Below, we unpack each insight and show how they fit into the strategic mindset we’ve cultivated here at EveryoneSocial.

1. People > Companies: It’s All About Real Connections

Erika Serow, CMO at Bain said it best:

“People don’t talk with companies, people talk with people.”

This reflects a fundamental change: as Erika explained, companies are just groups of individuals, and in the era of social media, B2B marketing means building real, human-to-human relationships at scale.

That philosophy echoes our approach on this blog—every post is crafted to empower employees to share authentic stories that resonate. When your people share your narrative, they don’t just distribute content—they drive network effects that amplify trust and extend reach  .

2. Imperfection Builds Trust: Let the Humans Tell Their Stories

Tim Hoppin, Chief Brand & Creative Officer at SAP emphasized the power of genuine storytelling:

“Let the HUMANS in the business tell their story.”

The message is clear: vulnerability matters. Budgets can be refined, campaigns planned—but it’s the real, unfiltered voices within your organization that cultivate trust.

Our content strategy encourages just that. Whether it’s through employee-generated content or third-party thought leadership, we’ve seen firsthand how authenticity drives engagement—and elevates both people and brand  .

3. Algorithms Aren’t Optional: Learn to Play, Or Be Left Behind

Rob Gold, President of Dentsu B2B issued a timely reminder:

“We live in the algorithmic era… You need to be in native platforms with human beings, building trust.”

Content alone won’t cut it—understanding how platforms distribute content is crucial. It’s not about funnel metrics or MQL quotas. It’s about audiences, native experiences, and strategic distribution in environments where your people are already engaging.

This is the core of modern B2B creativity and strategy. When your employees share content natively (rather than via broadcast channels), engagement grows. Our clients routinely see employee shares outperform paid ads, driving pipeline at a fraction of the cost  .

Bringing It All Together: A Framework for 2025-Ready Marketing

Here’s what happens when human authenticity meets platform mastery:

What You Can Do Now

1. Activate your people — Create structured programs for employee advocacy and provide social media training

2. Encourage authentic storytelling — Spotlight cross-functional voices (sales, customer success, product teams) to deepen brand narrative.

3. Optimize for platforms — Build content and distribution strategies tailored for native environments (e.g. LinkedIn, X, TikTok). Capture data and refine based on reach and engagement metrics.

Looking Ahead: The Human Algorithm Advantage

We’re at a tipping point. The companies that win in 2025 and beyond will do more than tell stories—they’ll lift the voices behind them, empowering human-to-human connections at scale. That combination of authenticity + distribution mastery is what defines modern B2B brand leaders.

Need help bringing this playbook to life? Whether it’s kickstarting an employee advocacy initiative, running a storytelling workshop, or optimizing your platform strategy—we’re here to help your CMO make those insights actionable.

The post People, Platforms & Imperfection: Why Modern B2B CMOs Are Rewriting the Playbook 🧩 appeared first on EveryoneSocial.

To help these folks out our team pulled together some of our recent greatest hits: data, case studies, stories, reports, etc. Resources that clearly paint the picture of the value of advocacy across marketing, sales, comms and recruiting. Advocacy can be applied to ANY person or team, and the beauty of it is that it directly impacts the things that are MOST important to any company: revenue and people. And fortunately, after more than a decade of supporting the world’s largest advocacy programs we have plenty of data and examples to share!

Sales: Driving Revenue

I’ve been an honorary salesperson all my life. You don’t have a choice when you’re a founder or CEO. And I’ve loved doing it. I love talking with prospects and customers. If I had to sum up what I’ve learned about sales over the last 20+ years it’s that being seen and heard, participating in the conversation and giving, contributing value is really the key. We buy from those we know, we like and we trust. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about buying a pair of socks or some multi-million dollar technical solution, the equation is fundamentally the same. That’s why social is SO important for salespeople. And contrary to what some salespeople and leaders may think, it’s not complicated. Your buyers are on social. Salespeople need to be talking with those buyers, they need to be engaging with them. Period. As the saying goes, 80% of life (of sales) is simply showing up (on time, with something to contribute).

Sales use case resource: Case study and data on how the use of EveryoneSocial + Linkedin Sales Navigator by sales teams led to increased pipelines, win rates and deal sizes.

Marketing: This Is Word Of Mouth

Marketing is the bread an butter of the advocacy world. This is where it all started and it’s still a core pillar of how advocacy drives ROI. I mean look, it’s really simple, advocacy is word of mouth marketing! This was the idea that drove us to start EveryoneSocial so many years ago, the idea that all of us, the PEOPLE inside companies were connected with everyone we wanted to reach as a business: customers, prospects, partners, candidates, etc. There isn’t a CEO in the world who hasn’t asked his team to share good news with their networks. Advocacy is how you do that repeatably and at scale and it’s the reason why Ogilvy called out advocacy as the #1 influencer trend for 2025.

Marketing use case resource: Ogilvy report highlighting advocacy as the #1 influencer marketing trend for 2025 (featuring EveryoneSocial customers!).

Recruiting: Winning The Talent War

If you’ve talked with me before you know that recruiting and employer branding is one the strongest use cases for advocacy. Honestly I would say that if you could only choose one way to use advocacy, use it for this. Why? Everyone you will hire is on social media. All of your current employees are on social. Everyone who has been a member of your team is on social media. Further, people LOVE sharing about their work, what it’s like to work at your company, and open opportunities to join the team. Further, there are LOTS of people looking for their next opportunity (something like >50% of the global workforce is open to new opportunities). Just a single example for you: the average job post (a link, leading to your company’s career site) shared from EveryoneSocial generates 36 clicks. Advocacy for employer branding and recruiting just works and there is NOTHING more important, there is NOTHING your CEO cares about more than people. The people are the business.

Recruiting use case resource: Comprehensive guide and data on why advocacy + (employer branding + recruiting) are a match made in ROI heaven.

Comms: How You Activate Your C-Suite

I think comms plays a way more important role at most companies than maybe it gets credit for. This is coming from me and I’m not a comms professional, but we’ve had the opportunity to work with comms teams and leaders and this is why I say that: unlike marketing, comms is crenated on people. They’re not afraid of people. Their job is to get messages to employees and get messages to key audiences outside the company. That’s advocacy! Advocacy is just a tool for them. AND they hold the ace, which is they’re the ones that support the senior most executives, the C-suite. And in 2025 the C-suite are quite possibly the most important advocates you can activate at your company. This is really the #1 trend amongst our customers right now and it makes sense. Activating your C-suite is absolutely critical. They can grow their networks faster than anyone at your company and the content they share will reach a bigger audience than anyone else. Perhaps most importantly (and unlike in the past) your C-suite knows they need to be seen and heard on social. It’s a critical pillar of any advocacy strategy in 2025.

Executive comms use case resource: Data on how your C-suite (especially your CEO) positively impacts all areas of your business when they’re active on social media.

The post The ROI of Advocacy in 2025: Resources, Case Studies, Data appeared first on EveryoneSocial.

Are OpenAI and the major social networks headed for a collision? Who knows? (Meta sure isn’t going to take it lying down.) But it’s definitely worth thinking about — especially if you’re a marketer!

I had a chance to talk with Scrunch AI CEO Chris Andrew the other day about SEO, and he shared a dashboard with me highlighting the referral traffic EveryoneSocial receives from ChatGPT and other AI apps. While it’s nowhere near the traffic we see from Google, it’s headed in that direction. 

And it got me thinking about who these visitors were. What were they asking? 

Just the other day I used ChatGPT for a research project that led me to a service provider that I may spend a bunch of money with.

Search is totally different. You have to ask the questions and sift through the results. You’re clearly talking with a computer.

But ChatGPT is basically another person, and one thing we know is that people are FAR more likely to make purchasing decisions that are recommended by a trusted connection…

Because ChatGPT is friendly, helpful, smart, patient, and always there to answer your questions, does that make it a trusted companion? I think it does. It’s why my wife refers to ChatGPT as simply “Chat.”

This is why people like Yuval Harari worry about AI: Because it’ll soon be at a place where we can’t distinguish it from another human. And in many ways it’s better than another human because it’s more helpful, more patient, etc. (Have you ridden in a Waymo vehicle? Best driver I’ve ever had!)

As the CEO of a B2B software company, I’m very excited for ChatGPT (and maybe others) to be the primary starting point for “search.” No doubt content marketers will do their best to figure out how to exploit it like they did with search, but I think it’s going to be harder to do. I think starting a search with ChatGPT is going to be really beneficial for good businesses, those companies that customers love and that provide real value. And I think it’s going to be bad for poor businesses because I don’t think you’re going to be able to BS Chat. It’s all-knowing and has a strong BS meter! 

It can be very hard to tell the difference between a good and a bad vendor, especially in B2B. After all, buyers are constantly being marketed to, and the vendors they go with are often the ones with the best marketing — not necessarily the ones with the best offerings. In these cases, the buyers simply connected with the right people who said the right things and made the buyers feel special.

But if you have a super smart trusted connection like ChatGPT that’s weighing all the options and guiding you toward the best solution… Well, it’s hard to see marketing and sales winning the day in that world.

What does all this have to do with advocacy? Like I said earlier, people are far more likely to make purchasing decisions based on recommendations from trusted connections, and these days a lot of those connections and recommendations are found on social.

In fact, 71% of decision-makers say social is influential when considering or researching a new product for their company, so if people aren’t talking about your product on social — especially the people you employ — you’re missing out on a massive part of the market.

Want to increase your brand’s presence and influence in the place where it matters most? Book a demo.

The post How AI Is Reshaping Buyer Decisions — And What It Means appeared first on EveryoneSocial.

Sandrine Zechbauer, Khoros’ senior director of global demand generation, and I had an interesting chat about the need for companies to do this and the key ways to accomplish this.

Check out some of the highlights in the transcript below.

Sandrine Zechbauer (Khoros): It’s clear that the increasing distrust in social media is the underlying cause of the social media chaos of 2023 — whether it is a lack of trust in the networks themselves, a lack of trust in the new technologies that have emerged, or a lack of trust in the people, such as paid influencers and ambassadors.

The social media world is in a crisis of trust, which is somehow ironic because that’s what the networks were built on to start off with because you trust your friends, your family, your colleagues, and your network.

Cameron, as part of your role as CEO of EveryoneSocial, you spend a lot of time talking to CMOs. Does this observation align with they are telling you?

Cameron Brain (EveryoneSocial): There’s always some questions and concerns about networks, but the fact is that social media continues to grow. It’s the predominant channel. I just saw a stat that more than 50% of people under the age of 42 post about their company on social media at least once a week.

SZ: Even though users don’t necessarily trust these networks, they still don’t give them up either. Social media is still seen as a vital source for news, for example. How can we explain that?

CB: I mean it’s the only medium by which we can connect with other people — anyone — around the globe. Think about it; it’s literally the first time that’s been possible in all of history.

Fundamentally, people want to connect with people more than they do with brands. The whole brand affinity thing was an outgrowth of media over the 20th century.

SZ: You work with the networks and brands a lot. Do you know what users do trust today?

CB: Edelman has some great research out on this. Firstly, people trust people. They trust their co-workers, the people they work with. In fact Edelman has consistently found that people trust businesses far more than they trust any other group, such as governments or NGOs.

The Internet is what, 30 years old at this point? So we’ve all been online for at least a decade or two, and I think we’ve generally honed our bullshit meter. We have interests, we have things we need to do, stuff we’re looking for, and we want trusted, authentic information.

To kind of turn your question around, what we see people looking for is trust. They’re looking for people and content that passes their BS test.

SZ: What should the social media networks prioritize if they want to make up for lost ground in 2024?

CB: Do I need to say anything about X? I think we’re all on the same page there. Elon may have some master plan, but it sure looks like he’s made a lot of unforced errors, stuff that didn’t need to be done over the last year.

I think openness and transparency on social are good. Again, it all goes back to trust. How does the algorithm work? Make that open source. Open up your APIs more. Give more data to the companies and people on the networks.

I think there’s some movement in this area, but, like most things, I think it’s going to take some disruption to really see big change.

The networks are the way they are because of their business models, the majority of which are build on ads, and that’s not something they’re going to be able to pivot off very easily.

SZ: What strategy do you recommend to marketers trying to cut through the noise in 2024, with reduced budgets and increased pressure on ROI?

CB: Every single company on this call has somewhere between 80-90% of its employees already on social. They’re on LinkedIn, X, and other networks sharing content and engaging. The biggest opportunity brands have to cut through the noise is to activate those people as brand advocates.

Remember that the social networks want one thing above all else: users posting content.  So all your employees who are on social — those you activate as advocates in a platform like EveryoneSocial — the stuff they share is algorithmically prioritized by the networks, straight to the top.

There’s no need to boost the content with ads or anything. It’s a massive opportunity that many companies are neglecting.

SZ: Other than trust, what do you think will be the big stakes in social media in 2024?

CB: Well, I think AI, which is very much connected to trust. I don’t think we need more content. I don’t think that’s the problem. I could be wrong, but it goes back to trust and our internal BS meters. We want authenticity. That’s one of the markers we’re looking for, and it’s pretty apparent when content is generated with the AI easy button.

SZ: Any advice on what marketers and social media managers out there should do to prepare for 2024?

CB: Well, a lot has changed in the last 10 years, which is probably the amount of time most of the people on this call have been working in social marketing. I think it’s important to remember that social media usage over that period has increased by more than 10 times.

Said differently, every single person you want to reach — including your own employees — is on social. They’re using social every single day.

Next year is also going to be the first year that social advertising is going exceed all other forms of digital advertising, including search. Social is the #1 marketing channel. So what do you do about that?

I think most marketers have content pretty well figured out. That’s what we’ve been doing for the last decade, and you can always do better, be more creative, but we know how to do content.

With social, though, you need to think about distribution, which is something most marketers neglect because it’s scary. But distribution is where the value is actually created.

So, the question is how do you reach your target audiences effectively, efficiently, and authentically?

We believe one of the best ways to do that is through brand advocacy, by activating your people to help share and distribute your content. But make no mistake, the winners in 2024 are going to be those that really drill down on distribution and crack that nut for their business.

Ready to build trust in your business? Let’s do it together.

The post How to Build Trust on Social Media in 2024 appeared first on EveryoneSocial.

Not insignificantly, they also have their Chief People Officer, Chief Communications Officer, Chief Financial Officer, and Chief Marketing Officer, and a whole smattering of SVPs and VPs activated on EveryoneSocial and regularly sharing content to LinkedIn and X.

The best clients we’ve had over the years (the best advocacy programs, period) have been those where the C-suite supports social. Simply having a CXO say, “This is important” can be enough to drive a stellar advocacy program.

But, for the most part, it’s been just that: lip service. (Do as I say, not as I do).

That’s why it’s SO fantastic to see more CXOs prioritize social for THEMSELVES.  And, as we all know, when your senior leadership publicly does something,  it has a trickle-down effect to everyone else in the organization. Soon, other employees do it too!

So why is this happening now?

Well, first we should acknowledge that the VAST majority of CXOs you see active on LinkedIn and X (posting, engaging, etc.) aren’t doing it themselves — they’re typically supported by a member of the comms team.

Looking at EveryoneSocial client data over 2023, the majority of CXOs have a comms resource handling virtually all of their social. A lesser percentage have a comms resource handling most of it, and a small minority of CXOs do the majority of their social posting themselves.

However, over the last five years, the trend is clearly toward CXOs doing more — even if that’s a tiny bit — of social themselves.

But is there value if they’re not doing the sharing themselves? Heck yes!

The fact of the matter is that a CXO on social media is a high-powered content DISTRIBUTION channel. They’re better than a brand handle because:

1. They’re more authentic — they’re a real person.

2. Their posts, regardless of who writes or posts them, will rank higher and reach a broader audience because algorithms prioritize content from real people.

Brand advocacy for us has always been grounded in a simple principle: that every single person, regardless of their role, experience, tenure, etc., has the ability to be an advocate, become discoverable, grow a network, and drive engagement and reach through sharing.

CXOs just happen to do those things faster, bigger, and at a higher value than anyone else. They’re your alpha advocates.

If you need any more convincing, let’s put it this way: Every single person that matters to your company — employees, customers, partners, prospects, future hires, investors, etc. — are on social and they ALL want to hear from your leaders.

So, I’m calling it: CXO activation on social is going to be one of the leading trends for 2024. It’s been building all year, and it’s something every company can do to more effectively and efficiently DISTRIBUTE their content on social and reach their key audiences.

I’m also super happy to share that EveryoneSocial is the ONLY platform that provides tools tailored to the needs of CXOs and the marketing and comms that support them, from managing their profiles (as many as you want) to getting super detailed reporting on who they’re reaching.

If you want to activate your C-suite or understand more about how we help our clients in this area, simply schedule a demo. We’ll be happy to take you through all the details and offer a game plan to get your leaders activated and sharing.

The post Here’s the Leading Social Trend of 2024 appeared first on EveryoneSocial.

He’s 100% right. Every company has employees, customers, partners, etc., so why don’t they have an advocacy program?

From what we see and hear, there are three main reasons why brand advocacy isn’t something that every marketing team is doing yet. And I stress YET.

1. Your marketing team thinks social begins and ends with brand pages.

The problem with brand pages is they don’t do much in the way of helping you to reach your target audiences.

Firstly, a lot of people don’t follow your brand page. They don’t and they never will. People follow PEOPLE, not brands.

Secondly, the content you post to your brand pages is exposed to only a tiny portion of your followers — unless you boost those posts with ad spend. (After all, that’s the reason brand pages exist in the first place: They’re a mechanism to extract ad dollars.)

Don’t get me wrong, a well-maintained brand page is important. People will search for your company on social media and you want your brand to present well.

But the truth is that brand pages are NOT an effective distribution channel. They’re a tactic — not a strategy.

2. Your marketing team is intimidated by running an advocacy program.

This is a far more valid concern. Running an advocacy program requires your marketing team to build support in other areas of the organization, and that’s not something that every marketer is comfortable with.

There’s a reason we talk about silos in business; not everyone is willing to tap co-workers on the shoulder.

However, I think this concern is outdated for two reasons:

• All of your co-workers are already on social media.
• Activating them as advocates is actually super simple.

In years past, not everyone was on social media, which made it hard to determine who you should approach to join your advocacy program.

Remember those people who said “I’m never going to put my Rolodex on LinkedIn”?  Well, those people are on Linkedin now just like everyone else.

As for the process of activating an advocate (an exec, a recruiter, an engineer, or anyone), it couldn’t be any simpler than it is today.  It’s just a couple clicks — fewer than 30 seconds — and they’re done.

Plus, a modern advocacy platform like EveryoneSocial allows you to bring advocacy toyour advocates, to where they spend time every day — in Slack or Teams, via email, in Salesforce, your intranet, etc.

Point being: Activating advocates is SUPER simple. (Did I mention that everyone wants to be an advocate?) And advocacy doesn’t need to take time out of employees’ already-hectic schedules.

Myth busted.

3. Your marketing team is just too busy, so advocacy isn’t a priority.

I totally get this. Reaching your customers and buyers efficiently, effectively, and authentically isn’t a priority for every marketing team.

There’s lots of other things marketing have to spend time on, such as sending emails that get caught in spam filters, spending loads of money on ads, and creating content that’ll never be seen.

Of course I’m being cheeky.

The #1 goal (and responsibility) of EVERY marketing team is to reach their company’s target buyers efficiently, effectively, and AUTHENTICALLY.

Here at EveryoneSocial, we’re extremely fortunate to have worked with some of the fastest-growing companies over the last 10 years, including  Amazon, Meta, Qualtrics, and Adobe, to name just a few.

What these and our other clients understand is that the ONLY thing that matters in the world of marketing is alpha: the ROI on their marketing investment.

And, to achieve alpha, you’ve got to explore new frontiers. As the CEO of one of our long-time customers says, “Marketers need to be bold!”

If you do the same stuff you and others were doing five years ago, guess what? Your results are going to be less than exceptional. They’re going to be the same as everyone else’s.

As I’ve said in recent emails and posts, awareness is on everyones’ mind right now, including the biggest brands in the world. And advocacy is an AMAZING way to build awareness.

There’s never been a better time to invest in an advocacy program and, frankly, given the macro environment, it’s exactly the solution most companies need to reach their key customers, buyers, hires, and other audiences on social.

See what our take on advocacy can do for your organization.

The post 3 Reasons Every Company Isn’t Doing Advocacy…Yet appeared first on EveryoneSocial.

I just got back from two weeks on the road meeting clients, prospects, partners, and even a competitor.

In total, those weeks amounted to 25 meetings and one big presentation to an audience of 750 marketers, and I learned a TON. Here’s an inadequate summary.

The tide continues to go out.

Everyone is having to fight more for everything: winning new clients, retaining current ones, attracting top talent, keeping and engaging current talent, generating awareness in the market, etc. It’s all harder.

The regime of the last 10 years is over. BUT, unlike a year ago at this time, I don’t think anyone is in denial about this being reality.

So how are companies adjusting? How and where are they finding success? This is what I heard from those I met with:

1. They’re getting bold.

There seem to be two types of companies out there right now: those making marginal adjustments and those who are rewriting their playbooks.

Marginal improvements on the things that we’ve been doing the last few years isn’t going to cut it. It’s time to make some bold moves in marketing, sales, comms, talent, leadership — it spans across them all.

2. Collaboration is key.

Our best clients, the ones who are winning their markets right now, collaborate heavily. They’ve made this a part of their DNA.

Market awareness and reach (distribution) are the top priorities for many, which means everyone needs to be a marketer: salespeople, execs, recruiters, everyone.

Maintaining silos is going to come at a big cost in the near future.

3. Innovation wins, as it always does.

In recent years, many companies grew by throwing bodies at problems — more salespeople, more client success managers etc.

That doesn’t work in this environment. Now, growth has to be product-driven to the core.

This is especially the case in tech: The ideal experience for any software product is 100% self-serve and that includes B2B SaaS — even at the enterprise level.

4. Every company is a tech company.

There’s no company for which talent isn’t its #1 priority.

The difference between today and pre-2020 is that every single company is a tech company: consumer goods, financial services, infrastructure, professional services, etc. They all have a need for specialized tech talent just like the pure-breed tech companies.

This means that you better bring your A-game when it comes to attraction, employer branding, engagement, retention, and all things hiring and people.

In summary, it’s a very exciting and dynamic environment out there. This is the kind of period in which the laggards are separated from the leaders.

The post 2 Weeks, 4 Countries, 25 Meetings: What I learned appeared first on EveryoneSocial.

Brand pages on any network are important. After all, they’re an extension of your brand. But there’s only so much value you can derive from them. The ceiling is low.

So, why do brand pages exist? Why did social networks create them in the first place?

To generate revenue. Primarily via ads.

As any social media manager knows, posting content to your brand page in the hopes of anyone actually seeing it is naive.

If you want impressions and engagement on your brand posts, you better be ready to put some ad dollars behind them because that’s the only way it’s going to happen.

Brand pages are not a strategy. At best, they’re a tactic.

The foundational question these teams need to ask is HOW do they reach their target audiences (their customers, buyers, hires, etc.) in the following ways:

Efficiently (without spending gobs of money on ads)

Effectively (at scale)

Authentically (authenticity is the currency of success on social!)

The ONLY way is by enabling brand advocates to post your brand content to their networks. Real people, including your executives and staff, but also people outside of your company.

While social networks DEPRIORITIZE content posted to brand pages, they PRIORITIZE content posted by users to their timelines.

Why? Because without users, a social network doesn’t exist. And the #1 thing that keeps users coming back is content posted by other users. NOT brands themselves.

Just take a look at the example below.

Brand advocacy programs are some of the absolute highest ROI investments a marketing team can make. You have people, they’re on social, and they want to share your content. You just need to give them the tools to do so. 

And unlike brand pages, there’s near limitless potential in terms of the value you can derive from a brand advocacy program. The more advocates you activate, the more value that’s produced. The ceiling is so high you can’t even see it 

Brand pages are something we all have to do, but as with all things, it’s important to understand where the greatest opportunities are. Marketing teams that spend their precious time and attention anywhere else guarantee they’ll produce less-than-exceptional results.

Want to see just how much ROI a brand advocacy program could drive for you? Try our calculator.

The post Brand Pages Aren’t a Strategy — They’re a Tactic appeared first on EveryoneSocial.