Cross-posted from the FIR Podcast Network

Today’s panel features Stealthmode Partners’ Francine Hardaway, Stone Temple Consulting’s Doug Haslam, and Alabama Power’s Ike Pigott. We talked about the following topics:

• A report from pwc (Price Waterhouse Coopers) identified eight technologies that are about to have a massive global impact across all business sectors. We looked at the communications implications for each of the eight, which include Artifical Intelligence, Augmented Reality, drones, the Internet of Things, robots, Virtual Reality, 3D printing, and blockchain.
• Saatchi & Saatchi’s chairman has been suspended after he uttered a statement worth of Donald Trump (whom we just can seem to avoid mentioning these days).
• The Brexit vote has put the UK media in a precarious position in terms of its reputation, particularly among young voters who voted overwhelmingly against the exit.
• It’s getting harder and harder for corporations to hide behind their brands, leading to new “brand networks” that encompass more differentiated and tailored relationships between corporate and product brands.
• The publisher of Crain Communications thinks marketers should emulate Donald Trump’s marketing by injecting controversy into their messages so people will debate it.
• Melissas Agnes thinks there’s no such thing as a social media crisis. Is she right?
• The University of Missouri also looked at crisis in a recent study, determining that unorganized and semi-organized groups form views of a crisis by seeing each other’s tweets.

Connect with our panelists on Twitter at @hardaway, @dough and @IkePigott.

Links to the source material for this episode are on Contentle.
Note: We are more than likely giving up on Delicious, which has become unreliable under its new ownership. We’ll try Contentle for a while to see how it goes, but may switch to Pinboard.

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

About today’s panel:

Francine Hardaway  PhD is the co-founder of Stealthmode Partners, an accelerator for early stage entrepreneurs. A three-time entrepreneur herself, she has been a PR professional since 1980. Her last PR company, Hardaway Marketing Services, was acquired by Intel in 1996, and after a year inside Intel, she emerged to advise, coach, and fund startups in the internet space in partnership with Ed Nusbaum. Dr. Hardaway has written for Huffington Post, Fast Company and Medium, and is a contributing writer to the Phoenix Business Journal, where she has won two journalism awards for best column. She has also taught “Business and Future of Journalism” and “Digital Media Entrepreneurship” classes as ASU’s Cronkite School of Journalism.

Doug Haslam’s career has spanned a variety of disciplines within the communications field: radio technology, editorial production, public relations, marketing, social media and digital. Doug began with public radio, producing news and thoughtful sports programs, moving into technology public relations, and currently to social media and content strategy for brands of all sizes and industries. Doug’s love of media has come full circle, as his most recent positions have seen him taking full advantage of his content creation skills, managing social media and brand publishing programs for a wide variety of clients.

After more than 16 years in television news, Emmy-winner Ike Pigott left to feed his passion for crisis communication. While building his consultancy, he started working with the American Red Cross – first as a local communicator in Alabama, and finally as the Director of Communications and Government Relations for a five-state region. It was during his time at the Red Cross that he pioneered the use of social media, developed the first disaster-response blogs, as well as the non-profit’s Twitter account all the way back in 2007. For the last seven years, Ike has worked as a communication strategist and spokesman for Alabama Power, an electric utility that serves more than 1.4-million customers. He helped shape the Social Media Guidelines for Alabama Power’s parent, Southern Company, and serves on the system-wide Social Media Advisory Council. In addition to media relations duties and serving as editor of the corporate NewsCenter site, Ike works across the company to help individuals and departments get the most out of social media tools. Ike has been a featured speaker at dozens of communication conferences in the United States and Europe, and is considered a thought leader in the integration of social media in utilities and other regulated industries.