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. 

 As politically charged and toxic content proliferates on social media, what’s your strategy for mitigating potential risk to your brand? When are the right moments to hold back, and when is it best to go all in? How do you define where risk lies? And how, if at all, do you respond or support your organization when your brand is swept into the news? Join Sherry Roper, Director of Enterprise Social Media and Brand Governance at Capital One, as she guides this candid workshop. We’ll discuss the practical side of this work – leveraging brand safety frameworks and strategies, as well as the human side – setting expectations and boundaries with yourself, your team, and your leadership. This community of peers is here to hold space for the most challenging aspects of your job. 

When it feels like every brand defaults to being cheeky on the internet, is a distinctive brand voice still relevant? Some might say that redefining your voice and tone is more important now than it’s ever been. Kikora Mason, VP, Community – Social Media at JPMorgan Chase, will moderate this workshop to uncover our collective strategies for revamping our voice, building out personas, and developing style guidelines with considerations in mind for the world we’re living in. When the playbook doesn’t exist for navigating the current climate, social media leaders have an opportunity – and a responsibility – to construct a thoughtful presence across channels.

How can big brands with little budget successfully grow and scale their employee advocacy program? Do you focus only on top leadership, feature on-the-ground employee stories, or prioritize enabling sales teams? Should the focus be culture, talent, sales, or something else? Join Vanessa Villescas, Manager of Employee Advocacy at AMD, in this guided workshop where we’ll discuss everything from which employee segments to include, how to resource this function, and processes that make all this work a lighter lift for overextended social media leaders.

How can brands adjust their social selling strategies to stay competitive while responding to shifting market conditions? How can we build trust and continue to generate leads in an unpredictable world? Join Cathy Lee Fredrickson, Director, Brand Strategy – Social Media at Transamerica, for a workshop exploring innovative approaches to BtoB social selling in an uncertain economy. We’ll talk through how we’re approaching budget constraints and changing customer behavior, as well as how we’re leveraging data-driven insights to continually demonstrate the ROI of our social selling programs.

It’s golden question we all get asked, “What’s the return?” and it’s also only getting harder to answer. Between channel diversification, shifts in consumer behavior and even AI coming into the mix, ROI becomes both more complex and more essential. Join Derek Schoen, Vice President of Integrated Media at MGM Resorts, as we collectively share current best practices, tools (including MTA, MMM, and incremental testing) and the philosophies needed to better understand what is driving business and how you can make the right choices with your resources.

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.

How does your brand decide which functions stay in-house and what gets outsourced to agencies or contractors, and how does that model support the demands of tomorrow? Gather with your peers at billion-dollar brands and our moderator, Allie Coulter, Head of Social Media, American Honda Motor Co., to candidly share what you most appreciate and what’s most challenging about your in-house, agency, and hybrid models. We’ll share our hard questions as well as what’s setting us up for future success in terms of resource delegation, swim lanes, and team agility.  

What does a robust social listening function look like for your brand in 2025 and beyond? How do we position this function as an essential part of digital intelligence, or digital research? In this session, Kyle Brown, Vice President & Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at CoxHealth will guide us through how we can take social listening to the next level. We’ll discuss how we’re monitoring across multiple channels and media formats, the tools we’re using, 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.

How can we get our leadership to approve AI for social media strategy? The possibilities inherent in this emerging technology could be saving you time, money, and resources. In this practitioner-led workshop, join Leslie Douglas, Global Head of Social Media at Intel, to discuss how to identify top problems to be solved by AI, and how to sell it as a way to benefit the business – from content creation to RFP comparisons to social media strategy building, and more. None of us want to feel left behind, so lean on the SocialMedia.org brain trust to understand how you can get leadership to support the future of business and marketing on social media.

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.