People follow people: Here’s how to operationalize it

Everyone in marketing agrees that people follow people, but not everyone is executing a content strategy that supports it. And the reason is because it’s hard to operationalize. 

First, some quick context. The first wave of blogging was driven by individuals sharing their own thoughts and ideas on their own personal blogs. It didn’t take long for companies to see how powerful this was and hence, the modern form of content marketing was born. The idea of “free” traffic through organic distribution was (and still is) very attractive.

Over time, company blogs have absorbed other marketing efforts as well. Organic content, product updates, tutorials, etc. A company blog is a necessity but a provocative thinker can almost always amass more readers on their own. And that’s because readers are more interested in what one person says vs. what a company says.

These days, new life has been breathed into the idea that “people follow people” (which I’ll shorten to PFP for the rest of this piece) thanks to platforms like LinkedIn and Substack. The individual can reach a lot of people because readers trust the source more than a company blog hosting similar content. Naturally, companies want to tap into this power, but it’s very hard to do.

To operationalize PFP, a company has to be willing to elevate the personal brands of employees who will likely not work there forever. They are borrowing social capital and while that may feel uncomfortable, I’d argue that it’s not that different than investing in content that relies on fickle algorithms to be found or paying for ads. Most marketing isn’t really yours in the long-term, but the effect it has on your brand is compounding.

It’s hard to make an investment like Ramp has in its Economic Lab, which is a Substack run by a single individual (shout out Ara Kharazian). It might feel like Ara has just as much to gain from it as Ramp, and that creates a tension that is hard to resolve. Ara is not the founder or a CxO, but he’s the perfect person to analyze Ramp’s massive dataset and turn it into interesting stories. You can’t have the audience they’ve built there without Ara or someone like him. Side note: it works. Their economics content (across the site and Substack) now accounts for a third of all visits to Ramp’s content. 

For as long as content marketing has existed, we’ve been trying to publish content that doesn’t feel like content. That’s the thing that makes people want to read it. This is easy for people to do and hard for companies to do. It’s also hard for companies to fake it. Trying to engineer authenticity never works and so it feels like a few companies either “have it” and most others don’t. 

First, accept that people want to follow people

The first thing to make peace with is that to operationalize PFP, you have to invest in the personal brands of a few key employees. They will benefit from this as much and maybe more than the company. And if they leave, they take at least part of your investment with them. 

When I asked Ara Kharazian, the writer and economist behind Ramp's Economics Lab, about the tension between his personal brand and Ramp's, he pushed back on the framing:

‍It's not really about my personal brand so much as it is my perceived credibility. This work wouldn't be as effective without my name on it. Conversely, I wouldn't be as effective without Ramp data. It's a symbiotic relationship, in which Ramp data provides me insight and information other economists lack. And my willingness to share my somewhat thoughtful opinions online gives Ramp data some context, credibility, and curation for human consumption.

Once you see it that way, the math becomes simpler. A brand account has a fraction of the reach, and those audiences aren't available to you any other way.

This mindset shift matters because if you haven't fully accepted it, every decision that follows gets second-guessed. You'll over-engineer the content to sound more "on-brand." You'll be forced to route posts through legal. You'll try to retain ownership of something you can't own and it’ll never work.

Build a well-resourced exec content program

The executives at your company are probably your most credible and highest-reach content creators. They're also the least likely to write anything without a system around them and goals to work towards.

This is solvable, but only if you treat it like the resource investment it is. You need someone whose job is specifically to extract expertise from your executive team and turn it into content—short-form posts for social, essays, presentations, whatever fits the person. This can't be a side project for a generalist content marketer who's already stretched thin.

Give each exec their own lane. Don't have everyone talking about the same things. The CEO has a different perspective than the CTO or the VP of Sales, and distinct voices find distinct audiences.

You will need buy-in from leadership before you start. The biggest failure mode in exec content programs is content people having to beg for 30 minutes on a calendar every two weeks. If leadership doesn't feel genuine ownership over this, the program stalls. That conversation has to happen first.

Luckily, we have some examples of companies doing this well that you can use to make your point. Ramp Economic Lab and PostHog’s Substack are good examples run by companies. Elena Verna’s newsletter is hers but clearly helps Lovable. (It’s possible that Lovable supports this with time and/or resources, but I don’t know for sure.) Lenny’s Newsletter is perhaps the ultimate example of PFP. He’s accumulated an audience of 1.2 million product folks that SaaS companies would fall over themselves to reach if only they could. 

Build a real system that includes regular brain dumps, a backlog of ideas, a publishing cadence, etc. Everything you’d see in a normal editorial calendar. Your goal is to facilitate. Make it as easy as possible for busy executives to participate.

Incentivize and encourage the whole team to post

Executive content is high-leverage but only taps into a small part of your team. The PFP effect compounds when it's not just a few executives but the engineers, marketers, PMs, and designers all posting about what they're actually working on.

People across every function have genuine expertise and real stories. And there's real audience interest in how work actually gets done inside companies right now. Work is changing fast and people want to learn from people living it.

Every company wants this and there are very few examples of companies doing it well. Usually, a few people are inclined to post anyway and some leaders at the company want more people to be like them. I wish I could easily point to a good program and just suggest that you replicate it but I think this has to be built slowly.

Making this work is mostly about culture and permission, not tooling. A monthly impressions contest is a light incentive, but it makes sharing visible and signals that it's encouraged. A shared Slack channel for ideas lowers the activation energy. Celebrating posts that do well internally creates a feedback loop that gets more people to try. 

Give people somewhere to publish long-form thinking (off-site with zero friction)

Short-form social posts are the most obvious channel. But some of your best people have things to say that don't fit in a LinkedIn post, and they need somewhere to put it. It is my personal opinion that long-form writing encourages long-form thinking, which is highly useful to your team because it helps them understand their own ideas even better.

The main company blog is usually the wrong home for this because it has rules and process and approvals and that’s the exact reason why no one would want to share their informal, back of the napkin type thinking there.

Engineering blogs have survived as one of the last honest formats in company content for exactly this reason. Engineers write about what they actually built and how. The posts don’t feel like marketing content because they aren’t. I love this article from Dan Luu where he talks about why some engineering blogs are great and some stink. The good ones all have a few common characteristics: a very lightweight approval process and direct executive support. You can apply the same thinking to topics beyond engineering. 

Use a CMS or newsletter platform that keeps this work separate from the marketing site and be ready to fight off any attempts at gatekeeping.

Frame the goal internally as clarity through writing, not content production. Ara sets his own research agenda, writes his own posts, makes his own charts. Ramp's involvement is the data, not the editorial direction. That's exactly why it works. You'll get better output and more of it when the person doing the writing is the one deciding what to write about.

It's too hard to engineer authenticity, so just get out of the way

The through-line across all of this is that the thing making PFP content work is that it feels real because it IS real.

Companies consistently undermine this by trying to control what gets said. Corporate copy on a personal feed is instantly recognizable and it gives people the ick. It's actually worse than nothing, because it signals to the audience that this person is just a distribution channel.

Authenticity is impossible to engineer. You can't manufacture it top-down. What you can do is make it easy for people to be genuine by removing the approval chains, giving them a space to write, and trusting them to represent the company well.

Your job as the content leader isn't to build a content machine staffed by your employees. Instead, think of it as a way for your team to reflect on their own work and learnings in a way that benefits the rest of the team and maybe, just maybe, potential customers. Writing feels good and I’d bet many people on your team would be inclined to do it given the time and space.

If you do absolutely nothing else, lead by example

If you’re a CMO or content leader thinking about building out PFP, you can start by doing it yourself. Post about what you're working on, what you're thinking about, what you got wrong. This can help you find the signals that justify further investment, and create the cultural permission for others to start posting too. 

People follow people, both on LinkedIn and within the org. And they will follow your lead before they follow your instructions. PFP is hard to operationalize, but it’s not hard for a single person to kickstart.