The Employee Advocacy & Influence Podcast

Hosted by DSMN8 - The Employee Advocacy Platform

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Episodes

102

Latest episode

Aug 2026

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EN-US

About the show

Empower your employees like never before and learn how to own the social share of voice in your industry. Organizations all over the world in every sector are driving strategic competitive advantage by scaling the impact of their employees' voices… and now YOU can too! As we delve beyond the why and get straight to the how so that you can put employee-driven growth at the heart of your organization. Hosted by Bradley Keenan and Lewis Gray of DSMN8.

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60 recent

September 9, 202633 min

How Do You Change Brand Perception on Social? | Biffa's Erica Perazza

Most brands struggle to get a single colleague to share a post. Biffa built a program that people now ask to join. Erica Perazza is Social Media Lead at Biffa, the UK waste management and sustainability business, where she owns everything from LinkedIn and TikTok to community management and employee advocacy. In under four years, she has turned a fragmented social presence into a structured advocacy program built around one goal: changing the perception that Biffa is just bins and trucks. In this episode, Erica explains why she treats employee advocacy as part of Biffa's wider social media strategy rather than a separate channel, and why the employee is the channel. She walks through organizing advocates by region instead of department, the social masterclasses that took colleagues from never using social media to posting with confidence, and the gamification and recognition that keep momentum going. She also gets practical on measurement, covering why brand perception and sentiment come first, how she reads impressions and engagement together, and how advocacy reach stacks up against the corporate page. She closes on why every program needs relaunching over time. If you are trying to prove that advocacy is worth the investment, or you are stuck at the first fifty advocates, this one is for you. Perception, trust, and credibility are hard to attribute and easy to undervalue, and Erica makes the case for measuring them properly rather than forcing everything into an ROI spreadsheet. Follow The Employee Advocacy & Influence Podcast on Spotify or wherever you listen, and connect with Erica Perazza on LinkedIn. Resources: Want to know how your employee advocacy strategy really stacks up? ⁠⁠⁠ ⁠Grab your FREE Employee Advocacy Health Check⁠⁠⁠⁠ and see how you compare against your competitors. ⁠⁠⁠⁠Book a call⁠⁠⁠⁠ to discover how employee advocacy can benefit your team. Ready to elevate your employee advocacy? Get a free copy of Bradley Keenan’s essential book, ‘ ⁠⁠⁠⁠Employee Advocacy: 101 Cheat Codes⁠⁠⁠⁠ ’ for deeper insights and actionable strategies. ⁠Download 'Stop Copy-Pasting Your Employee Advocacy'⁠⁠,⁠ a study of 517,374 LinkedIn posts. DSMN8 x OUTFRONT Media ⁠Case Study⁠ . Subscribe to the Employee Advocacy & Influence Podcast on Spotify or your favorite platform to never miss an episode.

August 26, 202634 min

How to Build Employee Advocacy in Cybersecurity with Ashleigh Perissi

How do you build a global employee advocacy program in a high-stakes, highly competitive industry like cybersecurity? In this episode of The Employee Advocacy & Influence Podcast, hosts Lewis Gray and Elliot Elsley welcome Ashleigh Perissi, Employer Brand & Social Media Strategist. Ashleigh brings a decade of experience building talent brands across defense, healthcare, pharma, technology, financial services, and cybersecurity. In this episode, listeners will learn how to leverage employee advocacy as a core talent acquisition strategy that cuts ad spend and attracts passive candidates. Ashleigh shares actionable tactics on empowering recruiters with ready-to-share content, establishing brand safety guardrails against unauthorized AI graphics, navigating regional privacy cultures during a global rollout, and structuring rewards so every participant feels recognized. In competitive talent markets, candidates trust real employees far more than corporate ads. This episode provides employer brand leads and marketers with a blueprint for turning their workforce into their ultimate recruiting advantage. Resources: Want to know how your employee advocacy strategy really stacks up? ⁠⁠ ⁠Grab your FREE Employee Advocacy Health Check⁠ ⁠⁠ and see how you compare against your competitors. ⁠⁠⁠Book a call⁠ ⁠⁠ to discover how employee advocacy can benefit your team. Ready to elevate your employee advocacy? Get a free copy of Bradley Keenan’s essential book, ‘⁠⁠ ⁠Employee Advocacy: 101 Cheat Codes⁠⁠⁠ ’ for deeper insights and actionable strategies. ⁠⁠Download 'Stop Copy-Pasting Your Employee Advocacy' ⁠⁠ , a study of 517,374 LinkedIn posts. Subscribe to the Employee Advocacy & Influence Podcast on Spotify or your favorite platform to never miss an episode.

August 12, 202635 min

How Employee Advocacy Outperformed Corporate LinkedIn by 13x | Camilla Erika Campbell

How do you turn a 33,000-person enterprise into an active network of brand advocates? In this episode of The Employee Advocacy & Influence Podcast, hosts Lewis Gray and Elliot Elsley welcome Camilla Erika Campbell, Social Media Lead at Wood. Camilla oversees social strategy and employee advocacy at Wood, a global leader in consulting, engineering, and operations across the energy and materials markets. In this episode, listeners will learn how to transition an advocacy program from a basic content distribution add-on into a primary, high-performing strategic marketing channel. Camilla shares how focusing on advocate education and post personalization allowed Wood's employee network to deliver 82% of total campaign web traffic, outperforming their main corporate page by 13x. You'll gain actionable strategies on using UTM tracking to prove real ROI, balancing niche industry content with corporate priorities, and re-engaging inactive advocates through direct, human-centric communication. As corporate page reach continues to decline on LinkedIn, marketing and comms leaders need reliable ways to drive authentic reach. This episode provides the exact roadmap to harness your workforce to build trust, boost traffic, and scale employee advocacy. Subscribe to The Employee Advocacy & Influence Podcast so you never miss an episode! Resources: Want to know how your employee advocacy strategy really stacks up? ⁠ ⁠Grab your FREE Employee Advocacy Health Check⁠⁠ and see how you compare against your competitors. ⁠⁠Book a call⁠⁠ to discover how employee advocacy can benefit your team. Ready to elevate your employee advocacy? Get a free copy of Bradley Keenan’s essential book, ‘⁠ ⁠Employee Advocacy: 101 Cheat Codes⁠ ⁠’ for deeper insights and actionable strategies. ⁠Download 'Stop Copy-Pasting Your Employee Advocacy'⁠ , a study of 517,374 LinkedIn posts. Subscribe to the Employee Advocacy & Influence Podcast on Spotify or your favorite platform to never miss an episode.

July 29, 202631 min

How Philip Morris International Scaled Employee Advocacy with DSMN8

How do you build a thriving global employee advocacy program in one of the most tightly regulated industries in the world? In this episode of The Employee Advocacy & Influence Podcast, hosts Lewis Gray and Elliot Elsley welcome Verena Camesasca, Digital Creative Content Lead at Philip Morris International (PMI). Verena was instrumental in orchestrating the complete rebrand, relaunch, and global scaling of PMI's employee advocacy program, "InsideOut." By tuning into this conversation, you'll discover how to transition from low participation to widespread advocacy across global teams. Verena breaks down how creating legally compliant content hubs, securing executive backing, leveraging live event activations with branded merch, and eliminating login friction via Single Sign-On (SSO) enabled PMI to generate millions in organic reach. You'll also learn practical strategies for scaling non-English content and keeping long-term engagement high. Whether you're facing strict compliance barriers, platform migration headaches, or struggling to maintain user activity after launch, this episode provides a proven roadmap to turn employees into authentic brand storytellers. Resources: Want to know how your employee advocacy strategy really stacks up? Grab your FREE Employee Advocacy Health Check and see how you compare against your competitors. Book a call to discover how employee advocacy can benefit your team. Ready to elevate your employee advocacy? Get a free copy of Bradley Keenan’s essential book, ‘ Employee Advocacy: 101 Cheat Codes ’ for deeper insights and actionable strategies. Download The World's Biggest Employee Advocacy Study . Subscribe to the Employee Advocacy & Influence Podcast on Spotify or your favorite platform to never miss an episode.

July 16, 202635 min

Why is Executive Visibility Vital for B2B Trust? | Lori Grey

How do you get time-poor senior leaders and partners to actively advocate for your brand online? In this episode, we dive into the exact strategies needed to shift corporate social media from an afterthought into a powerhouse business development channel. Hosts Lewis Gray and Elliot Elsley welcome corporate communications expert Lori Grey, founder of Greydient Communications. Having managed internal and executive communications for big four institutions like KPMG and Deloitte, Lori brings nearly 25 years of corporate expertise to the table, including firsthand experience scaling an in-house advocacy initiative to thousands of global participants. This conversation uncovers how to build an employee advocacy framework centered entirely around commercial outcomes rather than vanity metrics. Summarizing the primary lessons from scaling global programs, Lori explains why you must move beyond spreadsheets to specialized software, how to map executive LinkedIn profiles to your target ideal client profile (ICP), and the best methods for partnering with cross-departmental teams to prove hard-dollar ROI to your CFO. By framing social sharing as an essential form of business development, this episode helps marketing leaders solve the ongoing challenge of executive adoption, turning internal expertise into an un-invasive, continuous touchpoint for prospective buyers. Stop fighting the uphill battle of manual tracking and leadership skepticism. Hit play to learn how to transition your brand from corporate broadcasting to trust-driven human influence. Don't forget to follow and rate the show on Spotify or your favorite podcast app! Resources: Want to know how your employee advocacy strategy really stacks up? Grab your FREE Employee Advocacy Health Check and see how you compare against your competitors. Book a call to discover how employee advocacy can benefit your team. Ready to elevate your employee advocacy? Get a free copy of Bradley Keenan’s essential book, ‘ Employee Advocacy: 101 Cheat Codes ’ for deeper insights and actionable strategies. Download The World's Biggest Employee Advocacy Study . Subscribe to the Employee Advocacy & Influence Podcast on Spotify or your favorite platform to never miss an episode.

June 17, 202631 min

How Does Employee Advocacy Impact AI Search and AEO? | HubSpot's Gabrielle Herrera

Answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO) rely heavily on brand recommendations, mentions, and citations within AI-generated answers. Employee advocacy directly feeds these artificial intelligence models by distributing highly trusted, human-sounding employee-generated content (EGC) across social channels and communities like LinkedIn and Reddit. We are joined by Gabrielle Herrera, Leader of Community Growth at HubSpot, who details her fascinating journey taking HubSpot’s employee advocacy initiative from a 12-person pilot program to a global framework accessible to over 9,000 employees. Gabrielle shares how her extensive experience at the intersection of customer marketing, scaling growth, and global email strategy helped her design a sustainable roadmap for widespread workforce adoption. Throughout our chat, Gabrielle outlines why traditional SEO is evolving into Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), making decentralized community conversations across LinkedIn and Reddit vital for brand survival. She offers a masterclass on why customer success teams make the ultimate pilot testing ground, how to provide actionable content structure without destroying employee authenticity, and the continuous battle between deep-link attribution tracking and social algorithm health. Listeners will walk away with an exact understanding of how to move past uniform "lazy copy" and create an enablement framework that fosters intrinsic creator motivation, driving real enterprise growth. Resources: Want to know how your employee advocacy strategy really stacks up? Grab your FREE Employee Advocacy Health Check and see how you compare against your competitors. Book a call to discover how employee advocacy can benefit your team. Ready to elevate your employee advocacy? Get a free copy of Bradley Keenan’s essential book, ‘ Employee Advocacy: 101 Cheat Codes ’ for deeper insights and actionable strategies. Download The World's Biggest Employee Advocacy Study . Subscribe to the Employee Advocacy & Influence Podcast on Spotify or your favorite platform to never miss an episode.

June 4, 202631 min

How G2 Drives LinkedIn Engagement with Employee Advocacy | Jenny Gardynski

Ever wonder how G2 employees manage to completely dominate your LinkedIn feed with high-value content? In this episode, Lewis Gray and Elliot Elsley sit down with Jenny Gardynski, Senior Director of Content and Communications at G2. With over 13 years of PR agency experience representing fast-growing B2B tech giants, Jenny knows exactly how to build authentic brand awareness from the inside out. Listeners will dive into the exact mechanics behind G2's manual advocacy program, learning how their communications team builds high-performing social kits, launches tactical Slack engagement loops, and embeds custom LinkedIn branding into new-hire onboarding. Jenny shares strategies on why workforce personalization outpaces corporate channels by 5x, how to execute strategic quarterly contests that prompt passive employees to start posting, and how to effectively build custom GPT structures to scale executive voices while completely eliminating robotic "AI-isms". If you're currently struggling to prove a proof of concept with a manual social pilot, or if your employees are hesitant to share content because they are afraid of sounding unauthentic, this episode provides a realistic blueprint. Resources: Want to know how your employee advocacy strategy really stacks up? Grab your FREE Employee Advocacy Health Check and see how you compare against your competitors. Book a call to discover how employee advocacy can benefit your team. Ready to elevate your employee advocacy? Get a free copy of Bradley Keenan’s essential book, ‘Employee Advocacy: 101 Cheat Codes’ for deeper insights and actionable strategies. Download The World's Biggest Employee Advocacy Study. Subscribe to the Employee Advocacy & Influence Podcast on Spotify or your favorite platform to never miss an episode.

May 13, 202633 min

How to Use a Pilot Group to Scale Employee Advocacy Globally | Aptean

How do you turn employees into active brand advocates in less than 90 days? In this episode, Anna Laura McGranahan, the driving force behind the social media strategy at Aptean, an AI-enhanced enterprise software, shares her blueprint for migrating from manual, untrackable social sharing to a high-performance advocacy engine that hit its end-of-year goals in just four weeks. Listeners will discover how to build a structural foundation for scale, from navigating IT requirements like Single Sign-On to leveraging executive leadership to drive immediate adoption. Anna Laura also pulls back the curtain on her use of Generative AI agents to remove the “blank page syndrome” for employees, ensuring that even engineers and R&D teams feel confident posting on LinkedIn. Resources: Want to know how your employee advocacy strategy really stacks up? Grab your FREE Employee Advocacy Health Check and see how you compare against your competitors. Book a call to discover how employee advocacy can benefit your team: Ready to elevate your employee advocacy? Get a free copy of Bradley Keenan’s essential book, ‘ Employee Advocacy: 101 Cheat Codes ’ for deeper insights and actionable strategies. Download the 2026 Employee Advocacy Benchmark Report. Subscribe to the Employee Advocacy & Influence Podcast on Spotify or your favorite platform to never miss an episode.

April 29, 202632 min

How to Manage Employee Advocacy in Financial Services | Aviva Investors

Can you run a successful employee advocacy program when every single post is subject to regulatory enforcement? Beatrice Edera Panariello, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Aviva Investors, joins the show to reveal how she built an award-winning program that’s delivered over half a million pounds in equivalent media value within one of the world’s most tightly regulated industries. This episode provides a masterclass in navigating the risk of social media by co-creating guardrails with legal teams, reframing advocacy as a tool for personal professional growth rather than just a corporate megaphone, and leveraging AI to streamline the compliance process. Beatrice shares how to transition to a high-trust, expert-led LinkedIn presence that reaches four times the audience of a corporate account. Whether you are struggling with low engagement or high-risk barriers, this conversation offers a proven roadmap for scaling influence globally while staying 100% compliant. Resources: Want to know how your employee advocacy strategy really stacks up? Grab your FREE Employee Advocacy Health Check and see how you compare against your competitors. Book a call to discover how employee advocacy can benefit your team. Ready to elevate your employee advocacy? Get a free copy of Bradley Keenan’s essential book, ‘ Employee Advocacy: 101 Cheat Codes ’ for deeper insights and actionable strategies. Download the 2026 Employee Advocacy Benchmark Report . Subscribe to the Employee Advocacy & Influence Podcast on Spotify or your favorite platform to never miss an episode.

April 22, 202630 min

How Meta Scaled Employee Advocacy | Zach Blew

Your employees are your company’s most underutilized marketing channel. Relying solely on corporate pages means missing out on the authentic, human-centric voice that modern buyers and candidates trust. In this episode, we are joined by Zach Blew, a Talent Brand and People Programs Leader formerly of Meta and Glassdoor. Zach shares his experience from his time at Meta, including the nuts and bolts of building an employee advocacy program from the ground up, starting with a pilot that achieved a staggering 40% adoption rate. Zach shares his “Goldilocks method” for engaging everyone from the on-the-go sharer to the high-touch executive, and explains how to move past vanity metrics to track hard ROI, such as cost-per-click and direct job applications. He also debunks the myth that advocacy requires a massive content production budget, highlighting how authentic employee voices now take priority over flashy, polished content. Whether you’re struggling to get executive buy-in or looking to scale an existing program, this episode provides a masterclass in driving reach, trust, and bottom-line results through the power of your people. Resources: Want to know how your employee advocacy strategy really stacks up? Grab your FREE Employee Advocacy Health Check and see how you compare against your competitors. Book a call to discover how employee advocacy can benefit your team. Ready to elevate your employee advocacy? Get a free copy of Bradley Keenan’s essential book, ‘ Employee Advocacy: 101 Cheat Codes ’ for deeper insights and actionable strategies. Download the 2026 Employee Advocacy Benchmark Report . Subscribe to the Employee Advocacy & Influence Podcast on Spotify or your favorite platform to never miss an episode.