Brand ambassador

In practice it is not a title but a habit. An engineer who writes on LinkedIn once a week about what they solved, a salesperson who films a minute at a trade fair, an HR manager who shows how onboarding works. The company supplies material, facts and the freedom to write in their own words. What has to be agreed is what may not be published, and that list is shorter than management expects.

Why it beats the company page: a post from a person gets markedly more response than the same content from a brand account, because people follow people. A manufacturer that could not find a welder through job ads found one through a post by the shop floor foreman. It cost nothing but time and one photograph. That effect is hard and expensive to buy with advertising.

How to start: begin with three people who already post occasionally, not with a whole department. Give them a list of topics, photos they are cleared to use and a simple rule about what is confidential. Then leave their style alone. For the first few months two posts a month each is plenty. Regularity matters more than polish.

Where it goes wrong: the company writes the posts and employees copy them. It is obvious within seconds, because ten people publish the same paragraph, and credibility disappears faster than it was built. The second problem is an ambassador leaving for a competitor, a risk you have to accept. And not every employee wants to do this, so pushing people into it does not pay.

We do not write posts for ambassadors. We send them the raw material and one question they can answer. An answer in their own words always beats a paragraph of ours. Try it today: ask three colleagues what interesting thing they dealt with this week, and publish one of those answers exactly as they said it.