The Culture Is the Content
People trust people, not brands. But you can't manufacture that. The culture is the content — or it's nothing.
Let’s get something out of the way first: if your “employee advocacy program” involves a Slack channel where marketing drops pre-written LinkedIn posts and asks everyone to hit share, you don’t have a strategy. You have a cargo cult. And everyone — your employees, your audience, the algorithm — can smell it.
I’ve sat in the meetings where these programs get pitched. The deck always has the same slide: “Employees have 10x the reach of brand channels!” And technically, that’s not wrong. LinkedIn’s own research shows content shared by employees receives eight times more engagement than content pushed through the company page. The Hinge Research Institute found that leads from employee advocacy convert at seven times the rate of other leads.
But here’s what the deck never addresses: why would anyone actually do this?
Not the company. The person. The engineer who’s already underwater on a sprint. The customer success manager juggling fifteen accounts. The designer who’s three revisions deep on a rebrand that keeps shape-shifting. Why would they add “become a LinkedIn thought leader” to their list?
The answer can’t be “because it helps the brand.” That’s not a reason. That’s a mandate dressed up as an opportunity.
The programs that actually work — and I’ve seen a few — start from a completely different premise. They start by asking: Who on this team already wants to build something for themselves?
Not everyone does. That’s fine. Most people want to do their job well, go home, and not think about personal branding. Respect that. But in any organization of reasonable size, you’ll find a handful of people who light up at the idea of sharing what they know. They’re already posting occasionally. They’ve mentioned wanting to write more, or they’ve asked about speaking at a conference, or they have opinions about their craft that they’re dying to articulate.
Those are your people. And your job isn’t to hand them a content calendar. It’s to get out of their way while giving them the support they actually need.
That support looks like access — to data they can reference, to leadership for quotes, to design resources so their posts don’t look like they were made in PowerPoint on a plane. It looks like a legal and PR review process that moves in hours, not weeks, because nothing kills momentum like waiting nine days for approval on a LinkedIn post about API architecture. And it looks like genuine investment in their growth: training on how to write well, how to structure a video, how to build an audience that matters to them, not just to the company’s pipeline.
The transaction has to be honest. You’re asking someone to put their name and face on content that benefits your brand. In return, they should get something real: visibility in their industry, a network that follows them if they leave, skills that compound over their career. If the only winner is the company, you’ll get compliance at best and resentment at worst.
I think about Lovable, the AI development platform, and what they’ve built in public. Anton Osika, the company’s co-founder and CEO, shares technical deep-dives and honest reflections on what’s hard about AI development — the unsexy parts of making software that works. His growth lead Elena Verna does the same from the strategy side. Their chief designer Felix Haas shares the craft. It resonates because their audience — developers, tech leads, founders — can tell the difference between people who are in the work and people who’ve been handed talking points. In a market drowning in AI hype, that credibility is worth more than any ad buy.
Gong built a substantial chunk of their B2B brand the same way. Not just their executives on LinkedIn, but their sales team, their product people, their individual contributors — all sharing what they’re learning, what’s working, what’s not. It creates a network effect that a single corporate account, no matter how well-managed, could never replicate. You’re not following a logo. You’re following a dozen people whose thinking you’ve come to trust.
And Shopify and Figma and Framer have been doing this for years with their developer and design communities — empowering the people closest to the work to share what they’re building. Not because a marketing brief told them to, but because the culture actually supports it.
Now, the risks. Because there are real ones, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of corporate dishonesty.
People leave. They take their audiences with them. Your star product manager who’s been killing it on LinkedIn for two years? She gets poached by a competitor, and now she’s killing it for them. That’s a real cost.
But here’s the thing: she was going to build that audience whether you helped her or not. The question is whether you benefit while she’s with you, or whether you just watch from the sidelines, nervous about “investing in someone who might leave.” That calculus never works out. The best people always have options. The goal is to make staying more attractive than leaving — and supporting someone’s professional growth is part of that equation.
There’s also the risk of someone going off-script. Saying something that doesn’t align with brand values, or wading into territory that makes legal nervous. This is real, but it’s manageable. You need guidelines — not scripts, guidelines. Here’s what’s fair game, here’s what needs review, here’s who to call if you’re not sure. And the review process has to be fast and human. The moment it becomes bureaucratic, people will either stop participating or stop asking permission.
The other concern I hear is that this takes time away from “real work.” But the best employee content isn’t separate from the work — it is the work, narrated. Someone sharing the technical challenge they just solved. A customer win they’re genuinely proud of. A design decision that took three iterations to get right. You’re not asking people to become content creators on top of their jobs. You’re asking them to occasionally share what they’re already doing with a slightly wider audience.
According to Edelman’s Trust Barometer from as long ago as 2019, employees are now among the most credible spokespeople for a company — more trusted than CEOs, more trusted than PR representatives, more trusted than advertising. That’s not a trend. That’s a structural shift in how people evaluate who and what to believe.
The brands that figure out how to work with this — authentically, not performatively — will have an edge that compounds. The ones that ignore it, or try to manufacture it with mandatory share programs and canned content, will keep wondering why their organic reach is dying and their paid costs keep climbing.
But I want to be clear about the prerequisite: you can’t fake this. If your culture is broken, employee advocacy will surface that brokenness. If people don’t actually like working at your company, asking them to talk about it publicly is just handing them a microphone to share their ambivalence.
The organizations winning here are the ones where people genuinely want to talk about their work. Not because marketing asked them to, but because they’re proud of what they’re building. Because they feel like they’re part of something worth mentioning.
That’s not a content strategy. That’s a culture. And the content just follows.
*This article was originally published on rebeccaraebarton.com