Show Don’t Tell
Gordon Glenister is the author of Influencer Marketing Strategy, now being translated into Arabic and Chinese, host of the Influence Global Podcast at 200 episodes, founder of Employfluence, and CEO of Membership World. His core thesis is that the most powerful marketing asset most companies have is sitting in their workforce, unused.
“We never remember facts. Build it by showing, not telling.”
Gordon Glenister is Founder of Employfluence, the employee advocacy agency, and CEO and Co-Founder of Membership World, the professional community for trade associations and membership organisations. He is also Global Head of Influencer Marketing at the BCMA and runs Gordon Glenister Ltd as an influencer marketing and membership strategy consultancy.
Gordon spent eleven and a half years as Director General of the British Promotional Merchandise Association before pivoting in 2018 to influencer marketing, founding the BCMA’s influencer division and launching a podcast, book, and consultancy around the discipline. He describes the pivot as a discovery: membership and influence are structurally the same problem. Both are about creating belonging, sustaining engagement, and enabling people to advocate for something they believe in.
Employfluence, launched in March 2025, applies that logic to the corporate context. Employee-generated content outperforms brand content by a factor of eight on engagement. Gordon’s approach begins with guardrails rather than scripts, with tools that allow employees to see what is working, and with a programme design that makes advocacy aspirational. IBM’s blue jacket programme for its 200-strong IBMers advocacy community is his most cited example.
“A personal brand is not what you tell people you are. It’s what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
“If 20% of your workforce is sharing content, that speaks volumes about culture long before a client meeting.”
Gordon’s case for employee advocacy is commercial as well as cultural. The engagement multiplier is real: eight times higher than brand posts. Panasonic focused five salespeople on 25 target clients and generated 23 meetings. IBM built an aspirational programme around 200-plus advocates with their own merchandise and a contract specifying what advocacy looked like. Both cases illustrate that scale is not required. Depth and clarity are.
“A comment is the equivalent of a handshake. So why do we not go back and thank them?”
Gordon’s personal branding framework is built on three principles: pick a niche and do not deviate from it, post at minimum three to four times a week, and respond to every comment. The last of these is the most frequently neglected. The people who engage with your content are demonstrating intent to build a relationship. If they are ignored, that relationship stalls.
“We always remember a story. The most successful influencers are great storytellers.”
Gordon’s content philosophy is anchored in what cognitive science tells us about memory and persuasion. Facts decay. Stories persist. The content that builds an audience is not the content that cites the most data or uses the most sophisticated production. It is the content that gives the audience something they recognise in themselves, teaches them something they can use, or makes them feel something worth sharing.
Stay close to the conversation.
New leaders and insights. No noise.