✍️ we made LinkedIn a team sport (prizes inside. literally.)

Employee advocacy isn’t new. 

For the past decade, B2C has been training buyers to trust people over brands and creators over campaigns.

It’s just that now, B2B is catching up.

Buying decisions aren’t happening in golf carts and cigar lounges anymore. They’re happening in feeds. The B2Bs pulling ahead today are the ones building real, human relationships. 

At scale.

We get this, because that’s how we built storyarb: on the understanding that the most efficient way to get seen and evaluated by B2B buying committees is by activating your teams’ insights on social. 

So we ran a li’l experiment. Twice. 

For the last 8 weeks, we’ve hosted Season 2 of our “Own the Internet” contest, where 17 arbonauts compete to win attention on LinkedIn. (Co-founders don’t get to play. Rude. But fair.) 

Own the Internet is our company-wide push to see what happens when you treat employee advocacy like a real growth channel — not a side project.

And it worked.

Let’s get into it.

“Hey team, please post more on LinkedIn” is not a strategy. It’s a Slack message people ignore.

Most employee advocacy programs fail because they feel like work.

So we structured ours to feel like play. 

Inside our “Own the Internet” contest, that looked like this: 8 weeks. 8 weekly minigames. Clear prompts. Clear winners. Actual incentives.

Each week had a different angle: hooks, client stories, comment threads, traffic sprints.

Winners weren’t random. Each week, a rotating set of “juice captains” (1–2 team members) drove participation and selected the posts that stood out most.

To win:

• You didn’t have to have the most followers. 

• You didn’t have to already be “good at LinkedIn.”

• You just had to show up for one idea.

And that's what made it work.

The minigames (steal these)

You don’t need to run a full 8-week program to start reaping the benefits of employee advocacy programs. 

So if you don’t have the budget — or bandwidth — to run a full, 2-month, all-employee contest, you can pilot with something smaller. 

Run one game for a week. See who shows up. See what resonates.

That alone will teach you more than 6 months of “we should post more.”

Here are a few of the weekly minigames we ran inside our own campaign — and what winning looked like:

The hook Olympics

Write the strongest opening line. That’s it.

Forces clarity. Low lift. High upside.

Why this won: It earns attention immediately. Specific, unexpected, and impossible to scroll past.

Most client love

Show, don’t tell, a real client outcome. Turns proof points into content.

Why this won: It leads with the result, not the pitch. Specific names, clear context, real stakes.

The comment thread game

Start a conversation worth joining. This builds reach without overthinking posts.

Why this won: It invites participation. The post is the prompt, not the point.

The remix

Take an existing piece of company content and make it your own. Distribution without creating from scratch.

Why this won: It reframes a familiar idea in a human voice. Same insight, more readable, more relatable.

I’d buy from you

Write something that makes your ICP want to DM you. This aligns content with actual business outcomes.

Why this won: It builds trust through specificity. You can see how they work, not just what they say.

We have 4 other mini-games in our back pocket, by the way — reply to this email if you want the full roster.

(Or, ya know, find one of us on LinkedIn.)

Campaigns that got us talking: Emily Kramer made the case for why websites still matter — and PostHog is the proof. Interactive, opinionated, and actually worth clicking around. (Bonus points for the April Fools’ action figures.)

AI spotlight: Microsoft now says Copilot is “for entertainment purposes only.” Which is … not exactly how they’ve been positioning it.

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: Zoom’s latest campaign: “Take Back Lunch.”

Includes a burger pop-up, fake webinars to block your calendar, and AI positioned as the reason you can finally step away.

Honestly? Kind of brilliant. Especially for those of us inclined to hangry-ness.

We’ve Owned the Internet twice now. We know what works and what wastes everyone’s time.

If you want to run your own employee advocacy program, we’ll tell you how.

If you want to skip the trial-and-error, we’ll run it for you.

(Yes, we’ll still make it fun. No, we’re not buying you a Ninja Creami.)

Check out our content programs, then let us run yours.

“Quick Slack” energy … on your wedding day.

If you do this, we will be so mad.

Employee advocacy is all about lowering barriers to participation. 

Make it easy to start.
Make it clear how to win.
Make it just competitive enough.
And make it anyone’s game. 

People will show up.

And when they do, the whole company gets louder. 📣

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... 

Prizes didn’t start as participation trophies. Greek winners got wreaths, cups, even valuable goods. So we made sure ours were worth winning. S/o to Lauren "Prize-Queen"Layton.