✍️ stop asking employees to share your posts

If you’re reading this from a lake, an airport, or somewhere with an out-of-office reply turned on … we’re jealous. And very impressed with your dedication to The Standard. 

If you’re reading this from your desk or dining room table while everyone else is OOO … we’re right there with you. 

Summer has a way of exposing the difference between busy and important. That line feels blurry to marketers in the best of times, whiplashed between "let's make this go viral" and "wait, how does this tie back to revenue?" — usually from the same person, on the same day, about the same campaign. 

So we went looking for a company that pulled off the thing most teams only get to dream about: more visibility, in less time, without adding headcount. That company is Buffer. They’ve built a content engine where marketing orchestrates, teammates create, and the work keeps moving, even when people turn on the OOO.

Their secret? Turning their team into creators 🤳

We talked to Sabreen Haziq, Senior Brand and Community Manager, one of the architects behind Buffer’s “Team of Creators” program.

Her playbook will inspire you to build systems that create room for great work and occasionally, a little summer.

Let’s get into it.

66 employees.

21,000 posts.

40 million views.

0 social media managers. (Yep, you read that right.)

If you've ever wondered how your marketing team is supposed to produce more content without hiring more people, Buffer has an interesting answer.

Instead of relying on marketing alone, Buffer turned employees across the company, from engineering to recruiting, into creators.

“It’s not just that the content team produces content,” says Sabreen, who leads its brand and creator strategy. “Everybody creates content. We are orchestrators. We help bring them to the forefront.”

An engineer can become known for AI workflows. A finance teammate can write about career growth. Someone else can post about leadership. Remote work. Even cats. Seriously.

Buffer doesn’t expect its employees and community to talk about Buffer. 

It wants them to become known for something.

The idea problem

Most employee advocacy programs rely on inspiration. Someone has a great idea and marketing encourages them to post it. And then offers prompts and prizes to “inspire” it to happen again.

If you've ever tried to run this at your own company, you know getting people to post is its own special kind of pain. (At the arb, we’ve literally paid our team.)

The problem isn't that people don't have anything worth saying. It's that they open LinkedIn before they've noticed the idea. Then imposter syndrome takes over.

So Buffer built a system instead.

The creator OS: a 4-stage system to build your own Team of Creators

Whenever someone shares an insight in Slack that could make a great post, teammates react with a dedicated Team of Creators emoji. It’s a simple signal that says, “There’s content here.”

Ask any writer: Great posts don’t start with a blinking cursor. They start in the conversations people are already having. 

Instead of waiting until someone opens LinkedIn and wonders what to write, Buffer taught the entire company to notice ideas while they’re still fresh.

The Slack emoji is just one piece of a much bigger system.

Here’s the system in 30 seconds:

1. Model: Buy-in starts at the top. In Buffer’s case, CEO Joel Gascoigne models the behavior himself and makes sure that value ripples down across company culture. 

2. Equip: Sabreen and her team work with the entire org to help them find their unique pillars: 1 topic that comes easy on a low-energy day, 1 to stretch into, and 1 light lane. 

3. Signal: Capture ideas while they’re happening so no one starts with a blank page. Buffer created a specific TOC emoji in Slack to call out any stories/learnings that would make for a great post. 

4. Amplify: Buffer hands its brand equity back to its people through collaborator posts, shout-outs, and reach they couldn't get solo. As Sabreen puts it, the credibility you build sticks with you "even beyond this season of life."

In this week's playbook, we unpack each stage in depth and show how to adapt the same system inside your own company.

Campaigns that got us talking: A billboard that asks you to stop and smell it. Seriously.

Goodwipes' latest campaign releases a burst of fragrance every 30 seconds, transforming a traditional billboard into a sensory experience. And while we’re not 100% certain we actually want to stop and smell a wall, we’re intrigued.

AI spotlight: More than 40% of longform posts on LinkedIn are fully AI-generated. 

That's according to a new report from Pangram, which also found that nearly 2/3 of all the AI-generated content it detected across platforms came from LinkedIn.

Yikes. The bar has literally never been lower for developing your own voice and writing something people want to read.

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: Have we hit peak founder face?

Brands have been using people, namely their founders, to sell stuff for decades. Steve Jobs and Apple, anyone? But it can be tricky to put all of your eggs into one basket. Papa Johns, anyone?

It’s no secret that AEO is top of mind with so many marketers, as we wrote just last week. Good news is our resident experts have been busy cooking up a solution for AI visibility.

If you've caught yourself thinking:

+ "I just need my brand to show up more in ChatGPT and Perplexity."

+ "How is my AEO strategy supposed to be different from SEO?"

+ "I have no idea what's surfacing when people search for a company like mine."

Or you're getting pressure from leadership to figure this all out and make your brand more visible, we need to talk. More details coming soon. 👀

Treating creators like an unpaid creative agency.

If someone’s organic post performs so well that you want to turn it into an ad, that’s probably a partnership opportunity. Not a free asset.

Besides being the right thing to do, credit and compensation are how you build a creator ecosystem people actually want to participate in. A great lesson is what not to do if you care about building trust with your audience.

The future of content marketing is designing systems that help the right people create the content, not just marketing. 

That's a much more interesting challenge than simply publishing more. And one that might just leave a little more room for summer.

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... 

If your Q3 content plan includes a Christmas in July push, you're working from a playbook older than Hallmark’s. 

The tradition dates back more than a century, to a French opera in 1892 and then to a North Carolina camp celebration in 1933. And after the 1940 film Christmas in July, it became the retail industry’s solution to the summer slow-stice.