In his 2021 seven-time award-winning book Leading in a Social World, Aaron used research to, as one book review put it, “turn our perception of social media marketing on its head.” In this presentation, he’s at it again, this time with so-called AI.

Marketers have fallen hard for unprecedented hype and are rushing to be the first to master a tool that, as one scientist puts it, is nothing more than algorithms that are “haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms … according to probabilistic information.”

Or as a user on Mastodon put it, “mansplaining as a service: superficially plausible but totally fabricated nonsense presented with unflagging confidence.”

Implausibly, we’ve decided to pay a steep ethical price for participating in this illusion:

• We're now just stealing content (content that we’ve created for our brands and clients, astonishingly).

• We're publishing content from and giving juice to a biased system that causes real harm to many groups, a system that one scholar calls “the civil rights issue of our time.”

• We're choosing not to accept the significant environmental impact of our actions during a climate and humanitarian crisis.

We’re awash in data. As author and risk analyst Nassim Taleb warns us, we’re amid a calamity in the information age: The toxicity of data has increased much faster than its benefits. And this couldn't be truer than with marketing metrics.

The ease of deploying elegant-looking dashboards and auto-generated reports devoid of context (only to be made worse by generative AI, no doubt) has created a certain “data theater” in the marketing world: something that looks like meaning and results but accomplishes little.

In this session, Aaron Templer takes the research from his seven-time award-winning book and uses it for a strategic look at how to strip away our biases and the noise and get at the marketing metrics that truly matter to those making marketing budget decisions.

Audiences will take away:

1. The kinds of questions leaders should ask and what kind of data reporting leaders should demand of their marketing departments and agencies.

2. How and why the marketing industry itself gaslights business leaders with metrics that distract us from business results, and how to spot it when it’s happening to you.

3. Some key metrics every organization should measure, and how to hone in on the metrics that truly matter. text goes here

As a professional instructor for the AMA, Aaron developed and delivered a two-day course on content marketing at AMA’s headquarters. This presentation distills the research and key takeaways from that program, the research from his seven-time award-winning book, plus his research and lessons learned as an agency owner and author.

Did you know that brands with a documented content marketing strategy are four times more confident in reporting an ROI? But, less than half of marketing departments actually have one (21%, in one B2B sector)? Content marketing can be a spiraling, costly marketing approach without alignment of goals, timing, and constituents.

So, while unsuccessful brands obsess about email subject lines and video length in LinkedIn posts, the winning brands move the needle with strategy, planning, and measuring the right outcomes.

This presentation challenges audiences to put an end to their content marketing theater and focus on the three areas that can actually return value: strategy, aligning time and people, and business results-based measurements.

Audiences will take away:

1. An actionable, one-page approach to content marketing strategy that will change your approach the next day.

2. A clear perspective on the toxicity of data theater and a renewed focus on measurements that actually reflect business results.

3. How (and why) to align time and people to maximize content marketing’s effectiveness.

Marketers have long had their hands on the levers of social media in organizations, and have biased business leaders into a way of thinking about online social constructs that, according to research, actually stands in contrast to the way social networks generate value.

The better way is through building social capital — not with better marketing communications skills, but with stronger leadership acumen.

Leading in a Social World shows you how, and in the process opens new avenues for marketers to hone their social capital skills in any setting — digital or in-person.

The research from Aaron Templer's seven-time award-winning book is clear: Social capital, not marketing, enhances knowledge sharing in social groups. The connections and flow of information are facilitated by social capital, and the leadership acumen required to build it is learnable - if we're willing to strip away our marketing biases.

Audiences will take away:

1. Elevate your approach: Learn how to use leadership acumen to build communities that give back to you, your brand, and your cause.
   Shed biases: When it comes to building committed digital communities around a brand or cause, social media marketing data shows suspect results at best, and brand-damaging results at worst.

2. Discover a better way: Learn why some brands are successfully motivating others within social networks (and how they're doing it).

3. Mind-shift to digital social: Socially distanced workforces and other remote communities are our reality. Engage them with social capital skills, not technical capital skills.

4. Manage better marketing: Whether you’re managing in-house teams or agencies, social media marketing can be a huge resource suck without substantive ROI. Learn why, and where those social media resources should go.