Sam Ford is Director of Audience Engagement with Peppercomm Strategic Communications and an affiliate with both the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT and the Popular Culture Studies Program at Western Kentucky University. He is co-author of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (2013) with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green with New York University Press. He is also co-editor of the 2011 book The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era with Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington, with the University Press of Mississippi. Sam has written for Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, The Huffington Post, Portfolio, Chief Marketer, The Public Relations Strategist, PR News, Bulldog Reporter, The Christian Science Monitor, CommPRO.biz, and a range of other publications and blogs. His has also been quoted or had his work featured in Investor's Business Daily, New York TImes Magazine, The Financial Times, CNN, NPR, BBC Worldwide, The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Télérama,The Boston Globe, Boing Boing, Slashdot, Mashable, ESPN: The Magazine, Reader's Digest, Soap Opera Weekly, PRWeek, The Firm Voice, and other publications. He has spoken at South by Southwest Interactive, The Word of Mouth Marketing Association's School of WOM, the Futures of Entertainment conference and the annual conferences of The Society of Cinema and Media Studies and the Popular Culture Association, among others. He is also on the editorial board of Transformative Works and Cultures. Sam holds a Master's degree from the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT and a Bachelor's degree from Western Kentucky University, where he majored in news/editorial journalism, mass communication, communication studies, and English. He is a Kentucky Press Association award-winning journalist and has performed in a variety of local professional wrestling events. He lives in Bowling Green, Kentucky, with wife Amanda and daughters Emma and Harper. Sam can be reached at samford@mit.edu and found on Twitter @Sam_Ford.
