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Today’s panel includes Liz Bullock, director of Digital and Paid Media at Rackspace, the managed cloud company, and former director of Social Media & Community at Dell; Cory Edwards, Director of the Social Media Center of Excellence at Adobe, and former Director of Social Media and Corporate Reputation at Dell; and  Lionel Menchaca, director of corporate and strategy at W2O group, and communications consortium, and former chief blogger at Dell.

Our topics included…

• A conversation about how the Dell experience has shaped the panel’s post-Dell careers
• A recap of last week’s Adobe Summit, a digital marketing conference (Cory and Liz were both there)
• The announcement by E!, the cable entertainment news and gossip  network, is launching a 20-minute live broadcast on Facebook Live; does the surge of media programming on Live suggest brands can play, too?
• How big a deal will chatbots be for organizational communicators?
• Companies need to adopt social strategies around people, both among influencers and employee advocates
• A new generation of tools will affect the customer experience
• Income inequality is due, in large part, to the gap in workers’ computer skills (the hottest LinkedIn skill that led to a job in 2014 was statistical analysis/data mining)
• The era of free social media marketing is over
• Dan  York reports on the upcoming Internet Engineering Task Force meeting in Buenos Aires, the upcoming RightsCon that will address freedom of expression and encryptiong, new Snapchat data, and Netflix’s plan to target content based on your interests instead of your demographics

Connect with our panelists on Twitter at @lizbbullock, @coryedwards, and @lionelgeek.

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

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

About today’s panel:

Liz Bullock is a marketer, storyteller, and retired artist. She currently is Director of Digital and Paid Media at Rackspace, focused on driving best in class marketing experiences for the company’s customers. Lis is founder of Social Arts & Science Institute, LLC (SASI), which is focused on empowering organizations to scale employee social engagement to build trust and business results. She formerly wasDirector of Social Media and Community for Dell, focused on embedding social media within the organization, activating customer connected employees and operationalizing Dell’s social enterprise. In that role, Liz was a senior leader within Dell’s central social media team focused on strategy, governance, best practices, measurement and training. She founded and managed Dell’s social media training and certification program (SMaC University) to activate employees to engage online on behalf of Dell.

Cory Edwards is a Communications professional with experience in corporate PR, product PR, M&A Communications and social media. At Adobe, Cory leads a team that is at the heart of enabling our business to be social: from sales and marketing to support and HR. We’re aggressively trying new things and evolving our approach to social media to meet the demands of our business and the expectations of our customers. During the past 7 years, his primary focus has been on corporate social media. Cory has been part of the social revolution in the corporate world leading social media initiatives, programs and teams at Symantec, Dell and now Adobe.

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.

About Shel Holtz

Shel Holtz, ABC (Accredited Business Communicator), is director of Internal Communications at Webcor, a commercial general contractor headquartered in San Francisco. Before joining Webcor, Shel spent 21 years as principal of Holtz Communication + Technology. In addition to integrating technology into communications strategies, his expertise includes strategic communications planning, change management, organizational culture, business initiatives and communications research. Full bio