Sam Ford

Sam Ford is Director of Digital Strategy with Peppercom. In his role, he helps guide strategy and approach for the firm's PepperDigital practice and regularly works with Peppercom clients and teams on crafting social media response and infrastructure.

In addition to his work with Peppercom clients, Ford is a weekly contributor to Fast Company and co-author of Spreadable Media, with USC's Dr. Henry Jenkins and UC-Santa Barbara's Dr. Joshua Green, forthcoming from NYU Press. He has written for BusinessWeek, The Huffington Post, Portfolio, Chief Marketer, The Strategist, PR News, Bulldog Reporter, and a range of other publications and blogs. His work has additionally been featured in Investor's Business Daily, New York Times Magazine, CNN, NPR, BBC Worldwide, The Boston Globe, Boing Boing, Slashdot, Mashable, ESPN: The Magazine, Reader's Digest, Soap Opera Weekly, PRWeek, The Firm Voice, and other publications.

Ford has spoken at South by Southwest Interactive, The Word of Mouth Marketing Association's School of WOM, and events from publications and associations like PR News, PRWeek, the Advertising Research Foundation, The Association of Management Consulting Firms, and a variety of other industry events. He regularly leads workshops and webinars with industry trade publications and associations from CableFAX to the Association of National Advertisers, as well as directly for a variety of B2B and B2C companies.

Ford is a research affiliate with the MIT Program in Comparative Media Studies, a fellow with the Futures of Entertainment group, a lecturer with the Popular Culture Studies Program at Western Kentucky University, and co-editor of The Survival of the Soap Opera, along with UC-Berkeley's Dr. Abigail De Kosnik and Miami University's Dr. C. Lee Harrington. He has regularly presented at MIT's Futures of Entertainment conference and the annual gatherings of groups like The Society of Cinema and Media Studies and the Popular Culture Association, and his work has been presented/published in a variety of other academic venues.

Ford 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 also a Kentucky Press Association award-winning journalist who published a weekly column entitled "From Beaver Dam to Brooklyn" about life on the East Coast versus life in Kentucky for several years and has performed in a variety of local professional wrestling events. He lives in Bowling Green, Kentucky, with wife Amanda and daughter Emma.