitment to this (and, for that matter, any) cause?
• Google is about to take the wraps off an open-source project to compete with Facebook’s Instant Articles (not to mention similar offerings from Snapchat and Apple). What does this mean for the news ecosystem in which PR plays such an important part?
• Shot is a Kickstarter project that aims to make it easy for people with iPhones to create Virtual Reality (VR) photos and videos. In the meantime, newsrooms everywhere are gearing up to embrace VR.
• Millennials are willing to pay for content — just not news.
• ScottTrade is the latest institution to have to react to a data security breach. Shouldn’t any company that keeps customer data on servers be prepared to address an unwelcome intrusion?
• PR StackBook version 2 is out, with 30 PR professionals contributing 48 practical guides to more than 250 digital tools we can use in content marketing, PR, and SEO.
• Tumblr now lets you hide your Tumblr blog from the web. Some say this is creating yet another walled garden that is antithetical to the underlying philosophy of the Internet.
• Facebook has revamped Notes to make it more of a blogging tool to compete with Medium and LinkedIn.
• Beloved comic strip Bloom County is back after nearly 25 years. It’s on the Web only, and creator Berkeley Breathed is using it to attack the one-or-two-spaces-at-the-end-of-a-sentence controversy.

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

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

Join us next week for our third episode. Joining me on the panel will be Mitchell Levy, Lynette Young, and Doug Haslam.

About this week’s panel:

Scott Monty is an internationally recognized leader in digital communications, digital transformation, social media and marketing. As principal of Scott Monty Strategies, he counsels brands and agencies on strategy, executive communications, influencer management, the customer experience, and digital initiatives.

Scott spent six years at Ford Motor Company, as a strategic advisor on crisis communications, influencer relations, digital customer customer service, innovative product launches and more. He is a board member of the American Marketing Association and an advisor for RPM Ventures, My Dealer Service, and Crowd Companies. He writes about the changing landscape of business, technology, communications, marketing and leadership at ScottMonty.com and is the executive editor and co-host of the Sherlock Holmes website and podcast I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere.

Jennifer Zingsheim Phillips has  worked in politics–many sides, including political party work, working for a state senator, and lobbying. She also has worked at Fleishman Hillard, one of the biggest PR firms in the  world, and she has also done a stint in retail, working in customer service at a well-known furniture and lifestyle store. Jen currently is a partner at 4L strategies, an online media analysis and monitoring firm.

Jen’s work has been published in business magazines. She also brings to the table web content creation experience, podcasting, and fiction writing.

Dan York, CISSP, is a passionate advocate for the open Internet focused on helping people understand the changes going on all around us within communication technology and practices. Dan currently serves the Internet Society as the Senior Content Strategist focused on the Deploy360 Programme – creating, curating and promoting online content that helps service providers, companies and individuals more quickly deploy Internet technologies such as IPv6 and DNSSEC. Separately, Dan is also the Chairman of the global Voice Over IP Security Alliance (VOIPSA). Dan is also active within the real-time communications area of the IETF.

Since the mid-1980’s Dan has been working with online communication technologies and helping businesses and organizations understand how to use and participate in those new media. An author of multiple books on networking, security, IPv6 and Linux, Dan is a dynamic and engaging speaker who frequently presents at industry conferences and events and has been blogging and writing online for over 12 years. His most recent books are “Migrating Applications to IPv6” and “The Seven Deadliest Unified Communications Attacks”.

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