Hot take: companies should turn their employees into influencers. It's a win-win: - Makes employees more marketable in their careers - Builds trusted distribution for your company, which drives sales, hiring, and partnerships How to do it well: - Incentivize employees to post via social currency & financial upside - Remove friction to create (while having a full-time job) via agentic workflows or dedicated production/editing hires How we're doing it at @tenex_labs: 1) I built a directory of skills, called the Content Machine, that helps employees go from blank page to published non-slop content in 15 minutes. Will be breaking it down with @clairevo tmrw. 2) We launched the Tenex Creator Cup today. Feel free to copy the format: What it is: A monthlong challenge to get us all posting. You don’t need an audience to win. You just need to show up. How to play: Post on social (LinkedIn or X). Every time you post, drop the link in #replyguys#. That’s it. That link is how you get scored, how teammates find your post to support it, and how you get entered for prizes. How points work: - Post of the day: 10 pts (one counts per day, so no spamming) - Genuinely engaging with a teammate’s post (real comment or repost, not "cool" or "great post"): 3 pts, up to 5/day - “Editor’s Pick”: best post we spotlight each week: +50 pts Reach and follower count don’t earn points. Showing up and supporting each other does. Weekly games: a new theme and a new winner every week Week 1 · Full House—the whole team’s going for one goal together. The game: if at least 70% of us post on social at least once this week, we unlock the week 1 prize—and everyone who posted gets entered into a draw to win it. Week 2 · Show Your Work—best build-in-public post. Team votes. Week 3 · Hot Take—best-performing opinion post by engagement rate, so audience size doesn’t decide it. Week 4 · Tell the Story—best narrative/long-form post. Team vote + founder pick. Each week has its own prize. The metric changes weekly on purpose, so it’s never the same person winning. Monthlong games: 1) Points Leader—most total points across the month. 2) The Breakout—biggest growth from where you started. Snap a screenshot of your follower + engagement numbers at kickoff, another at the end. Going from 200 to 900 engaged followers can beat someone who started at 8k. This is the one we most want to reward. 3) The Streak Raffle—post at least twice a week, every week, and earn a raffle ticket each week (up to 4 total raffle tickets). We draw winners live at the finale. Pure luck—you just have to keep showing up. Two rules: Posts have to be real and sound like you. On-brand, substantive, your actual voice. One-line filler and generic AI-written posts don’t count. FAQs: • Why does it make sense for you to help employees become more marketable and get poached? 3 reasons: - Helping your employees drive trusted distribution makes you a more marketable employer and drives far more candidates than employee attrition - By having an always-on employee content motion, you'll have a farm system of up-and-coming creators even as folks leave - Most employers won't invest in this capability, which will drive retention for employees who value the investment you're making in their audience-building • How do you deal with employees saying something they shouldn't say? - Be clear about what employees should and shouldn't say. I.e. at Tenex, the team knows never to mention clients or identifying information about clients unless they've provided explicit approval. - If you're a bigger company, you likely have a compliance department. Allocating a light compliance review, if necessary, to this program is net worth it. How do you keep employees focused on their FT job, while also doing this? - It's pretty simple. Tell them that their day-to-day responsibilities always come first and make sure their compensation reflects what you want them to prioritize. High agency people are capable of handling multiple priorities and executing at a high-level. You don't need to baby people. How do you measure the impact of the program? - Awareness: lift in website traffic and social impressions - Impact: lift in job applicants and inbound leads ideally with attribution to referrals, social, or tenex employee