Your Most Underused Marketing Channel is Sitting in your Org Chart

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Our Field Notes series shares in-the-trenches, first-person perspectives from the frontlines of marketing, creativity, and leadership. These reflections are shaped by lived experience and challenge the status quo — offering fresh ways of thinking about the work.

Everyone is fighting for attention right now. Brands are spending more than ever to buy a few seconds of it with bigger ad budgets, louder campaigns, another rebrand, another push to say the same thing in a slightly newer way.

Meanwhile, the people who already have attention are sitting quietly inside the building. Your employees. Your executives. The engineer who could explain your product better than any landing page ever will.

We keep calling this the attention economy, but I think that name sends companies chasing the wrong thing. Attention is easy to buy and impossible to keep.

What actually compounds is visibility, being consistently seen and trusted by the people who matter. I call it the visibility economy, and it runs on something you can't purchase: credible humans who show up in public. Most companies are still trying to rent attention when they're surrounded by people who could earn it.

I learned this the hard way. When I was laid off from my role as Director of Marketing at Forbes, I found out fast how much of my "brand" had actually been the logo behind my name. The title opened doors. My own voice? I'd barely used it. So I started posting on LinkedIn from a network of ~2k followers, sharing what I actually knew instead of what a company wanted said. That grew into an audience many times that size, but the follower count was never the lesson. The lesson was simpler and a little uncomfortable: people don't trust brands. They trust people and they always have.

That's the part the attention framing gets wrong. Attention isn't the scarce resource anymore, trust is. Attention is cheap and endless; anyone can buy an impression. Trust is what makes attention worth anything, and trust doesn't transfer from a logo. It transfers from a human being who sounds like they know what they're talking about, because they do. That's the whole engine of the visibility economy: not who shouts loudest, but who gets believed.

This can look like a branded company account posts a product update, and it lands with a thud. A single employee posts the same idea, in their own words, from their own experience, with a real opinion attached, and it travels. Same information, yet a wildly different result. The difference is that one has a face and a point of view, and the other has a content calendar. Buyers notice and are far more likely to trust a company whose leaders and teams are visible and active than one that only speaks in the corporate "we."

So why do so few companies actually do this? Usually because the instinct, the second they see it work, is to control it. Hand everyone a script. Route posts through three approvals. Turn your people into brand megaphones. And that kills the exact thing that made it work, the humanness. Nobody follows a person to read a press release with a headshot on it.

The companies getting this right do something less tidy and much more effective. They treat their people as trusted voices, not distribution channels.

That starts with permission. Most employees assume that being visible online is somehow off-limits, or that it'll read as self-promotion the company won't like. Removing that fear by explicitly telling people you want them to share their expertise unlocks more than any campaign will.

Then it's about point of view, not volume. You don't need everyone posting daily, what you actually need is a handful of people willing to say something true and specific about the work they actually do. One engineer who writes clearly about a hard problem is worth more than a quarter of boosted posts.

And it has to start at the top. When executives stay hidden, everyone below them reads that as the rule. When a leader shows up publicly, sharing what they're learning, not just what they're selling, it gives the whole organization air cover to do the same.

None of this means abandoning your brand, but rather recognizing that your brand is now the sum of the humans who carry it, and that those humans are already on the platforms your buyers live on. You're paying for that reach either way. The only question is whether you're using it.

The attention economy has trained us to think the answer is always more with more spend, more reach, more noise. But visibility doesn't work that way, and the most underappreciated asset most companies own doesn't cost more. It's already on payroll. It has opinions, expertise, and credibility that no ad account can manufacture.

Stop trying to out-shout the feed. Look at your org chart. Your most valuable marketing channel has been in there the whole time, you just have to let it speak.