User:Leumas712

I'm Sam Ford. I'm Director of Audience Engagement at a strategic communications and marketing firm called Peppercomm. In that role, I consult with our clients and our teams part of the time about how they better serve and respect the audiences they seek to reach with their communications initiatives. And I also write and speak regularly about this and related issues (how organizations should listen to their audiences; the importance of empathy in marketing and communications; the need to understand your audience and see things from their POV if you want to create more engaging and useful material about who your organization is; the need for a deep focus on ethics in marketing and communications). I write several times a year for Harvard Business Review, for Fast Company, for Inc., and a range of other publications. And I'm on the Board of Directors for the Word of Mouth Marketing Association and serve as a board liaison to WOMMA's Ethics Committee.

I also remain actively engaged in academic work. I co-authored the 2013 NYU Press book, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. I am contributing to academic collections like "Making Media Work" and "Media Ethics." And I remain a research affiliate with the MIT Program in Comparative Media Studies/Writing, where I have done work on transmedia storytelling, fandom studies, the television industry, "media convergence," and a range of other issues. I was one of the co-founders and later project manger of a research group called the Convergence Culture Consortium. My background is in journalism (and I'm proud to be a former Kentucky Press Association award-winning journalist, working largely at weekly rural newspapers). And I'm very interested in "civic media," helping as part of the committee--for instance--to originally establish MIT's Center for Civic Media, which is a collaboration with the Knight Foundation.

As we state in Spreadable Media, I'm passionate about creating a more participatory culture (without presuming that inequalities will ever fully be obliterated in who has equal understanding, ability, and visibility to have their voice heard). The goals of the Wikipedia project are very much aligned with the world I seek to do my small part in helping shape: one in which our activity as creators and circulators of content help give more people more of a role in shaping the flow of information more of the time and in which we better have access to information beyond just our own perspective and worldview.

I'm also an affiliate instructor with Western Kentucky University's Popular Culture Studies Program. My two predominant areas of popular culture research are professional wrestling and soap operas. I teach classes on both and co-edited the 2011 University Press of Mississippi book, "The Survival of Soap Opera." I'm a proud Kentucky native, current resident of Bowling Green, Ky., and an alum of Western Kentucky University and MIT.

While my direct participation as a contributor to Wikipedia has been fairly minimal thus far (consisting of minimal edits to pro wrestling Wikipedia entries--which rank among the most highly edited on the site), I am highly invested in Wikipedia as a resource for students, academics, and citizens and as an ongoing experiment and example of what sorts of collaboration a participatory culture might bring us...as well as questioning how the marketing and communications space can engage and support the goals of Wikipedia in an ethical way that seeks appropriate ways to serve Wikipedia's goals of accuracy and objectivity while maintaining a high standard of transparency and disclosure within Wikipedia's communally adopted guidelines on conflicts of interest.