I'm delighted to welcome guest, Melanie Ensign, Founder and CEO of Discernible, where she helps organizations adopt effective communication strategies to improve risk-related outcomes. She's managed security & privacy communications for some of the world's most notable brands, including Facebook, Uber & AT&T.

Melanie counsels executives and technical teams to cut through internal politics, dysfunctional inertia & meaningless metrics. For the past 10 years, she's also led the press department & communication strategy for DEF CON. Also, Melanie is an accomplished scuba diver and brings lessons learned preventing, preparing for & navigating unexpected high-risk underwater incidents to her work in security & privacy. Today's discussion focuses on the importance of communication strategies and tactics for privacy engineering teams. 

Topics Covered:

• Melanie's career journey and how she leveraged her experience in shark science to help executives get over their initial fears of the unknown in security & privacy
• How Melanie guides and supports technical teams at Discernible on effective communications
• How to prevent 'Privacy Outrage'
• The value of preventing privacy snafus rather than focusing only on crisis comms
• How companies can use technical communication strategies & tactics to earn trust with the public
• The problem with incentives - why most social media metrics have been bullshit for far too long
• Why Melanie decided to leave big tech to start Discernible
• Insight into the 7 Arthur W. Page Society Principles, a 'code of ethics' for communications professionals
• What makes for a good PR story that the media would want to cover
• Why press releases are mostly ineffective except for announcing funding raises
• The importance of educating the community for which you're building
• Melanie's advice to Elon Musk, who does not invest in a comms team
• What OpenAI could have done differently, and whether their go-to-market strategy was effective
• The importance of elevating Compliance teams to Business Advisors in the eyes of stakeholders

Resources Mentioned:

• Subscribe to the Discernible newsletter
• Discover Github's ReadMe Newsletter
• Learn about the Arthur W. Page Principles

Guest Info:

• Follow Melanie on LinkedIn
• Follow Melanie on Mastodon

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