Today's piece is something a little…different.

I know you've been here for email stuff (and this fits into that world big time, I promise), but I want you to put on your "brand building" hat for what's to come.

In thinking about introducing today's topic, a thought popped to mind: I honestly can't remember who actually wrote most of the company articles and insights companies have published.

And I think I'm in good company.

Years ago, I was selling email software to email senders. The decks did their job, true, but what actually built trust was a tiny newsletter I started on the side, showing people how good email can be when it's done properly.

It was meant to be a sales tool. And, somewhere along the way, people started calling me the face of the company. Nobody planned that (and it's kinda intimidating for this introvert), but it happened because a real person was writing, and the people reading could tell.

I've thought about that a lot since, and it's why I believe this piece landed at a time filled with similar opportunities for many.

But this isn't about me, so I'd like to introduce my friend, Renga Padmanabhan.

If you've spent any time in the newsletter world, you may already know his work. He's also spent two decades building and marketing highly technical products across Deloitte Digital and Nike. Today he advises technical B2B companies on going to market with Anushka Ventures.

He also buys internet businesses from time to time. Since 2024, he's acquired and rebuilt LetterStack into a media brand where new newsletter creators level up their newsletter knowledge fast by learning from the best newsletter operators around the globe (if you're building a newsletter or starting one, consider this your nudge).

Renga and I had been circling a collaboration for a while, and when we finally sat down in August, he laid out a thought I couldn't quite shake: staying in the inbox, getting your people to write, and getting cited by AI all lead back to the same place...but so few have joined the dots on that well.

What follows is where that thinking took him, and yes, it's written with the enterprise leader in mind, though anyone who's worked in corporate and has been told to "run it past comms/legal first" will probably recognise themselves in this scenario.

Intrigued yet? Over to you, Renga. 👇

2021 was a rough year.

I joined Nike right at the peak of COVID, right after my wife and I mutually decided that our first startup was headed down the gutter. I was hired not just because I had grown the product and design arm at Deloitte Digital, but also because I had been candid about documenting what I understood about building product orgs in the last decade.

I had grown a considerable LinkedIn following of product practitioners who were keen to learn. At the same time, I was also building and collaborating with multiple learning platforms on how to hire for product orgs, so I was writing quite a bit in public.

All these side quests led to brownie points during my interview process. I would later learn that the same points that earned me a cookie would detract me from building my personal brand online.

My product org went from 0-50 new hires within a matter of 4-5 months, riding on my LinkedIn presence. I was using my LinkedIn following for hiring, but at the same time, I was asked to hold back on writing freely about building the team. This team was one of the finest concentrations of data and product practitioners. But as soon as they joined the org, their hands were tied too, and they were not allowed to speak as much at events or social forums.

Two conversations used to be a constant in hiring meetings:

Somewhere along the line, it seemed like all the experienced professionals whom we hired with years of experience in the field felt that they had to be PR-trained so that they don't make a mess of themselves and the company's brand identity in public.

I always felt there was a better way to go about this, and I couldn't quite justify the cost of inaction in this endeavour: keeping my most coveted talent from writing in public.

That is until AEO came along.

AEO (or Answer Engine Optimization) has picked up traction in the last few years, primarily prioritizing expert authoritative content to get brands cited in AI Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Brands had been building their content marketing muscle over the last two decades, but the push had always been on editorial content. With LLMs increasingly scoring experience and expertise for citation-worthy snippets, expert-led content has been on the rise.

So where's the hiccup, you might ask? To answer that question, let's look at how orgs mobilize their talent pool.

I had spent the last 5 years advising and running go-to-market for devtool and data orgs. Their buyers are immensely technical. They love immaculate documentation. They also love a well-written founder story, which, in turn, inspires them to collaborate and join these companies. As a result, the more your founder and org show their work in public, it ends up attracting more people that they are looking to hire for.

When you come to enterprise, somehow, between legal, compliance, and HR trying to put processes in place so that people follow due procedure, you end up spiralling the cost of building brand-worthy content by 3x.

Let me explain:

1. You pay for acquiring talent.

You are hiring directors and engineers way above market rate. As soon as they hire, you bind their hands behind their back by saying they are not permitted to talk about the work in public, even if they follow due procedure to hide sensitive details.

2. You allocate a different content budget to your marketing org.

Marketing in a technical product org is going to be two degrees removed from the context of how and why the product is built. The marketing team has never sat on a support escalation at 2 am on a Saturday, and they have never watched a customer get wrecked by a product update. The content gets assembled with whatever the product team and the founder team provide, so it's usually secondhand, watered-down information.

3. You hire an external agency to be the comms vehicle for your execs.

You hire execs who are absolutely magnetic in terms of network pull. You use that network to have them represent your org in hiring events. But when it comes to enabling them to communicate their vision to the world outside the enterprise org, you have an agency write the vision on their behalf and then have HR and legal review.

These 3 payments spiral the cost of going to market for your own org-related content. In my opinion, the last two are preventable.

The Content Marketing Institute found in 2025 that 40% of B2B marketing teams describe one of their top challenges as 'getting across organizational silos', while 33% mention 'accessing subject matter experts' as another top challenge they run into every year.

I understand why both challenges see less than 50% of the employees with specialized knowledge contributing to creating content. I believe this does not capture the true context of what your team does inside the org.

Now, the people who are not contributing are not shy. Most of them have never been asked. A good number were told not to contribute by policy.

In the orgs I have worked with, principal and distinguished engineer roles have their 'stretch goals' in their job description to have external visibility and influence, but it comes with a fair amount of media training.

Let's understand one thing:

The refusal is not for publishing. The refusal is to publish it in the channel that marketing thinks is right.

Every employee advocacy program I observe collapses the same way because founder-led orgs send the same mandate to engineering, marketing, and sales, but only the marketers understand the mandate and deliver on it.

If you go to engineering and revenue, they would want to talk about their work, but just in different watering holes. Let's talk about them for a minute.

A developer will not write a hook for your socials, but the same developer could spend an afternoon getting the technical documentation correct on their GitHub repo so that it's easy to apply, not just for other developers, but also for AI agents. They will write it and flatten it in markdown because bad documentation, especially in developer circles, is considered an offense, because their name would be on the pull request anyway. They will also document an architectural decision on their wiki, explaining their thesis with a particular product decision.

The same applies to sales, finance, and founder‑led roles. C‑suite execs might admit they aren't cut out for writing LinkedIn content, yet they would spend hours speaking with prospects and procurement teams, helping them see why their product outperforms competitors.

Those conversations would tell you everything on how well they understand the customer they are selling to, but that version never gets out in public.

When Semrush analyzed 89,000 LinkedIn URLs cited in AI search, roughly 95% of the cited posts and articles were original rather than reshared. A separate Meltwater and LinkedIn study found that 75% of LinkedIn's AI citations pointed at individual member profiles, with company pages accounting for the remaining quarter.

In 2026, the limited content organizations can promote, whether on LinkedIn, Reddit, or other social forums, is being absorbed by AI. If your dev team puts out how-to technical content or changelogs on your site, they would appear in AI‑generated answers for bottom-of-funnel queries for your product.

The foundation for recording tribal knowledge within the org already exists. Every enterprise I have worked with pays to record these conversations with software, but does not mobilize the outcome. There are sales transcripts, customer support conversations, and architectural review decisions.

So the first and foremost job would be to recover that tribal knowledge. You would then get the right editorial voice inside the org to capture and pull the moments which would make your buyers stop scrolling. You can hire a storyteller or an editor to align all these pieces together in one coherent buyer-facing content strategy.

What happens next is the part that makes most marketing orgs shoot themselves in the foot: they distribute the content under the company's LinkedIn company page.

And that's the way the expert-led cookie crumbles.

To that end, I would like to cite the wisdom behind three popular voices on LinkedIn, who bring a great deal of perspective to my thinking.

Kaleigh tracks AI search activity more closely than anyone I know. She put across her read on the Meltwater-LinkedIn whitepaper on her YouTube video in Aug 2026, where she points out that three-quarters of LinkedIn's AI citations pointed at individuals, and more than half of these individuals being cited had fewer than 10,000 followers.

She also advocates for a hybrid internal SME-external creator model if your enterprise falls short of expertise within the org.

I would highly recommend reading her Source Signal Stack Framework for AEO LinkedIn article on how to activate your employee content program for gaining AEO citations.

Now I know what you must be thinking: I told you that the 3rd-price pillar above for bringing in an external agency could be easily preventable, so let me explain.

Your employees and executives need to have a clear understanding of what great editorial-worthy content needs to look like.

Abby Murray brands her client strategists at storyarb more as therapists, who counsel and provide a clear lens to their executive clientele on what is publish-worthy. She is an advocate for dogfooding her own advice, documenting the process by enrolling herself into storyarb's executive program.

I wish I had Abby and storyarb in my corner in 2020-2021. Having a sparring content partner like Abby's team would have given wings to not just my personal brand, but my entire org, and hiring would have been a cakewalk.

This is also where I want to be fair to the third price pillar. Paying for editorial help is reasonable. Paying for knowing what excellent media presence looks like is priceless.

So consider this as a training ground for your executives and employees to understand what great content looks like, not just for LinkedIn and newsletters, but also for great podcast appearances and speaking events. Once your executive leadership understands the difference, make it part of their OKRs to build as many outward-facing employee brands as possible.

Taylor covers the creator economy, B2B creators, and employee-generated content for companies like HubSpot, beehiiv, and more. Her recent reporting for Later examines how companies including Starbucks, Dell, and Gap are building structured programs to support employee creators through training, creative briefs, compensation, and measurement.

She sees this as a natural extension of what brands have learned from founder-led content and influencer programs: people build audiences around expertise, personality, and a perspective worth following. Employees bring those same qualities, along with firsthand knowledge of the product and customers. In her own words:

The shift goes beyond asking employees to share company announcements. As Taylor's reporting shows, a strong program gives employees a defined way to participate, support for the work involved, and space to build personal brands in their own right.

I believe putting together a content program with brand guidelines is a great middle ground between letting employees run their own content and totally blockading them from social media. More orgs should take copious notes from the playbooks Taylor has been sharing here, so I would stay tuned.

Note that B2B enterprises are not the only ones to benefit from the wisdom from Kaleigh, Abby, and Taylor above.

As part of the LetterStack podcast, I have talked to newsrooms and healthcare orgs, and the common factor is this:

The more employee brands that you are able to build, the more network effects kick into play.

As a marketing advisor, I talk to CEOs and marketing leaders every week, and the advice I put on repeat is:

The more you and your team share in visceral detail the experience of building a product or growing a business, the more people will relate to your scenario and buy your product.

Putting the advice from Kaleigh, Abby, and Taylor in perspective requires three things to happen inside your org:

None of this requires a new line item in your org budget. You pay their salaries, you are transcribing their conversations, and the agency retainer is a training exercise for your team.

As boring as it might sound, this discipline of documenting my expertise and putting it out for the world to see has helped me build my dream company and life at LetterStack. Having built 0-1000 practitioner orgs globally, I can imagine any leader empowering their teams would achieve a sustainable way of building a company and personal brand, and then choosing to leverage paid media and PR outreach to amplify the brand further.

I have been advising and executing these end-to-end founder- and employee-led marketing motions for technical B2B startups for the past 6 years. Having been on both sides of the fence, I would wager that the earned media value of these employee-led social content programs pays for themselves within the first year, and like a great gift, just keeps on giving for years to come.

Curious to know more about what this new model looks like for your enterprise? I keep 2 hours of my Fridays open to CEOs and marketing teams to use my time as a free sounding board. Take me up on that offer. I am on LinkedIn here.

Good luck with your employee content program!

Renga 👋