SocialMedia.org Board Meeting

Show & Tell: Paid + creative: How to increase collaboration and results

Eric Ellis, Bobcat

If you struggle to find the best way to partner with your creative or larger marketing teams on paid content, you’re not alone. Join Bobcat’s Eric Ellis, Marketing Manager for Paid Social and Display, for a case study on how social media teams can and should collaborate with creative partners to achieve best-in-class content and exceed KPIs. He’ll discuss how he was able to turn disjointed, irregular conversations and a struggle over the ownership of paid assets into regular, creative review sessions that led to soaring performance quarter-over-quarter and creative assets living within the paid team.

Show & Tell: Utilizing influencers and creators to increase BtoB brand awareness

Ashley Manz, Panasonic

What role can influencers and creators play in a BtoB social media strategy? Join Ashley Manz, Head of Social Media at Panasonic North America, as she shares real-world examples of how they’ve leveraged influencer marketing in event activations, brand partnerships, and day-to-day content strategy to increase brand awareness around their BtoB products. She’ll share some best practices for leveraging influencers for a BtoB audience, including opportunities for big wins and lessons learned along the way.

Show & Tell: Building an impactful and repeatable employee advocacy incentive program

Alicia Eisenbise, Robert Half

How do you incentivize and encourage employees to activate and engage in your employee advocacy program? Join Alicia Eisenbise, Manager of Employee Social Advocacy at Robert Half, as she shares how testing employee advocacy sweepstakes last year led to their best month ever for shares and engagement. We’ll get behind-the-scenes details on how they overcame challenges with legal, key learnings that have enabled them to increase engagement during seasonal lulls and product launches, and how they’ve templatized their gamification program so it’s easier to reproduce.

Show & Tell: Auditing your social media channels for peak performance

Nicole Lightbourne, RTX

Join RTX’s Social Media Director, Nicole Lightbourne, for a look into how to conduct an effective channel audit. We’ll hear about their journey gathering analytics data, assessing channel performance, partnering with internal and external resources, and benchmarking against competitors. In this session, you’ll learn how to thoughtfully shine a light on past wins and weaknesses, present missed opportunities to your team, and guide efficient resource allocation moving forward. Armed with this intel, you’ll be able to craft a data-driven, optimized strategy that maximizes your team’s money and time, and leaves the rest behind.

Show & Tell: Building and optimizing social customer care

Nicole Walden, Rust-Oleum

What is the key to success when it comes to engaging your customers online? How do you keep your customers engaged and appear human while simultaneously leveraging AI tools to scale and optimize your program? In this off-the-record presentation, we’ll hear from Nicole Walden, Product Support Manager, VH and Social Customer Care at Rust-Oleum, as she walks us through how they manage social customer care, including establishing authenticity, fostering genuine connections with consumers, and providing solutions to their issues to welcome them back to your brand.

Show & Tell: Assessing and scaling brand health on a zero-based budget

Lauren Lucas, Delaware North

Data makes the world go round, but how can you tie your social media metrics directly to your company’s Profit and Loss statement? Learn how Delaware North’s Manager of Social Strategy Lauren Lucas used insights and learnings from fellow SocialMedia.org members to manually develop a Social Brand Health Index for the 100+ hospitality and entertainment industry sub-brands in their portfolio. Armed with a new data-driven system for scoring organic, paid, and influencer campaigns, Lauren will share how she made programmatic correlations to successfully predict target KPIs, including return on ad spend. She’ll also give us a sneak peek into how she plans to move Delaware North’s sub-brands upwards along the social media maturity curve at no additional cost to the business.

Show & Tell: Safeguarding brand reputation: Mastering crisis management and minimizing risk

Christine Mueller, Thrivent Financial

Join Thrivent Financial’s Christine Mueller, Brand and Integrated Marketing Strategist, as she shares a behind-the-scenes look into their risk management and crisis communication strategies. She will walk us through how they have turned potential brand threats into opportunities for strengthening brand loyalty, their process for creating a strategic blueprint for risk management and how they built a toolkit that allows for rapid, effective crisis communication that preserves their brand’s integrity and trust.

Show & Tell: Getting Scrappy with collabs

Nicolle Lopez and Andrew Jasenak, Amtrak

Partnerships aren’t just for Branding Departments with big budgets. With new collaboration features and the rise of niche communities, social media provides a fun, experimental space for organic plays. In this session, Amtrak’s Nicolle Lopez, Social Media Manager, and Andrew Jasenak, Director of Digital Media, will share how they’ve found new audiences through bartered social-forward collaborations, from Co-Star Astrology to the National Park Service.

Show & Tell: Removing roadblocks between social media and IT

Andrew Kaiser, Southwest Airlines

How do you remove barriers when partnering with your IT teams to optimize your social media program? Join Andrew Kaiser, Technology Consultant at Southwest Airlines, as he shares how they’ve fostered a unique relationship of collaboration between the airline’s social media and IT departments to drive social media innovation. He’ll share how IT and strategy jointly powers social media operations at Southwest, including how they’ve used technology to enhance their social care efforts, break down departmental silos, and unlock new strategic opportunities for the brand. We’ll gain actionable strategies to remove roadblocks and foster synergy when partnering with our internal technology teams.

Show & Tell: Proving out an organic video strategy

Kelli Nowinsky, Cardinal Health

How do you expand your organic content to include video without increased investment? You get creative. Join Kelli Nowinsky, Cardinal Health’s Director of Social Media, Enterprise Communications, and Marketing, to learn how her ‘don’t look back’ approach to launching an organic video pilot led to insightful learnings and irrefutable success. Find out what key tactics, practical applications, and KPIs she utilized to prove how more dynamic storytelling can impact brand growth and tee up the opportunity for more.

BtoB strategic spend: Driving awareness, engagement, and leads

Brittney Harris, LexisNexis Risk Solutions

How are you increasing your BtoB paid social media program to drive both awareness and engagement while also generating leads for your brand? And what techniques or tools have you found helpful in optimizing advertising spend? Join Brittney Harris, Senior Manager, Digital Marketing at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, as she leads this roundtable discussion on ensuring BtoB paid social efforts align with overall brand strategy, implementation challenges and how to overcome them, and striking a balance between driving awareness and generating leads.

Scaling social care capabilities to keep up with demand

Abby Pemberton, Publix Super Markets

As the scope and expectations of our social care teams continue to grow, how can we scale our capabilities without additional headcount? Join Abby Pemberton, Manager of Social Community and Care at Publix Super Markets, for a conversation where we’ll explore how we’re creating efficiencies and bandwidth for our teams to take on new responsibilities. We’ll dig into our approaches to expanding to new platforms, reviews management, and proactive monitoring and response.

Agency Structures: The ideal, the OK, and the no thank you

Allie Coulter, Honda Motor Co.

How do you determine your ideal agency structure? Is a single agency of record (AOR) more efficient than partnering with specialized agencies by focus, region, or business unit? What framework do you use to make these decisions?

This session will focus on the pros, cons, and unknowns of various agency partnership structures and discuss how we can determine what’s the ideal setup for our brand. Allie Coulter, Head of Social Media at Honda, will lead this group discussion.

Proving the value of social media strategy to leadership

Whitney Magnuson, Northwestern Mutual

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 Northwestern Mutual’s Whitney Magnuson, Senior Director, Social Media & Influencer Marketing, 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.

Developing BtoB Social Selling Superstars

Carey Larson, Procore

How is your social media program supporting your company’s sales organization? Are you giving them the proper training and tools to drive new business and build relationships through social media? Hear from Procore’s Director of Social Media, Carey Larson, on how they activated their BtoB sales org, engaged more prospects, identified potential customers, and developed a team of social selling superstars!

Navigating the transition to a new SMMS

Meghan Mazza, Carlyle

How do you know when it’s time to transition to a new Social Media Management System (SMMS)? What’s the offboarding/onboarding process like, and is the switch worth the effort? Join Carlyle’s Global Head of Social Media, Meghan Mazza, for a discussion on the key factors you should consider when selecting a new platform, and how to navigate obstacles along the way.

Content strategies for channel diversification

Siobhan Jones, Bayer

Are you primarily re-purposing general marketing assets for all of your social media channels? Or are you looking for a way to create channel-specific content more efficiently? If so, you’ll need to join this conversation with Siobhan Jones, Social Media Manager at Bayer. We’ll discuss best practices for tailoring content by channel (LinkedIn vs TikTok vs Meta) and how this impacts engagement levels from your online audiences. Come ready to swap tips and tricks, or bring your challenges, because a room full of experts will be there to help you brainstorm and benchmark on how to improve.

Evolving social listening into digital intelligence

Kyle Brown, Cue Health

Join Kyle Brown, Senior Director of Digital Strategy and Corporate Communications at Cue Health, for a conversation on how to take your social listening program to the next level. In this session, we’ll discuss how we’re evolving traditional social listening to more expansive digital research 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.

Holistic marketing campaigns: Building internal alignment

Carly Nusser, Johnsonville Sausage

In a tale as old as time, alignment between broader marketing, communications, digital, content, and social media teams continues to be tested, especially when working on larger ad or brand campaigns. Join Johnsonville Sausage’s Carly Nusser, Digital Activation Manager, as she walks through how social media leaders can secure a seat at the table and work smoothly with larger teams to create a holistic, company-wide brand campaign. Together we can discuss best practices that help streamline internal processes and how to navigate competing priorities when you’re working across teams. 

Proactive community management to foster engagement

Kikora Mason, JPMorgan Chase

How are you bridging the gap between community management efforts and the authentic needs of your audience? Join JP Morgan Chase’s Kikora Mason, Vice President of Community, for a dynamic conversation where we’ll explore the ins and outs of effectively aligning your community management approach with your audience’s true desires. We’ll talk about the importance of cultural fluency on teams, audience response strategies in an election year, and creative tools/tactics for understanding our communities. We’ll also dive into our crisis management techniques for communicating in a timely manner through social media at critical times. Finally, we’ll discuss how our brands can join social trends in a meaningful and authentic manner.

The value of AI in social media programs

Catalina Holzer, Hilton Grand Vacations

Can the capabilities of artificial intelligence really improve the efficiency with which your social media teams operate, or does it create more work to review and update subpar outputs? Join Catalina Holzer, Director of Content and Social Media at Hilton Grand Vacations, for a vendor-free, candid conversation on the contributions and value AI offers social media leaders. We’ll talk through what we’ve tested, what we’ve learned, what we’ll never try again, and how we’re navigating the rapidly evolving landscape of AI tools and capabilities. 

Scaling your employee advocacy program

Karen Nielsen, Toyota North America

Expanding an enterprise employee advocacy program might as well be a full-time job. Lighten the lift of this effort by joining Karen Nielsen, Internal Communications Manager at Toyota North America, for an open discussion around how to lead and grow employee advocacy programs. We’ll gather to talk through common challenges we face when trying to scale our efforts, general best practices for program expansion, tips and tricks for increased employee participation, and the benefits of amplifying your brand reach through employee advocacy.

Career paths in social media – where do we go from here?

Martha Valle Veltri, Transamerica

Social media has changed rapidly, and so have the career paths, specializations, and compensation packages within this field. Join Martha Valle Veltri, the Senior Manager of Brand Strategy and Social Media at Transamerica, for a discussion about how we can progress our careers within social media. We’ll talk about viable paths for specialization, related roles outside of social media, and how to navigate “aging” in this field. This hot-button topic is aimed at leaders in any phase of their social media career, so come ready to learn and share with your peers as you navigate this evolving industry!

TikTok: What’s working, what’s not, and what’s next?

Jessica Walters, Expedia Group

What does the future hold for TikTok and how can social media leaders make the most of their brand’s presence on the platform? Join Expedia Group’s Jessica Walters, Head of Organic Social Media, Vrbo, in this off-the-record, members-only discussion of all things TikTok. We’ll cover the strategies that are working well, what we’re learning from those that have not, and whether we’re adjusting course amid an uncertain future for the platform.

Social media collaboration in a decentralized model

Meren Tabora, Owens Corning

How do you effectively manage social media across your enterprise when stakeholders are spread across distinct product or business line teams? Join Meren Tabora, Director of Brand and Creative at Owens Corning, as we explore the nuances of managing social media within decentralized models. We’ll discuss the organizational structures and governance best practices that can help streamline operations and navigate competing priorities effectively when working across teams.