Laurel Papworth

About Laurel

Laurel Papworth has been running online communities since 1989 — before most of her audiences had email addresses. Forbes named her one of the top 50 social media influencers globally, and Marketing Magazine designated her Head of Industry, Social Media. She taught social media at the University of Sydney for twelve years, beginning in 2005 when the subject barely existed as a discipline. Her client list includes Sony, Westpac, the UNHCR, Singapore Government, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, and 22 Australian senators and ministers. She has worked in virtual worlds, augmented reality, and AI across multiple continents.

What makes Papworth genuinely different is chronology. She did not discover digital community when it became commercially fashionable. She was building, moderating, and studying it when it was a niche academic and technical pursuit. That history gives her a view of where Web3, the metaverse, and AI-driven communities are heading that is anchored in thirty-plus years of watching how people actually behave online — not how marketers hope they will.

She suits technology and marketing conferences, government and public sector events, and leadership forums where the audience is trying to understand what comes after social media rather than what to do with it. Her sessions on the metaverse and Web3 are grounded rather than utopian — she is interested in what works and what does not, informed by decades of practical experience managing communities at scale. Audiences leave with both a longer view of digital culture and a clearer sense of what to do next.