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SocialMedia.org Peer Practitioner Forum at NAMLS’25

September 29 – October 1, 2025 | Phoenix, AZ

Agenda

7:15am - 8:15am

8:15am - 8:20am

Opening Remarks

8:20am - 8:35am

Chair’s Welcome Address

8:30am - 9:05am

Culture at the Center of Marketing: Consistently Drive Cultural Conversations and Establish Universal Connections

  • Creative and Strategic thinking in both traditional and non-traditional realms
  • Embedding your company’s culture in your decision-making processes, including strategic thinking, risk management and compliance, performance and the incentives driving these activities
9:05am - 9:40am

All Marketing is Performance Marketing

The hybridization of both ends of the marketing spectrum is a reaction to the evolving nature of consumer behavior and the need for marketers to adapt accordingly.

  • Investing in data- driven tools but also habituating to continuous testing and optimization, breaking down silos between creative and analytical teams, and ensuring that specific, measurable goals inform every campaign
  • Highly personalized and relevant experience at scale – the rise of automation and AI in marketing and enhancing both efficiency and effectiveness
  • Integrating data, creativity and technology – regardless of who you are marketing for and why
  • Meet demands for accountability and precision while building stronger, more meaningful connections with audiences
9:45am - 10:20am

Transform CX with Preference Data

  • Leverage customer provided consent and preference data by eliminating guess work
  • Regulatory drivers that impact marketing communications
  • Strategies for implementing an effective consent and preference approach
  • Unpack strategic approaches for harnessing direct customer insights
9:45am - 10:20am

Content Strategy: Creating the Stickiest Content

  • Staying relevant and memorable to retain your current clients and win new business
  • Adapting to agile techniques, emphasizing speed and adaptability to respond to evolving market demands
  • Identify overlooked areas in your current content strategy and discover the untapped potential to increase your reach and elevate your brand’s visibility
  • Understand the shifts in content consumption across different platforms and devices, and tailor your strategy to meet the changing needs and preferences of your audience
10:25am - 12:05pm

10:30 am – 10:50 am: Meeting Slot 1/Networking

10:55 am – 10:15 am: Meeting Slot 2/Networking

10:20 am – 11:40 am: Meeting Slot 3/Networking

11:45 am – 12:05 am: Meeting Slot 4/Networking

These mutually agreed-upon conversations are arranged and facilitated by Executive Platforms staff to ensure attendees have valuable discussions about their top-of-mind questions, challenges, and opportunities.

12:10pm - 12:45pm

Innovation in Marketing and Customer Experience: Master your Marketing Strategy and Align Your Resources to Significantly Increase ROI

  • Accelerate growth and maintain a strategic mindset
  • Leaning into customer experience and marketing investments
  • Discover why economic turbulence should be an essential part of your digital growth strategy
12:10pm - 12:45pm

Brandformance – Importance of Both Branding as well as Direct Response Engagement

  • Brandformance as a future trend in marketing – the change in the market and why brandformance is a necessity
  • The building blocks of a growth strategy: Strong brandformance
12:45pm - 1:45pm

Explore this year’s themed lunch discussions led by industry leaders, where executives engage in focused conversations over a meal, discussing topics they’re passionate about alongside their peers.

AI Powered Creativity: Delve into the power of AI at each interaction

Communication: Enhance customer and seller experiences through better communication

1:50pm - 2:25pm

Leading, Managing and Marketing in the Age of Turbulence

  • Shifts in audience expectation and differences in their channel preference
  • Create a sharper understanding of future growth opportunities and stay ahead of the curve
  • Accelerate growth: Master your marketing strategy and align your resources to significantly increase ROI
  • Upskilling your marketing teams to better build their brands – tips, tools and frameworks
2:30pm - 3:05pm

How to Connect with Your Customers On Their Journey from Acquisition, Conversion, Retention and Loyalty

  • Building relationships and goodwill through personalized messages
  • Capturing and holding your customers attention throughout their decision-making process
  • Help foster loyalty and word-of-mouth marketing through personalized digital marketing
2:30pm - 3:05pm

Beyond Marketing Analytics: Enter the New Age of Consumer and Market Intelligence

  • Uncover real-time context influencing consumer behavior
  • Move beyond time-consuming, legacy tools that rely on the past and see your data through the lens of the future
  • Foresee trends with pinpoint precision and sharing data across the team to enhance decision making
  • Gain a clear vision of your digital impact to optimize performance and outmaneuver the competition
3:10pm - 4:20pm

3:10 pm – 3:30 pm: Meeting Slot 5/Networking

3:35 pm – 3:50 pm: Meeting Slot 6/Networking

3:55 pm – 4:15 pm: Meeting Slot 7/Networking

These mutually agreed-upon conversations are arranged and facilitated by Executive Platforms staff to ensure attendees have valuable discussions about their top-of-mind questions, challenges, and opportunities.

4:25pm - 5:00pm

AI and Next Gen Tools: Looking to the Future – Get Past the Hype and Look for Real Results

  • Looking at long term view and passing the tangible stuff – long term trajectory
  • Real-world use case and the ways AI can streamline marketing processes and look for real results – adopting things that are beginning to work
5:00pm - 5:35pm

Marketing Leaders Roundtable: What do you Care About?

  • What trends are you watching? What trends are back in style?
  • What’s your leadership style? How do we plug into you? What are you looking for from your team?
  • It’s a human business – let’s make sure we always put people first!
5:35pm - 5:45pm

Chair’s Closing Remarks

6:00pm

7:30am - 8:25am

8:25am - 8:35am

Chair’s Opening Remarks

8:35am - 9:10am

The Secret of Business: How Opportunity is Plentiful to Those Who Lean into Preparation and Consistency

  • Creativity as a significant competitive advantage – as long as you use it the right way
  • Preparation, planning and agility
  • Consistency – the cornerstone of success
9:10am - 9:45am

Brand Performance Marketing and the Future of Consumer Empowerment

  • Building best-in-class innovation, value delivery and cultural convergence
  • How brands should be approaching the evolving age of consumer control
  • Analytics: What data is the most important and how do you use it?
  • What next? Tackling data and evolving CX
9:50am - 10:25am

Creativity: A Means to an End, Not an End in Itself

  • Recognizing the ever-evolving preferences of consumers, including the desire for immersive experiences
  • Reflecting the “age of experience” that today’s consumers demand
  • Understanding that brand recall determines the fruitfulness of brand engagements – crafting bold experiences for consumers
  • Continuous learning and improvement
9:50am - 10:25am

Beyond Buzzwords – Crafting campaigns that Truly Connect

  • Developing an approach for creating both authentic and impactful campaigns
  • How to navigate the evolving cultural landscape and craft advertising that truly connects with diverse audiences who want to buy, love and recommend your brand
10:30am - 11:15am

10:30 am – 10:50 am: Meeting Slot 8/Networking

10:55 am – 11:15 am: Meeting Slot 9/Networking

These mutually agreed-upon conversations are arranged and facilitated by Executive Platforms staff to ensure attendees have valuable discussions about their top-of-mind questions, challenges, and opportunities.

11:20am - 11:55am

Leading Your Marketing Strategy with Vision and Innovation

  • Creating demand and driving traffic
  • Fostering customer engagement and loyalty
  • Building brand equity
12:00pm - 12:35pm

Personalization Strategies for Orchestrating Engaging Omnichannel Experiences

  • Exploring use case examples of omnichannel personalized experiences
  • Reviewing recommendations for initiating and scaling a data-driven optimization program
12:00pm - 12:35pm

Brand Design – They Say The Best Design is Invisible Yet Stands Out!

  • Brand positioning and creating a consistent, ownable and engaging visual identify
12:35pm - 1:35pm

Explore this year’s themed lunch discussions led by industry leaders, where executives engage in focused conversations over a meal, discussing topics they’re passionate about alongside their peers.

Audit & Compliance: Leverage customer intelligence you can bank on adhering to all compliance matters

Conversion Rate Optimization: CRO through SEM, Digital and Paid Media

1:40pm - 2:15pm

The Future is Personalized, Sustainable and Powered by AI

  • Evolving landscape of marketing
  • How to build a successful influencer marketing strategy
  • Role of AI in product development and consumer engagement
  • How the brand can remain culturally relevant worldwide
2:15pm - 2:45pm

Panel: How to Survive and Thrive as an Elite Marketer

  • Lead with purpose – discussing how our roles have changed – career paths, specializations and opportunities within the field
  • In such a rapidly changing environment – were are you seeing things headed? What are you excited about?
2:50pm - 2:55pm

Chair’s Closing Address

5:00pm

9:00am - 1:00pm
8:00 am
Themed Breakfast Discussions: Functional Area
  • Digital / Paid Social  
  • Social Care / Community Management  
  • Brand Reputation / Comms  
  • Employee Advocacy  
  • Executive Social  
  • Governance  
  • Influencers  
  • Social Listening 
8:45 am
Welcome
8:55 am
Break
9:05 am
Practitioner-Led Workshops: Impact
  • Tech stack adoption: Buy-in and governance best practices
    Many of us spend months fighting for the buy-in and budget for various SMMS, listening, or security tools, but then are left with low user engagement or adoption rates post-onboarding. In this vendor-free workshop, join fellow leaders to discuss how you evaluate your tech stack to be sure you have the right tools in place, work with global and departmental stakeholders to gain widespread adoption of your tools, and ensure governance practices are upheld and understood across the enterprise. 
  • Paid social media measurement: What’s working?
    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. 
  • Maximizing the impact of your social media COE
    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. 
  • Employee advocacy: Scaling up for success
    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.   
9:35 am
Break
9:45 am
Practitioner-Led Workshops: ROI
  • Proving the value of social media strategy to leadership
    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. 
  • Social media maturity models: Proving our progress
    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. 
  • Innovative strategies to maximize influencer ROI
    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. 
  • Quantifying the value of executive thought leadership on social media
    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.
10:15 am
Networking Break
10:25 am
Practitioner-Led Workshops: Future
  • How generative AI is shaping enterprise social media
    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. 
  • Team structure: Aligning with social media’s evolution
    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. 
  • Emerging technologies in social media: What’s the next disruptor?
    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. 
  • Evolving social listening programs for the future
    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. 
10:55 am
Snack Break
11:15 am
Peer Advisory Roundtables

Example topics: 

  • Budget constraints: Stretching your social media dollars 
  • Which AI tools are helping improve team efficiency 
  • Global social: Optimizing regional collaboration and strategies 
  • Agency support and oversight models for improving performance 
11:45 am
Break
11:55 am
Peer Advisory Roundtables

Example topics: 

  • Optimizing BtoB lead gen tactics on social media 
  • Enhancing employee social media guidelines and policies 
  • Leveraging the value of executive’s social media presence 
  • Organic social media: Finding ways to innovate 
12:25 pm
Closing Remarks
12:30 pm
Adjourn