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Role Overview

Senior Channel Manager, Brand Social

2021 – 2025

Rebuilt a dormant channel and a dismantled team, one business case at a time.

Reorg’d down to one—still delivered 62% growth.

Every win on this page took longer than it should have. That’s the story: another 100+ year-old brand, in one of the most heavily regulated industries in the country, with a voice that needed to sound less like a dusty boardroom and more like a new bestie.

A reorg eventually reduced the social team to just me—stranded on a deserted island, owning the workload of a full team—while pushing non-social-savvy leaders to give our content partners the essentials for a winning social operation. It took years, but the wins finally started stacking. See for yourself.

Case Study Snapshot

Challenge

  • A heavily regulated environment where legacy processes created significant brand risk

  • No formal governance, corporate social management tool, content calendar, defined social or content strategy, or dedicated creative support

  • A five-year-dormant Instagram channel and a social team reduced from 4 to 1 in a single reorg

Strategy

  • Enforced brand standards and governance across corporate, branch, and recruitment social channels

  • Partnered with Hootsuite, SocialMedia.org, Legal, and Compliance to relaunch Instagram with dedicated creative support

  • Rebuilt a stale reputation management program into a proactive strategy supporting 19,000+ advisors

Results

  • Secured $600K for six social-dedicated roles — four creatives in Brand and two community managers in Rep Management

  • Instagram relaunch delivered 62% follower growth, a 3.87% engagement rate, and 25% faster content turnaround

  • Branch Social Media Playbook reached a 75% download rate + drove a 20% lift in branch content engagement; CSAT increased 42%

Impact & Achievements

Turned Brand Risk Into Fort Knox ​

  • Owned the end-to-end RFP for Edward Jones’ first corporate social media management tool — addressing a significant brand risk created by shared logins and zero governance across teams accessing brand social accounts.

  • Ran a needs analysis across internal teams, then led vendor evaluation, legal review, and approvals to build a scalable foundation for enterprise social operations.

  • Built the business case around compliance, Proofpoint integration, brand consistency, and operational efficiency — securing buy-in from U.S. and Canada teams across Brand, Legal, Compliance, and Marketing.

  • Partnered with Hootsuite to build a self-serve resource hub — trainings, SOPs, and onboarding guidance for corporate and thought leadership teams, built to requirements I defined — making adoption easier across skill levels.

  • Closed a second governance gap when associates posted on behalf of thought leaders using shared personal credentials — requiring individual Hootsuite seats tied to compliant, documented access and full SOP training before account entry.

  • Worked with Compliance and Legal over two years to create signed agreements for each thought leader — a first for the firm — authorizing Edward Jones to connect their LinkedIn profiles to Hootsuite and the firm’s LinkedIn advertising ecosystem, enabling governed publishing, paid amplification, and centralized performance reporting without shared personal credentials.

  • A cross-channel content audit surfaced a clear performance gap: recruitment was posting at high volume without a defined social strategy, content was underperforming, and show-rate targets weren’t being met — signaling the need for a more intentional plan.

  • Started weekly and biweekly working sessions with recruitment, content, and brand — replacing generic skyline imagery with FAs at their own local branches, developing custom creative for younger audiences the organization was targeting, and consolidating LinkedIn posts into a purpose-driven roundup linking to recruitment’s Facebook Events page.

  • Closed a third governance gap when recruitment posts were bypassing standard brand review — building a two-step Hootsuite approval chain requiring creative director review first, followed by content team approval before anything could go live.

  • Negotiated the added Hootsuite seats into a multi-year renewal — securing discounted pricing based on the existing relationship, with Rep Management contributing budget after seeing firsthand ROI and setting the stage for broader Hootsuite adoption.

Strategy Needs Infrastructure

  • Drawing on experience from another highly corporate environment at Honeywell, built Edward Jones’ first corporate social strategy within six months — meeting with internal teams to design an ecosystem that could support firmwide needs.

  • As reorg shifted roles, trained both the interim and permanent Content replacements — using each transition to reinforce social-first thinking and build a stronger partnership around what Social and Content genuinely needed.

  • Spent 1.5 years advocating for foundational social support from Content and Brand — including a content calendar, content strategy, social-specific brand standards, and a dedicated social-first creative team, all documented throughout quarterly performance reviews.

  • The Hootsuite partnership became an extension of the social function — providing strategic and operational support that helped surface gaps in internal resourcing. The Instagram relaunch made those needs more visible, followed by new hires and added infrastructure.

  • After two years of advocating for membership, secured a SocialMedia.org trial based on my prior membership history — along with a discounted rate for Edward Jones. When the bank crisis hit, the network proved its value in real time, giving the firm direct access to other corporate social leaders navigating the same fast-moving issues. That helped convert the trial into a full membership, with Rep Management contributing to another social investment.

  • Owned the Branchpoint agency relationship supporting corporate and branch social strategy, learning, and reporting from 2021 to early 2023 — then, after another reorg, took full ownership of the corporate scope through 2025 while the new Branch Marketing team assumed ownership of branch social.

Solo Strategy, Enterprise Scale

  • Joined Edward Jones when social was a stated priority, then navigated a series of reorgs that reshaped how the firm invested in the function — including the dissolution of the social team and a shift in oversight to two leaders without prior social management experience.

  • Trained the trainers — regularly educating leadership on social strategy and the discipline itself, using Hootsuite data to ground the case in more than internal opinion.

  • Clarified the function’s scope with new leadership — distinguishing day-to-day posting from ownership of corporate social strategy, channel direction, and long-term growth.

  • Worked within a culture where slower movement was often accepted as the norm — while continuing to push for social to operate with greater speed, responsiveness, and intention.

  • Went from a four-person social team to sole ownership of corporate social strategy — driving organic channel strategy, all paid boosting, budget management, business cases, social technology and governance, reporting, trend analysis, and social listening, including leading recurring listening calls, while Content and Rep Management owned their respective execution.

Client Trust Up 42%

  • Inherited a stale Yext relationship and revitalized it — training directly with their team, learning to capture the data that mattered, and refining monthly reporting with Yext validation before it was shared with internal stakeholders.

  • Transformed digital reputation from passive reporting into a proactive strategy supporting 19,000+ financial advisors across the U.S. and Canada — protecting trust, improving discoverability, and strengthening the advisor experience..

  • Ran monthly review audits across platforms, working through Yext’s partnership with Google to successfully remove 13 reviews that violated platform policy.

  • Built a monthly reporting engine for internal stakeholders — spotlighting wins, tracking review-removal success, and surfacing branch-level trends that supported faster escalation and smarter decision-making.

  • Delivered a 42% increase in CSAT and a 15% lift in advisor acquisition, alongside measurable gains in trust and discoverability — while turning a dormant Yext relationship into a true strategic partnership.

  • Traveled to Edward Jones’ St. Louis headquarters five times for quarterly onsites between January 2022 and May 2023 — joining cross-team planning sessions and guest-speaker programming before attending remaining onsites virtually.

  • Served on the planning committee for the May 2023 onsite — coordinating icebreakers, networking, lunches, and happy hour programming through months of behind-the-scenes planning and logistics.

  • Recruited a director who also teaches yoga to lead short stretch breaks between sessions — a small touch that reflected the level of thought behind the onsite experience.

  • Selected to represent Edward Jones at SIFMA’s 2023 Social Media & Digital Marketing Seminar at the Charles Schwab Conference Center in San Francisco — the industry’s first in-person return since the pandemic, covering digital client experience, compliance supervision, and the evolving social media regulatory landscape.

  • Represented Edward Jones at the 2023 Hearsay Summit at the Beacon Grand Hotel in San Francisco — a flagship financial-services conference focused on digital compliance and social strategy. Hearsay was later acquired by Yext, connecting back to the reputation partnership already built in-house.

  • Built real relationships with LinkedIn and Hearsay reps at both conferences — a LinkedIn office tour and a Yext lunch while in San Francisco for Hearsay — trading corporate comms war stories that turned out to be as valuable as anything covered in the sessions.

No Playbook, No Problem

  • Before a reorg created a dedicated branch marketing team, playbook approval and rollout ran through Branch Enablement — a team managing its own backlog without a clearly defined process for prioritizing social media work.

  • Documented the delays in a timeline for leadership and raised the gap directly with a general partner — making the lack of a formal prioritization workflow visible ahead of yet another reorg.

  • On a mentor’s suggestion, used an informal happy hour to reset a relationship that had been difficult for more than a year — creating a far more productive working dynamic afterward.

  • Created and launched brand-aligned social media strategy playbooks for 19,000+ financial advisors across the U.S. and Canada — practical, compliance-approved tools designed to work across digital skill levels.

  • Built the playbooks around tactical how-tos, platform best practices, KPIs, and audience insights — helping advisors understand channel differences and connect social activity to business goals in their local branches.

  • Partnered with Brand Enablement to survey 600+ advisors and branch office administrators — using their feedback to shape the playbooks’ structure and tone before piloting and refining them with a test group.

  • Once Branch Marketing’s new Marketing Hub gave the playbooks a home, they reached a 75% download rate in the first quarter — helping reframe social from a corporate megaphone into a local relationship engine and driving adoption of newer branch tools, including Hearsay Social and LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

  • Drove a 20% increase in branch content engagement, alongside measurable gains in advisor confidence and inbound client inquiries — showing the playbooks were changing how advisors used social, not just how many times they were downloaded.

  • Worked with Legal and Compliance to build flexibility around different advisor business models while maintaining regulatory guardrails — ensuring the playbooks worked for how advisors operated day to day.

  • The playbooks became a standard part of Edward Jones’ onboarding and enablement process — a permanent resource for training both new and existing advisors on social.

3.5 Years Ahead of the Curve

  • Relaunched Edward Jones’ Instagram after five dormant years and 3.5 years of internal advocacy — researching and building the project plan that proved reaching a younger audience was essential to the firm’s own “generational wealth transformation” mission.

  • Owned the full Instagram relaunch rollout from strategy through execution — leading kickoff calls, weekly and biweekly syncs, Friday status updates, timeline management, and repeated executive presentations to build and maintain alignment through multiple rounds of internal review.

  • Spent two years advocating for and ultimately securing a $600K investment in social-first creative and community support — grounded in the three-month content-readiness model I’d proven at Honeywell and built to strengthen collaboration across Content, Brand, and Rep Management, later reinforced by a reorg that brought Content and Brand into the same department.

  • Built the business case behind the $600K investment after a custom-graphics A/B test outperformed the norm — funding six social-dedicated roles: four creatives in Brand and two community managers in Rep Management.

  • Partnered with SocialMedia.org to benchmark strategy against peer financial and regulated brands, then pushed for and led a three-part Hootsuite branding workshop covering strategy, voice, and how to run A/B tests — sharpening the channel’s creative direction and getting Content, Brand, and Rep Management aligned before launch.

  • Worked closely with Legal and Compliance to integrate Proofpoint and lead sandbox testing — extending beyond the typical social remit to ensure Instagram launched with the right operational and regulatory guardrails in place.

  • Delivered Instagram relaunch results of 62% follower growth among the target audience, 121% growth in impressions, a 3.87% engagement rate, and 25% faster content turnaround — demonstrating that a five-year-dormant channel could perform at both a brand and business level.

Receipts Before Requests

  • Built the data-backed case for Rep Management to fund its own boosting budget — their content consistently met boosting eligibility requirements, making a dedicated budget more sustainable than continuing to draw from the core social budget.

  • Secured a $100K annual boosting budget from Rep Management for two consecutive years — amplifying already high-performing thought leadership content through a dedicated cost center and custom pre- and post-boost reporting.

  • Refined the social listening format across several iterations for a growing cross-functional audience — restructuring sections so the Content team contributed performance reporting alongside social strategy.

  • Maintained a $500K annual core social budget covering Hootsuite — including the branding workshop — SocialMedia.org membership, and corporate boosting while continually evaluating new tools and building business cases for investments that kept the stack current without overspending.

  • Spent more than a year building and pitching the business case for a Tagger Media partnership — a research tool including 60+ social conversations — using Instagram relaunch data and an existing Sprout Social relationship from the RFP process to demonstrate its value. Leadership agreed the tool made sense, but funding was not approved.

  • Fielded an internal referral for a CBS MoneyWatch/Paramount+ content partnership — a natural fit for a financial firm and the Instagram relaunch’s younger-audience goals. Spent more than a year building and pitching the opportunity before it was ultimately shelved after a conflict surfaced late in the process.

In the Room, On the Road

  • Traveled to Edward Jones’ St. Louis headquarters five times for quarterly onsites between January 2022 and May 2023 — joining cross-team planning sessions and guest-speaker programming before attending remaining onsites virtually.

  • Served on the planning committee for the May 2023 onsite — coordinating icebreakers, networking, lunches, and happy hour programming through months of behind-the-scenes planning and logistics.

  • Recruited a director who also teaches yoga to lead short stretch breaks between sessions — a small touch that reflected the level of thought behind the onsite experience.

  • Selected to represent Edward Jones at SIFMA’s 2023 Social Media & Digital Marketing Seminar at the Charles Schwab Conference Center in San Francisco — the industry’s first in-person return since the pandemic, covering digital client experience, compliance supervision, and the evolving social media regulatory landscape.

  • Represented Edward Jones at the 2023 Hearsay Summit at the Beacon Grand Hotel in San Francisco — a flagship financial-services conference focused on digital compliance and social strategy. Hearsay was later acquired by Yext, connecting back to the reputation partnership already built in-house.

  • Built real relationships with LinkedIn and Hearsay reps at both conferences — a LinkedIn office tour and a Yext lunch while in San Francisco for Hearsay — trading corporate comms war stories that turned out to be as valuable as anything covered in the sessions.

Certifications & Board Chair

Hootsuite Certifications

  • Hootsuite Enterprise Certification

    Hootsuite Academy - Credential ID: 75056342 - Issued June 2023

  • Foundations of Social Advocacy

    Hootsuite Academy - Credential ID:70957215 - Issued March 2023

  • Foundations of Social Advocacy

    Hootsuite Academy - Credential ID:70421897- Issued March 2023

  • Hootsuite Platform Certification

    Hootsuite Academy - Credential ID: 69890433 - Issued March 2023

  • Board Chair

    Boarch Chair representing the company’s membership, seat-holder participation, and primary point of contact (2023 - 2025)

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