Employee advocacy used to mean a tool rollout, a content calendar and a hope that reach would follow. The last time Chris Kim joined me for a LinkedIn Live, that was still the default setting for most advocacy programmes in IT.
Chris has led advocacy and social media in Palo Alto Networks, Workday, ServiceNow and SAP, so he’s watched the pattern up close. Two years on, he thinks anyone still running it that way is using yesterday's playbook. Community is in the comments, he told me, exec social is a must and most IT companies are nowhere near them.
Why isn't our employee platform delivering results?
Because the platform was never the strategy! For years, IT companies bought a tool, loaded it with pre-approved content, and waited for employees to share and reach to arrive. Chris has watched this pattern repeat across the sector for years, and his verdict is blunt. The tool is not the strategy.
The programmes getting results in 2026 have stopped treating advocacy as a distribution channel. They connect it to executive presence, sales conversations, brand marketing, recruiting and internal comms. What gets posted is now as important as how people listen, comment and contribute to the conversations already happening in their industry.
That shift matches how buyers actually behave. Edelman found that 75% of B2B buyers say thought leadership has led them to consider a product they were not previously looking at. In IT, where the technical differences between vendors are subtle and trust is everything, a credible employee voice carries weight a branded post never will.
Employee advocacy now sits within a wider commercial strategy, rather than being treated simply as a distribution channel.
How does executive social presence affect employee advocacy?
It sets the cultural tone for everyone else. Chris mentioned that exec social used to be a nice to have, and that it is now table stakes. In competitive tech markets, leaders are expected to have a point of view. They comment on industry trends, respond to customer concerns and engage with analysts in public.Chris was clear that this is not about announcement posts. It’s how you engage in between those moments and build community. When employees see their leaders participating thoughtfully, advocacy starts to feel encouraged rather than risky.
A few years ago, fear of saying the wrong thing held most employees back. In 2026, particularly in tech, that fear has eased because leaders are modelling the behaviour themselves.
What does effective employee advocacy actually look like now?
It looks like commenting, not just posting. Chris described it simply as “Community is in the comments.”. Employee advocacy in IT is no longer about pushing corporate content into the feed. It now includes thoughtful commenting, contributing expertise to conversations that are already happening, and stepping beyond the algorithm's echo chamber.Chris shared how this has played out on his own profile. Engaging meaningfully in discussions outside his immediate B2B bubble led to new relationships and unexpected connections. Most of them started with short, considered comments rather than long-form posts.
The implication for IT advocacy programmes is uncomfortable. If your team is only ever posting and never engaging, you are measuring the wrong half of the work. Effective advocacy in 2026 is defined more by meaningful participation in conversations than by the volume of content shared.
Can you tell when a LinkedIn post was written by AI?
Yes, and it’s getting easier. Chris told me he uses AI all the time, particularly for brainstorming and summarising complex topics. But the heart of it, he said, still has to come from the individual creator. That distinction is what most generic LinkedIn content is missing.
Content production has accelerated dramatically in the last two years. Feeds are crowded with thought leadership that could have been written by anyone, about anything, for any company. In that environment, posts grounded in real experience stand out more than they used to. As Chris put it, you can just read something and you kind of know when it’s real.
Even inside AI-focused companies, there are still people shaping narrative and perspective. AI supports productivity. It does not replace lived experience or original insight, and in B2B decision making, credibility and expertise are still what move the needle. The fundamentals have not changed. The bar for being recognisably human just got higher.
How do you get a sales team to engage with an employee advocacy programme?
Train them properly, then let them hear each other. Training still matters, but the moment a programme really shifts is when employees from the same company start sharing their own wins out loud. I saw this at a client's sales kickoff recently. AEs and BDRs were swapping stories about how LinkedIn engagement had opened doors. The room shifted. It stopped being a training session and became a conversation.
Chris recognised the pattern straight away. The best value from those sessions, he told me, is when he gets the sales teams talking to each other. It is not from him teaching them. It is from them teaching each other.
The performance data backs it up. LinkedIn has found that 78 percent of social sellers outperform peers who do not use social media. But the number is not what changes behaviour in a sales team. Hearing a colleague describe how a comment on a prospect's post led to a meeting carries more weight than any slide deck or stat. Employee advocacy programmes in IT are quietly turning into communities for that reason. Slack channels, informal wins, stories told between colleagues. That is where the momentum lives now."
How do you prove employee advocacy is working to leadership?
By showing them the moments that moved the business, not just the numbers on the dashboard. Impressions and engagement still matter, but Chris told me they are no longer the whole story. Leaders remember the story, he said. A single strategic prospect engaging unexpectedly. A new relationship forming from a comment. A door that had been closed for months suddenly opening. Those moments look small on a dashboard, but commercially they can change a quarter.
Chris does not expect dramatic reinvention from here. After a period of rapid experimentation and AI-driven acceleration, organisations are becoming more deliberate about how they engage. Great content, he said, is still going to win out.
What has changed most in IT is not whether employee advocacy exists. It is how much it matters. It now sits closer to sales conversations, executive credibility and trust than it ever has before. Measuring it on impressions alone in 2026 misses where the real value now sits.
So what should IT marketing leaders do next with their employee advocacy programmes?
Stop asking whether employee advocacy works and start asking whether yours is built for how buyers actually behave. The answer is rarely about the platform. It is about whether your leaders are visible, whether your employees feel encouraged to participate rather than just amplify, and whether your sales teams are learning from each other instead of waiting for the next training deck."I still think great content is going to win out."
That is the line I keep coming back to. In a feed crowded with AI-generated noise, in a sector under pressure to do more with less, the companies that will win are the ones still investing in people who have something real to say. The platform was never the strategy. The content calendar wasn’t either. The strategy is, and always has been, helping credible people show up well.
