Work and Let Work: Three Models for Managing Political Conflict

But talent publicity and platform branding have an important difference. While the former is done to demonstrate the value a firm has to offer, the latter is all about leveraging employees to grow the company’s reach.

In the age of mass media, companies only needed to compete with one another to win attention. Ad space on TV, radio, and print was only affordable for deep-pocketed corporations. Individuals, meanwhile, rarely had the means to outbid companies to get noticed.

In a certain sense, any company with employees engaged in audience building could shift a traditional brand into a platform. For example, Alexis Gay was hired in a Partnerships role at Patreon in 2018, with Twitter followers numbering in the hundreds. According to Linkedin, she recently left the company with ~82,000 followers after her TikTok taked... See more

Instead of leveraging outsiders to build their brands, a crop of forward-thinking companies have started partnering with a new set of stakeholders: their own employees.

As Fast's star has risen so has Kobach’s, along with every other employee who is publicly affiliated with the company. Fast’s increased prestige will make it easier for the company to get other audience-builders to join them with a pitch that sounds something like: “Come help us build our audience, and we’ll make sure to build yours as well.”

In the words of Morning Brew co-founder Alex Lieberman: Every employee at Morning brew should be a “digital personality” (if they choose).

Rather than building skill-based career moats, workers of the future may be using their audiences to secure permanent employment.

If this turns out to be the dominant strategy, many younger workers will start looking for opportunities that enable them to grow their following.