Your employees are your best medium, but you have to activate them

Apostle founder Koen Jordaans in conversation with Clubgeist about why employee advocacy so often fails – and what makes the difference between a platform that gathers dust and a program that truly works.

Recently, Apostle founder Koen Jordaans sat down with Ton Rodenburg and Marco Dalmeijer, employer branding specialists at Clubgeist. The interview took place in May 2026 and focused on employer branding and technology. The common thread: employee advocacy sounds like a no-brainer, but in practice it is anything but easy. These are the key insights from the conversation.

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Why it goes wrong: it starts at the top

Asked when employee advocacy does not work, Koen is crystal clear: when it is not carried from the top. The pattern is always the same. An enthusiastic employer branding manager or HR professional sets up a great program, but the executive team does not join in. It becomes an internal game without momentum. And when that one enthusiastic person leaves, it collapses.

That is why Apostle sets a hard requirement for its clients: at least two active executives in the platform and two certified SRO professionals in the organization. Not to impose rules, but because the data shows that a client will churn as soon as those two green lights go out.

Part of the solution lies in the approach: deliberately starting small with an affordable experiment. Five executives, twelve weeks, see what it delivers. When executives post themselves and see candidates coming in through their content, the conversation changes on its own.

"When those executives post themselves and see candidates coming in through their content, the conversation shifts from 'do we have to do this?' to 'how do we scale this up?'"

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Numbers are a trap

Many organizations want to activate as many employees as possible. And that, according to Koen, is exactly the pitfall. He tells the story of a company with thirteen thousand employees that wanted to start a pilot with five thousand people right away – and how he advised against it. Activating the masses does not work; activating the right people does.

The strongest example from the interview: a company with fifteen ambassadors that achieved more reach than a large Dutch chip machine manufacturer with two and a half thousand. Not because they had more people, but because their content was relevant, authentic and personal. Quality over quantity – that is Social Reach Optimization in practice.

To safeguard that authenticity, Apostle distinguishes five roles: social executives, social creators, experts, networkers and people who want to tell the work-life balance story. Not everyone has to do the same thing. For creators there is a trigger system: via the app, WhatsApp or Microsoft Teams they receive a notification at the right moment. "You are at a client event tonight. Take a photo." Small nudges that generate a stream of authentic content that a communications department could never produce on its own.

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The business case: stop advertising, give the money to your people

HR rarely has real budget, and employee advocacy quickly feels like an extra investment. Koen turns it around: a page in a newspaper easily costs forty thousand euros – one-off. The platform costs a fraction of that per year, and the value is continuous. Apostle measures this through earned media value: what would you have paid if this had been advertising? Some clients see average values of more than thirty thousand euros per quarter, in programs that have only been running for four months.

And then the argument every CFO understands:

"Give your advertising budget to your own people. Instead of giving it to LinkedIn or a job board, invest it in the people who are your best ambassadors."

For recruitment, this is now hard, measurable data. Every employee has a unique UTM code, which makes it possible to trace that a candidate from six months ago came in through one specific post by one specific colleague. That turns 'soft marketing' into hard recruitment data – and makes it possible to concretely reward people for their contribution.

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Leadership has fundamentally changed

Five years ago, you still had to explain why executives should be visible themselves. Today it is beyond question. The CEOs who understand it build their company not only on results, but on culture – and they communicate that culture through their own voice. Not via a press release, but via LinkedIn, events and personal stories.

At the same time, Koen is realistic: writing yourself is a hurdle for many executives. The most successful approach he sees is a communications professional who sits next to the CEO, listens, and turns the brainwave from a meeting into a post. With AI, this is becoming easier and easier: you speak your thoughts out loud, the AI helps structure them, and you give them your own voice. That is the future of executive advocacy.

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Where is the real difference between platforms?

Asked what makes Apostle different from Ambassify, Everyonesocial or Oktopost, Koen points to a recent competitive analysis by the University of Amsterdam: Apostle ranks at the top on activation. Many platforms are reactive – you prepare content in a portal and employees have to log in themselves. That does not work, because behavior does not change when you leave it up to people.

Apostle is proactive: content is pushed via WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams and the app, with step-by-step guidance. An internal churn score warns when things threaten to go wrong at a client. And soon the SRO score will be launched: a number from zero to one hundred that shows how mature an organization is in its advocacy approach.

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The five conditions for a successful advocacy program

Clubgeist distilled five critical success factors from the conversation:

• Executives must visibly participate. Not as an obligation, but as culture carriers. Without buy-in at the top, the program stops as soon as the driving force leaves.
• Start small and prove value. An experiment with five to fifteen people creates more support than a large-scale rollout nobody understands.
• Identify the right people, not the most. Motivated employees with authentic content reach more than a mass that mindlessly reshares.
• Build in continuity through multiple SRO professionals and clear ownership. If one person carries it, it is vulnerable.
• Measure and make the business case concrete. Earned media value, cost comparison with advertising and demonstrable recruitment results are the language executives understand.

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Finally: this is a culture project

The most important message for HR directors considering employee advocacy? Stop thinking of it as a communications project. It is a culture project. If you want employees to talk authentically about their work, there first has to be something to talk about: a strong story, a great culture, leaders who show what they stand for.

The platform helps you strengthen and scale that. But it cannot build anything that is not already there.

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The full interview with Koen Jordaans, Ton Rodenburg and Marco Dalmeijer was published in May 2026. Want to know more about Social Reach Optimization? Visit www.apostlesocial.com or read The Employee Advocacy Playbook.