Category: Articles

I teach companies how to show up on LinkedIn, and our own company page might be the loneliest place on the internet. I post there a few times a year, feel like I did a proper job for a day, and then go back to my personal profile, because that’s where the clients come from. Turns out I stopped believing in company pages years before I was ready to say that out loud.

Lucky for me, I did spend some serious time in those years learning about tech and innovation, and somewhere along the way I understood how blockchains work. I’m not going to play crypto influencer here, because I’m not one, but stay with me, because blockchain engineers figured out the exact problem your company has.

A dollar works because one central bank says it works, and your page works because one person keeps it alive. Crypto skipped that weakness on purpose. No head office, no server in a basement someone can switch off to bring the whole thing down. It runs on blockchains across thousands of machines that don’t answer to any center, so you can kill one part and the rest carries on like nothing happened.

Say I sneak into your accounts tonight and start switching things off, one by one, to see when a client notices. I unpublish the company page first. Nothing happens, because the last post was a birthday cake for the office manager and three colleagues liked it.

Then I “unplug” the personal account of a few business developers and consultants who have been posting once in a while, and by Friday you will see the numbers on your dashboard plummet.

So the page you maintain is decoration, and the people your clients listen to aren’t even in the plan. That’s your single point of failure.

It was never the page. It’s the two or three people who carry your brand, and nobody’s managing that.

You built it that way because control feels safe. One page, one logo, one careful voice that waits for approval before it says anything. I call it corporate broadcasting, and it’s exactly those messages nobody gives a crap about.

Kill the approval chain.

Now let’s say you spread that same message across the people who do the work, the partners, the consultants, and you get lots of voices with no off switch. Unplug one and the other 14 keep talking. That’s the crypto trick, minus the stupid coins.

People carry the company’s brand because they have something to say about the work they do every day. And when you help them do that, three things happen that a company page never will.

One message becomes many angles

The page says the thing once, in the approved way, usually six weeks after it mattered. Fifteen people who do the work say it fifteen ways. The one who runs the deals explains how the work gets done, the one who sits with clients explains why it matters to them, the one who trains the juniors shows what it’s like on the inside.

So the market hears a company that’s clearly good at what it does, confirmed from every direction at once.

It reads as help, not marketing

When someone shares their own point of view, in their own words, nobody reads it as an ad. Edelman has said the same thing for years: people believe the person long before they believe the logo.

That “these people know what they’re doing” feeling can’t be manufactured from a page everyone knows exists to make the company look good. It only shows up when it comes from a real person.

Every reputation feeds the next

Each person who builds a name makes the company look stronger, and a stronger company makes the next name easier to build. Rented reach, a.k.a. ads, stops the second you stop paying, but this lives in the relationships those people have already built, not in an account you have to keep topping up.

You can’t mandate any of this, and that’s the part most old school companies hate. The second you script people or drop them onto a posting schedule, you kill the thing that made it work, because a forced post is obvious and it does nothing for the author.

Give people a reason to want it, then get the hell out of the way.

Put the company’s name in the hands of the people who do the work, and there’s nothing left to unplug. And nobody’s grading you on the years the page did all the talking. The market only hears what comes next.

Anyway. I have a company page to go ignore.

I got my first BMX when I was a kid. A big blue second-hand BMX that was way too big for me, but I didn’t care. Every free moment I was on that bike.

Soon, I knew every cross track in the neighbourhood, and I had my first crash pretty quickly, too.
Took a corner too fast and scraped up both knees, misjudged a jump and went straight over the handlebars.
The kind of crashes that look dramatic but heal in a week when you’re a kid.

Nobody took the bike away. My parents checked if I was okay, told me to watch the track, and let me ride again the next day.

That bike, way too big, slightly dangerous, sparked something that’s still with me decades later. Cycling is how I clear my head, and it’s been that way for as long as I can remember.

But what would have happened if my parents had locked that BMX in the shed after my first crash? I’d never have known that cycling would become my thing.

That’s the exact tension every company faces when building an employee advocacy program.

Two ways to kill a program

Most companies pick one of two extremes.

Lock the bike in the shed.
Pre-write every post and review every message before sending.
Control over trust.
I get why.

• Legal is nervous, comms is nervous, and everyone’s imagining the worst-case scenario before a single employee has posted anything.
• The result is that no one learns to ride and no one wants to try.
• The “program” becomes a content distribution channel where employees share messages they didn’t write and don’t believe in.
• Your audience can smell that from a mile away.

Hand them the keys and say “good luck.”
No training, no guidelines, no support.

• It usually happens when someone in leadership reads that employee content gets 8x more engagement than brand content.
• They get excited and skip the infrastructure.
• Someone crashes, leadership panics, and the program dies.

Two extremes, same outcome.

Give the bike, show the track

There are only four rules that everyone needs to understand:

• Don’t share confidential information
• Don’t post discriminatory content
• Don’t attack competitors by name
• Don’t speak on behalf of the company on topics you’re not authorised to address

That’s it.
Those are the boundaries of the track.

• Try different content styles and share your perspective on industry trends.
• Talk about what you learned at that conference, or write about a problem you solved.
• Build your voice and make mistakes along the way.

Fall off the bike, we will help you get back on.
Ride into the wall? We remind you why the wall is there.
But we don’t take the bike away.

Boundaries are not control

The companies winning at employee advocacy are the ones with the clearest boundaries.

Tight controls say: “We’ll review every word before you post it.”
Clear boundaries say: “These four things are off-limits. Everything else is yours.”

If you treat people like responsible adults you get responsible adults.
If you treat people like children you get compliance, or silence.

“But what if someone says something wrong?”

The benefits are worth the problems.
The first time an employee in a program I helped build posted something that made even me hold my breath for a second, I understood exactly where that fear comes from.

But if you hire smart people, train them well, and set clear expectations, most will act responsibly.
Not naive optimism, just what I’ve seen play out across dozens of programs.

The honest mistakes are coaching opportunities.
Pull them aside and talk about what happened, and they’ll be more careful and more confident next time.
And if someone intentionally crosses boundaries?
That’s a mentality and performance issue, not a policy problem.

What kills programs is building your entire system around the 2% who might cause problems, while suffocating the 98% who just want to share their expertise.

The one requirement you need

This only works if senior leadership commits.
Not some fake ass board meeting where they sort of get it, but real commitment and trust in employees.

If the CEO won’t defend someone who makes a well-intentioned mistake on LinkedIn, lock the bike in the shed.
Heck, please throw the bike away.

But if leadership is willing to say “we trust our people within clear boundaries” and mean it when things get uncomfortable, that’s when things start to shift.

I can tell you one thing…
The best thing anyone ever did was not take that bike away.

I’ve audited a lot of advocacy programs over the past years. They all make the same mistake: they design for one type of participant and expect everyone to fit.

It never works.

Some companies aim too high. They expect every participant to create original content, post weekly, and build a following. It’s the best way to burn out 80% of the participants before you even get started.

Others aim too low. A few likes and shares, and some additional followers on the company page. The people who want to create get bored and disengage.

Either way, participation drops, skepticism grows, and the program dies.

Richard van der Blom and I spent a long time looking at this problem. Why do most programs fail to sustain engagement beyond the first quarter? The answer turned out to be people, not content or tools.

The result is a framework we call VIBE.

Four levels of advocacy

Voice. Influence. Boost. Engage. Four levels of participation, each with expectations that match what people are willing and able to do.

Voices are the thought leaders

These are people with deep expertise who are building serious professional authority. They create in-depth content, speak at events or star as a guest on a podcast, and develop and share original perspectives. Typically, you can find them on LinkedIn with 2-3 major pieces of content per week.

The mistake I see companies make is assuming Voices are always executives. They’re not. It could also be the specialist who solved complex problems or the consultant who built innovative processes. Expertise lives throughout organisations, and what sets these people apart isn’t their title. It’s that they’re willing to invest.

Influencers are the brand ambassadors

This level consists of professionals who create original content regularly but aren’t aiming to become industry voices. They share project successes, add perspectives on trends, and bring context when they share company content. Typically, they are active on LinkedIn by engaging with other people and sharing two to four original posts per month.

Boost, aka the engagement advocates

People who amplify what others create, with thoughtful comments, strategic shares or a simple like. They spend some time on LinkedIn, mainly engaging with what their colleagues have posted.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking this level isn’t important. Engagement Advocates are a substantial percentage of your program, and algorithms favour quick engagement. When Engagement Advocates interact with posts from Thought Leaders and Brand Ambassadors, they multiply visibility.

Engage, the potential promoters

This level has two groups in it:

• The internal promoters, who won’t post or comment, but will repost content if you ask them to.
• The external promoters, such as partners, stakeholders, and collaborators.

Both serve the same strategic purpose, but they differ fundamentally in relationship, activation approach, and management.

External engagement carries more algorithmic weight than internal engagement. On LinkedIn, a reaction from someone outside your organisation is valued roughly 1.6x more than a reaction from a colleague. This makes external promoters disproportionately valuable for reach and credibility, even at low activity levels.

Your partners, clients, and industry peers are worth more to your program’s reach and credibility than another ten employees hitting the like button.

But you can’t manage external promoters through an advocacy platform. They’re not employees, so you can’t assign them content or add them to a dashboard.

External promotion is relationship-based. It works through co-creation, strategic planning, shared events, and content that serves both parties. The moment it feels transactional, credibility is gone.

People choose their own level

One principle that makes VIBE work is that people choose their own level, based on their capacity and motivation.

Force people into roles they don’t fit, and they either burn out or check out. Create clear levels with appropriate expectations, and people find where they belong. The VIBE framework accepts people where they are and gives room to grow to the next level.

For example, an Engagement Advocate might experiment with creating content and move to Brand Ambassador. A Brand Ambassador develops confidence and steps into Thought Leadership. But only when they’re ready and only because they want to.

How each layer builds on another

We’ve tested this, and ignoring it is why many employee advocacy programs fail.

Without Voices, there’s nothing original to share. Without Boost and Engage, even strong content gets limited reach. Without the external track, you’re missing the highest-value trust signals. Each layer makes the others more effective.

I noticed that many companies are putting all their energy into creating more Thought Leaders. That’s the wrong focus. The real opportunity is activating the Boost and Engage levels that make existing content travel, and building the external relationships that give it credibility.

Two questions for your next review

If you’re running an advocacy program, I’d suggest you look at two things.

• Are your participants in the right level? Are you expecting Engagement Advocates to create content they don’t want to create? Are your Brand Ambassadors bored with activities designed for beginners?
• And the harder one: have you mapped your external promoter ecosystem, or are you running a purely internal program and missing the most valuable engagement you could get?

The companies I see winning at advocacy aren’t the ones with the most creators. They’re the ones where every type of participant contributes at the level that works for them. That’s when the whole system compounds.

Running one of these programs? Let’s talk about how to make your next one work.

I worked with a company a few years back that had just launched its first employee advocacy program.

They were excited, and so was I! They’d built a content library, even got an Employee Advocacy content tool, and hired me for guidance and training.

Then the legal department stepped in and demanded that every employee’s post be approved, or that they post the scripted and approved posts from the library.

Word… for… word…

You can guess what happened.

A few people shared some stuff out of obligation. The ones who did share got zero engagement, because their readers could smell corporate content from two screens away.

Six months later, the program was declared a failure. But the program wasn’t the problem. The approach was.

People aren’t distribution channels

Most advocacy programs start with the company’s needs: more reach, more impressions, more brand awareness. So they build a system to push corporate messages through employee profiles: templates, approved copy, polished marketing speak.

It sounds logical. It doesn’t work.

People don’t engage with corporate messaging from personal profiles. They engage with real people sharing real perspectives. When you post someone else’s words, everyone can tell.

Ownership over obligation

There’s a better way to think about this. There’s a concept called employeeship.

The idea behind it is that everyone in the company acts as a co-owner of their own professional growth, not an executor of the company strategy. They take responsibility for their own visibility, their own reputation and their own career.

That does not mean everybody is going rogue. It’s companies creating the conditions where people want to share, rather than being told to share.

Give people strict messaging guidelines and approved posts, and you get compliance. Give people clear boundaries and help them find their own voice, and you get ownership.

Ownership is what makes advocacy last.

How boundaries work

Boundaries and control sound similar, but make no mistake, they’re not.

• Control: “These are the three posts you can share this week. Don’t change the wording.”
• Boundaries: “These are the topics we care about as a company. This is what’s off-limits. Everything else? Go ahead!”

Control makes people dependent. With boundaries, people know what the playing field is, and within it they have room to play and develop their own voice. The difference looks small, but it’s exactly what 80% of employee advocacy programs get wrong.

The backstory is the starting point

I’ve written before about identifying your professional backstory and the six questions that uncover what you stand for.

Your backstory is yours. You built it over years of experience, mistakes, and hard-won insights. No company created that for you. And no company should replace it with marketing messages.

But a good company should help you use it.

The best advocacy programs I’ve run don’t hand employees content, they give them the tools and support to find their own. And that starts with their backstory.

In my training programs, people answer those six questions and turn their expertise into a clear POV. The employees who find their own voice become far better advocates than those who get a script, because they’re sharing from experience instead of repeating someone else’s message.

Everybody wins!

For the individual: Stop waiting for permission to be visible. You own your career path, and you build a reputation that goes with you, to the next project, the next role, wherever.

For the organisation: You get real advocates. Posts from personal profiles reach 10 times as many people as company pages. Companies with visible employees are 58% more likely to attract top talent. And the advocacy lasts, because it comes from ownership, not obligation.

Most companies I start working with think it’s one or the other: help employees build their own brand, or keep the message controlled. Employeeship says it’s both.

A question worth asking

If you’re an employee reading this, does your company help you find your voice, or do they try to replace it?

If you’re a leader, are you activating what your people already have, or asking them to distribute what marketing created?

The answer tells you more about your program’s future than any engagement metric.