Guardians of the Brand: Handling Hot Topics in a Heated Election Year

Allison Carter has built her career around content in all its forms. She cut her teeth during the early days of social media, helping small businesses create and execute content strategies across platforms. After a brief stint as an advertising copywriter with companies including Microsoft and Chase, she joined her hometown newspaper, the Indianapolis Star. Over seven years she worked as a social media producer, a trending content writer, and in her happiest roles, as an editor to talented reporters and photographers, helping figure out what audiences really want to read and keeping the legacy paper’s digital strategies sharp. She played a small role in the 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winning story “Mauled.” She joined Ragan in 2022 and currently works as executive editor for PR Daily. She lives in Indianapolis.

Lisa Kaplan founded Alethea in 2019 to help customers navigate the new digital reality and protect against threats stemming from disinformation, misinformation, and social media manipulation. Kaplan and her team drive new solutions to meet the dynamic threats facing brands, individuals, and organizations as disinformation continues to impact the public and private sector across all industries. Under Kaplan’s leadership, the Alethea team has built the technologies and capabilities to detect and expose threats at scale to market capitalization and shareholder value, customer bases, physical safety, and brand and reputation. This includes exposing foreign, domestic extremist, and for-profit disinformation networks that have targeted organizations, institutions, and brands. Kaplan has briefed US, NATO, EU, and G-7 policymakers and officials on disinformation. She writes for Brookings and Lawfare, and is frequently sought out by top-tier media outlets, such as The New York Times, Bloomberg, CNN, and the Washington Post and Alethea was named one of the hottest cybersecurity startups to watch in 2023 by Fortune. She was named to the 2021 Forbes 30 Under 30 list of top entrepreneurs and leaders and the Washingtonian’s 2021 Washington’s Most Powerful Women list. Kaplan is a graduate of Colby College.

Sarakshi Rai is the Director of Audience Development and Head of Social Media at The Hill. She got her start writing about sports in India before heading to London, where she was mostly in charge of booking Ukrainian hotels for correspondents during the 2014 invasion as an intern at The Times of London. After a couple of years of political reporting in India at Network 18, she moved to Esquire magazine in Dubai. Sarakshi moved to the U.S. in 2020 and started at The Hill after getting a second masters at University of Delaware. She also hold a master’s degree in International Journalism from City, University of London.

Karen Freberg is a Professor in Strategic Communications at the University of Louisville, where she teaches, researches, and consults in social media strategy, public relations, and crisis communication. Freberg is an award-winning author, and has written several award-winning books in public relations, social media, and personal branding. She is also the Director of The Bird’s Nest, a full-service student-run agency focused on strategic communication. Freberg also has worked on several consulting opportunities with General Motors, Adidas, Brown-Forman, Churchill Downs, Sun Tan City, Adobe, Facebook, Chipotle, HubSpot, The Breeders’ Cup, DHS, CDC, Hootsuite, Colorado Ski Association, and Firestorm Solutions. Freberg has coordinated and advised various companies on the areas of social media pedagogy and certification programs, such as Cannes Lions (Co-Chair of the Cannes Lions Educator Summit), Hootsuite (Advanced Social Media Certification and #HootAmb), Meltwater (certification program and contributor), Adobe (EDUMax Thought Leader and Adobe Education Leader), Facebook Blueprint (Subject Matter Expert), and HubSpot (Education Founding Member).