SocialMedia.org Peer Practitioner Forum at NAMLS’25

As social media leaders, we can be overlooked or not taken as seriously as our counterparts in more traditional marketing or communications roles. So how do you effectively represent the impact you make for your business? Join Temeka Easter Rice, Vanguard’s Head of Social Media, in a conversation about how we can project confidence, build authority, and ensure our contributions are more accurately valued. 

How does your brand approach measuring the effectiveness of paid social media when platforms are constantly changing? Whether you spend big dollars or manage a lean paid social media budget, you can’t afford to invest in ineffective campaigns. How do you determine which metrics and KPIs matter to your team and your leadership right now? Which tools have been helpful for capturing your paid social media performance? Hear directly from another Fortune 1000 brand on how they’re evaluating their paid social media strategy and performance. 

Is your Center of Excellence (COE) fulfilling its purpose? How could it be improved to better serve the needs of your brand? This workshop gather social media leaders to discuss the pros and cons of working within this model. Beyond structure, a critical component of success is how well you’re able to communicate the value of the COE to your leadership and demonstrate its ongoing benefits. You won’t want to miss this opportunity to speak candidly with your peers about optimizing the operations of your social media COE. 

How do you incentivize and encourage employees to activate and engage in your employee advocacy program?  In this session we’ll share openly about how to structure a program that can scale efficiently – we can discuss everything from overcoming challenges with legal to increasing engagement during seasonal lulls and product launches, and even how to templatize your gamification strategy so it’s easier to reproduce.   

How are you utilizing data and insights to show the impact of social media across your organization? Which metrics and data sets successfully tell your team’s story? Join us for an open discussion on how we position our social media insights to ensure continued investment. We’ll talk through what our leadership dashboards look like, how we present them to execs, as well as where we’re gaining buy-in and where we could do better. Come away with new tactics and approaches to proving the value of your program to leadership. 

What does a mature, social-first organization look like, and how can you identify tangible actions to get there? Join this workshop to discuss how to utilize a social media maturity model to calibrate an ideal future state of your program and also gauge progress toward its objectives. We’ll share ideas on how to develop your own model, how to gain buy-in from relevant stakeholders, and how to operationalize areas of improvement in order to reach goals. 

With the rising costs of influencer and content creator marketing, how are you getting the most bang for your buck? As influencers – and their agencies – hike their fees and demands, this candid discussion will focus on trends we’re seeing in the influencer and creator economy, strategies we’re using to get more value from our influencer campaigns, and methods for internal education about the rising costs of influencer collaborations. 

How are you making the case that executive social isn’t just a nice way to build brand trust, it’s also valuable for the business? In this workshop we’ll discuss how to measure and report on the success of high-quality thought leadership content on social media. We’ll compare notes on all the factors that contribute value to the business and executives.

AI might be the most over-used buzzword of the past year, but it’s also a potential source of savings for social media teams in terms of time, money, and resources spent. In this practitioner-led workshop, we’ll discuss our enterprise brands are leveraging generative AI for social media creation, management, and more. None of us want to feel left behind, so lean on the SocialMedia.org brain trust to understand how AI is already shaping the future of business and marketing on social media. 

Do the goals and priorities placed upon your team align with where it sits organizationally? How are you delegating responsibilities among your team – are you organized by specialty or emphasizing generalists? As we navigate the current phase of social media’s evolution together, this workshop is your chance to speak off-the-record with fellow leaders about how to shift your enterprise social media team structure to keep up with the times. 

With technology and social media in a state of perpetual evolution, how can you capitalize on the Next Big Thing? What evaluation criteria can you use to determine if a new platform or functionality is the right fit for your brand? Join this collaborative workshop to discuss which technologies are poised to revolutionize social media. Together we’ll discuss strategies for innovating in an increasingly competitive space including the merits and foibles of everything from artificial intelligence to augmented reality. 

What does a robust social listening function look like in 2025 and beyond? How do we position this function as an essential part of digital intelligence, or digital research? In this session, we’ll hear how to take social listening to the next level – expanding across multiple channels, the tools we’re using to do so, where generative AI fits into our strategy, as well as how we’re sharing this digital intelligence with leadership to influence and inform business decisions.