And I'm Lena Berger, Head of Marketing at NordTec Automation. For the last six months I've been running our corporate influencer program – with sales, HR and our engineers.

Two things. Reach – our company page had twelve hundred followers, our sales team alone had eighteen thousand contacts in their personal networks, and posted almost nothing. And a sales team that really uses LinkedIn: to find new leads, to network effectively, and to stay top of mind with existing contacts by engaging with them consistently. The expertise was in the building, it just never left it.

Exactly. People trust people. A post from our automation engineer about a real customer problem gets more attention than any campaign motif. And for sales it goes one step further: if the right people see you as an expert, the first call is warmer. That's social selling – no cold pitch, but a visible, useful presence before the conversation.

Realistic numbers, not a dream. We used the reach calculator: twenty people, one post a week, eight hundred views per post – that's over eight hundred thousand views a year. Organic, from personal profiles. That number opened the door.

Three groups. Sales – they get the most direct benefit, and they were the fastest to see it. HR – because employer branding lives on the same channel; every authentic post is also a recruiting post. And our technical experts: engineers, service technicians, product managers. The people who actually know things.

"I'm not a marketing person." Every single one. That's fine – we didn't need marketing people. We needed their topics. And we had Bill. Bill is our specialist for predictive maintenance, and he had always shared interesting content – even at his previous companies. You could see the vibrant community he had built around his topic.

Exactly. That got the others curious. We used his example in the workshops and showed what's actually possible for a niche topic like ours. In the end, marketing provided the content ideas. We discussed which posts should follow our corporate design and built templates for them. Sometimes a post is on-brand, sometimes very personal – it's the mix that makes it work. That was a bit of a discussion at the beginning.

Three things from day one. First: nobody has to start from scratch. The platform helps you share your content in a personal way, and a few things are already prepared to make it easier. Second: nothing goes out unless you want it to. Post right away, or schedule it for later – and you see all the posts that are set to go out in the coming days and weeks. Third: we do a short workshop and a small training with you, adapt the tool to your content and your language, and show you how it works. Nobody is left alone – there's help whenever you need it.

By separating two jobs: collecting and posting. Anyone can throw a moment onto the Wall – a photo from the plant floor, a screenshot from a project, one sentence from a customer call. That takes thirty seconds. Whoever has time and something to say turns it into a post later.

Then the BrandMoment card. A quote, a number, a thought – two minutes, already in our colors, with our logo. It fills the weeks where nothing else would come.

The AI drafts two versions in the company's voice – that's the foundation, not the post. The expert personalizes it: their own view, a detail, a story – and makes it their own post. Copy-paste posts from five people look like a campaign. Five personal posts look like a team that knows its stuff.

In the ten minutes after the post. That's the part we trained explicitly with sales. First: answer every comment within the first hour – that's when LinkedIn decides how far the post travels. Second: look who reacted. A plant manager from a target account liked your post? That's not a like, that's an opener. Connect, and say why.

Never. "Saw you reacted to my post on sensor drift – happy to share what we learned at a customer site, if it's useful." That's it. Three out of ten answer. One of those becomes a conversation.

Sometimes we follow up with a Smart Link from Sales Navigator: the documents are right there, and we can see who opened them. But we learn all of that together anyway – in the social selling training, and as part of our joint LinkedIn strategy.

The editorial plan and the timeline on the Wall. We agreed on a rhythm: each expert one post every two weeks, sales one per week, HR takes the people stories. The traffic light tells you the best hour. And planning a post is just an alarm clock you set yourself – nothing is automated, every post is your own click.

Twenty-three active people, four hundred and ten posts, about one point one million views – roughly three hundred times the reach of our company page. A hundred and forty new relevant connections for sales. And four opportunities that started as a comment.

They do – and that's the point. It's not a control tool; nobody gets called out. But quiet readers become active voices once they see where they stand. A bit of competition, no pressure. And for me it's the counter-check to the calculator from the kick-off: we set a target, here I see if we're on track.

Start with ten people who want to, not fifty who should. Make collecting easy, keep the posting personal, and measure honestly. Whether you call it corporate influencing, social selling or employee advocacy doesn't matter. Measurable numbers always help.