In 2024, MJ Jaindl made a bet: personal brand and distribution would become one of the last durable moats as AI commoditized everything else.
At the time, MJ had spent more than 25 years in SaaS, including executive roles at Buddy Media and Salesforce — with almost no online presence to speak of.
He started posting daily as a CRO, writing about sales, LinkedIn, audience growth, and what he was learning along the way.
Over a 2.5-year daily posting streak, MJ’s audience grew from ~1,500 to 75,000+ LinkedIn followers. His content helped drive pipeline. And eventually, his posting led him to his current role running Stanley for Business — a product that helps companies support and measure employee content.
My content and my interests actually became my day job. MJ built the exact thing he knew would become more valuable as AI made content easier to produce:
a recognizable perspective, and an audience that wanted to hear it. “It all starts with writing about something that you love to do, that you're good at, and that people will pay for,” says MJ.
Now, he thinks companies should be helping their employees do the same.
You already have micro-creators who know your biz Today, roughly $40 billion is flowing into creator marketing . (Unilever plans to shift half of its advertising budget into social media and 20x its influencer program. ) And much of creator spending today is going to micro-creators with smaller, more specific audiences.
As creator marketing becomes the name of the game, MJ encourages companies to look internally for their own micro-creators.
“You have folks that know your brand, know your positioning, and have an audience,” he says. “That’s an entire team of micro-creators already working at your company.
They also know the work. A salesperson hears the same customer questions over and over. A product leader knows what the team tried before landing on the approach that worked. And an executive can talk about the bets that paid off and the ones that didn't.
“We all understand the principle of ‘people buy from people, they don't buy from brands’ ,” MJ says. “That's where trust is built.”
But encouraging employees to post means more than asking them to re post. MJ notes:
Asking the entire team to just repost company content… doesn't really do anything. “For a long time, folks have been doing this wrong,” he adds. CMOs are excellent at delivering a message at scale. But most don't understand organic social content at its core. Unless you're a creator on the platform, obsessing over the details, you’re not going to understand the nuance.
Companies make the mistake of thinking that if they encourage people to repost about the company offsite, that counts as employee advocacy. Even worse, they hamstring their employees by asking them to only post about the ins and outs of their job and only highlight the people who are parroting the brand message.
None of this (no surprise) does anything for your brand.
Instead, MJ encourages companies to help people develop their own voices.
All that said, employees will also need a beat to get good at this. MJ spent substantial time early on writing, commenting, studying what worked, and building relationships with people interested in the same subjects. Over time, he built systems that made the work more efficient.
Not every employee needs to follow MJ's daily schedule. But helping someone build an audience is a bigger effort than handing them a company post and asking them to “add their thoughts.”
Let employees have a personal voice The company's reason for wanting employees to publish is pretty clear. But if you want employees to participate, MJ says to start with what's in it for them: in part, amplifying their own, real voice.
His first question: “What do you want to be known for?”
That gives an employee somewhere to start that isn't the company's editorial calendar.
Some executives understand that argument and still don't think personal content will work in their industry. “Some just don't believe personal content will work,” MJ says. “Or they think it won't work in the industry or they don't have examples yet.”
To counter, he points to Blackstone's Jon Gray , who writes about running, marriage, family, and travel just as much as he writes about the business more directly.
“No one thought this kind of content could work in private equity,” MJ says. “Jon Gray flipped the script.”
Once one person does it, other people in the industry have an example to work from. The company gets more people talking credibly about the space it operates in, while employees build an audience and reputation of their own.
“It all comes down to your personal zone of genius,” says MJ. Encourage employees to write about something they love to do or that they’re good at. Otherwise, the content will feel like vanity posting, and readers can smell that from down the block. Or running path, as the case may be (we see you, Mr. Gray).
At the end of the day, you’re not trying to turn everyone into an influencer.
You want employees to become known for what they know.
Putting paid dollars behind employee posts MJ also recommends rethinking the money marketers are already spending on distribution. That means taking the strategy marketers already use with outside creators and turning it inward:
Pay employees to publish original content. Give people room to write about subjects they know and want to become known for, and incentivize them to follow through.
Track performance to find the winners. Keep an eye out for posts attracting the buyers and conversations that matter to your business.
Amplify the best. Put paid dollars behind content that has already connected with the audience you want.
“That same strategy you use for paid media elsewhere can be deployed with employee content,” MJ says. “Pay your team to post, find the winners and outliers that are landing for your ICP, and put paid dollars behind them to boost them even more.”
Your company will see benefits in the form of reach, trust and good old fashioned “hey, I like them” feelings from their audience. Employees will get visibility and earned authority that they can take forward into the rest of their careers.
At storyarb, we shelled out $5,000 for stupendous employee posting. Read all about it .
Your perspective is still yours Paid media is getting more expensive. Search behavior is changing. AEO and GEO are the talk of the town. And AI has made it possible to produce more content, faster, than companies know what to do with.
So, the inevitable question: how much should AI be involved in your employee advocacy program?
“There's just good content and bad content, period,” MJ says. “It doesn't really matter who wrote it.”
AI can help with the writing, but it can't give someone the experience they're writing from.
“Only you can do that,” MJ emphasizes.
Every single person inside your company has a unique perspective. They're talking to customers, building products, managing teams, making decisions, and learning things along the way.
The opportunity for CMOs is to get more of that experience out of people's heads and into the market.
Start by reminding your team that they have great things to say.
