Editor’s Note:
This article is part of a Digital Summit Collective series where we’re turning standout live sessions from recent Digital Summit events into actionable, on-demand insights for our community. Each piece is adapted from a real stage presentation—capturing the ideas, examples, and strategic thinking that resonated most with attendees.
Moving at the speed of culture requires more than chasing trends. It means knowing your audience, understanding your brand, and being ready to act when the moment is right.
Social media moves quickly. A conversation can dominate the internet one day and feel dated by the end of the week, creating enormous pressure for brands to react faster, create more content, and find their way into whatever people are talking about right now.
For Vanessa Mbonu, Director of Editorial Strategy and Storytelling at the ACLU, keeping up with culture starts with something more fundamental: understanding what your organization can realistically do and why you are doing it in the first place.
During her session at Digital Summit Tampa, Mbonu shared lessons from nearly nine years at the NAACP, where a relatively small marketing and communications team supports 2,200 branches and units and an audience of millions across social platforms. Her approach balances speed with strategy, giving marketers permission to participate in culture while staying grounded in the brand they represent.
Brands face constant pressure to participate in trending conversations, but Mbonu argued that success begins with an honest assessment of your team's capabilities.
Some organizations can identify a trend and respond within 24 to 72 hours. Others have approval processes, resources, or organizational structures that make that pace unrealistic. Both can succeed on social media, but their strategies should reflect how quickly they can move.
Mbonu contrasted fast-moving viral trends with predictable opportunities such as Spotify Wrapped or Apple Replay. A nimble team might capitalize on an unexpected cultural moment, while an organization with longer lead times can prepare months in advance for recurring events.
Understanding which model fits your organization allows your team to focus its energy where it has the greatest chance of succeeding.
Knowing where your audience spends time is only the beginning. Brands also need to understand why people use each platform and what they expect when they arrive.
The NAACP learned that lesson firsthand with TikTok. Its future audience was there, but simply republishing content from other platforms failed to resonate. The team eventually developed formats that felt more natural to TikTok while still supporting the organization's mission, including a recurring current events series that makes complex topics accessible within the platform's visual language.
Mbonu also encouraged marketers to consider the full context of their audience's lives. The same person who cares deeply about policy or advocacy may also be following sports, reality television, entertainment, and family milestones. Understanding those overlapping interests gives brands more opportunities to communicate in ways that feel relevant and human.
One of Mbonu's most important distinctions was between participating in culture and allowing culture to dictate your marketing.
A trend should ultimately help move an audience toward an existing goal. For the NAACP, someone may discover the organization through TikTok, deepen that relationship on Instagram, move into its email ecosystem, and eventually volunteer, donate, vote, or become a member.
That journey gives cultural participation a larger purpose.
Mbonu pointed to Popeyes' timely "Pope, yes" post following the selection of a new pope as an example of how simple execution can work when the moment aligns naturally with a brand's established personality. Effective cultural marketing does not always require a major production. Sometimes it requires recognizing an opportunity and responding in a way that already feels true to the brand.
A successful cultural moment can introduce new people to a brand, but consistency determines what happens afterward.
Audiences follow because something resonated with them, creating an expectation for what comes next. Maintaining that relationship requires a sustainable content cadence, active community engagement, and an understanding of what performance data is telling you.
For smaller teams, engagement can be particularly valuable. Commenting on another account's post, joining an existing conversation, or responding to followers allows a brand to remain visible without constantly creating original content.
Mbonu described this philosophy simply: be a friend before you need a friend. Building relationships consistently creates a stronger community when the time eventually comes to ask that audience to take action.
Moving at the speed of culture requires more than reacting quickly. It requires understanding which moments deserve your attention and having enough clarity about your audience and brand to know how to respond.
Mbonu's framework of assess, align, and analyze offers marketers a practical way to navigate an environment that changes every day. When cultural relevance supports a larger purpose, social media becomes more than a race for attention. It becomes a way to build relationships, strengthen community, and ultimately move people to action.
Watch the Full Session
This article was adapted from the live session Keeping it Reel: On Brand, On Trend, On Time presented by Vanessa Mbonu, ACLU at the Tampa Digital Summit 2026
Watch the full video: https://resource.digitalsummit.com/resources/material/keeping-it-reel-on-brand-on-trend-on-time-tpa26/