Our guest today is Doc Searls: journalist, writer, and speaker. 

We started off this informative conversation talking with Doc about his background, the emergence of the Internet, and the conceptual flaw that could have avoided a lot of today’s problems — overlaying the concepts of the client-server world and centralized control over what is inherently a peer-to-peer network based on TCP/IP. We went on to talk about privacy, VRM, and CustomerTech; what the consumer world could learn from B2B; implications of GDPR and globalization, and how people can protect their privacy. Doc also dispelled 

This is the first episode of Season 2 of the Influence Marketing Podcast. This podcast was recorded in September, 2017. Recently, we’ve seen a lot more public discussion about Facebook and privacy, but as Doc insightfully points out in this recent article, it’s not just Facebook and Cambridge Onalytica: the same problems are inherent in the entire online advertising industry (and thus all companies that advertise online).

Doc is co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and author of The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge, by Doc Searls, a fellow at the Center for Information Technology & Society (CITS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an alumnus fellow (2006–2010) of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. 

The Influence Marketing Podcast is a podcast from the Influence Marketing Council, an industry council for B2B brands who innovate in influencer, advocacy, and community marketing. Podcast co-hosts John Mark Troyer and Kathleen Nelson Troyer are also co-founders of the IMC. For more information, go to influencemarketingcouncil.com.