At the end of last week's issue, I dropped a ~hot take~ that we're going to see brands build internal Reddit advocacy programs the same way they did on LinkedIn, and that the window to build an early, credible presence before everyone else figures this out is narrowing fast.

I dropped a version of this take on LinkedIn earlier this week and it resonated more than almost anything I've posted about Reddit so far this quarter. So if you're in the replies: hi, here's the full version. 👋

The TL;DR version: Reddit is growing up as a marketing channel, and the tactics that kind of worked in the early days—anonymous accounts, vague "helpful" comments from obvious brand handles, half-assed astroturfing—are not going to cut it going forward. Reddit is aggressively cracking down on spam and grey-hat tactics.

And Redditors are, frankly, more sophisticated than the average social audience about sniffing out anything that feels manufactured. (They will find the sock puppet account. They will post about it. Do not test them.)

But here's the thing 💡 That's actually good news for brands who are willing to do this right.

Because the answer to "how do we scale a genuine Reddit presence without faking it?" is sitting right inside your organization (and in your customer base). The answer is people. Real ones, with real opinions and real expertise, who are already enthusiastic about what you do.

That's what a Reddit advocacy program is. And it's going to be a bigger deal than most marketing teams realize yet.

Let's get into it 👇

Before we go further, let me define what I mean, because "advocacy program" can mean a lot of things depending on who's using the term.

A Reddit advocacy program is a structured, brand-supported effort to mobilize real people (employees, customers, or creators) to participate on Reddit authentically, on behalf of or alongside your brand.

Key word: authentically. This is not a script. It's not "please post this comment in r/marketing by Friday." It's the opposite of astroturfing.

What it is: giving your people the context, the guidelines, the permission, and the incentive to show up on Reddit as themselves, with their real expertise, in the places where your audience is having conversations.

Think of how LinkedIn advocacy programs work at their best. The brand doesn't write your posts. They train you on what's worth talking about, point you toward the conversations happening in your industry, maybe give you some talking points and then you show up as yourself, with your own voice and your own opinions.

Same idea. Different (more chaotic, more powerful) platform.

Not all advocacy programs are built the same, and which one makes sense for your brand depends on what you've got to work with. Let me walk through the three main models.

This is the most natural starting point for most brands, especially B2B. Your employees (specifically the ones who actually work in your customers' problem space) are often the most credible voices you could put on Reddit. They have domain expertise. They have opinions. They have receipts.

The brands that do this well identify a handful of employees who are already knowledgeable and somewhat comfortable online, give them training on Reddit culture and community norms, and encourage them to participate in relevant subreddits as themselves.

The brand disclosure piece matters here (more on that in the risks section), but done right, employee advocacy creates a presence that feels real because it is real. And in a world where Redditors can spot a corporate voice from three comments away, that authenticity is worth more than any polished brand account.

The tradeoff: employees have day jobs. Participation has to be lightweight enough to not feel like a burden, structured enough to actually happen consistently, and protected enough that employees don't feel like they're personally taking on brand risk with every comment.

I'll be honest: I've seen this go wrong when companies treat it like a mandatory social media policy with extra steps. Nobody wants to be voluntold into being a brand ambassador. The programs that work are the ones where participation is genuinely optional, genuinely low-lift, and genuinely appreciated—not the ones that quietly end up in someone's performance review criteria. 😬

Your happiest, most engaged customers are likely already on Reddit. Some of them are probably already recommending you unprompted. The question is whether you have a program in place to identify those people, nurture that relationship, and give them more reasons to keep showing up.

Customer advocacy on Reddit looks a lot like a traditional community champion or VIP program, with a Reddit-specific layer. You identify your power users—the ones who respond to every email, who send in testimonials, who've been customers for years—and you build a real, genuine relationship with them.

In exchange for early access, exclusive input on product decisions, a direct line to your team (whatever incentive makes sense for your brand) they become advocates who can speak to your product from lived experience. No script needed. They already know what to say because they've actually used the thing.

This model takes longer to build than employee advocacy, but it's also harder to fake and harder to replicate. A customer who genuinely loves your product is more persuasive on Reddit than anyone on your payroll. Full stop.

And here's the part I find most exciting about this model: those people often want to be more involved. They're already emailing your support team to say thank you. They're already leaving five-star reviews unprompted. They just haven't been invited in. That's a missed opportunity that's embarrassingly easy to fix.

This one's the most nascent, but the opportunity is hiding in plain sight: the creators you're already working with on LinkedIn, YouTube, or podcasts probably have Reddit accounts. And some of them are more active there than you'd think.

The brands that figure this out first will stop thinking of their creator relationships as platform-specific. If you've got a creator who makes great content about your industry on LinkedIn, there's a real question worth asking: are they also on Reddit? Do they already participate in the subreddits where your audience lives? And if so, is there a way to extend that partnership there?

Done well, this looks less like a sponsored post and more like a creator who genuinely uses and believes in your product showing up in a thread where someone is asking for recommendations. The creator has already earned trust with that community. You're not buying reach, you're showing up somewhere credible, through someone credible.

The disclosure rules still apply here, full stop. Reddit is not the place to run an undisclosed paid partnership and hope nobody notices. But a creator who's transparent about the relationship and who has real opinions about your product (including honest ones) can pull this off in a way that a brand account never could.

The risk is still the highest of the three models. But if you're already investing in creator relationships elsewhere, this is the most efficient path to making that investment work harder.

I'd be doing you a disservice if I made this all sound easy. There are real risks here, and brands that go in without a plan tend to create exactly the kind of Reddit disasters they were trying to avoid.

1. Disclosure is non-negotiable. Any employee, customer, or creator representing your brand on Reddit needs to disclose their affiliation. Not buried. Not vague. Clear. "I work at [Brand X]" or "Full disclosure, I'm a customer ambassador for [Brand X]." Reddit's community norms around this are stricter than most platforms, and the blowback for getting it wrong can be swift and loud.

2. You can't control what they say. This is the thing that makes marketing teams nervous, and understandably so. The whole point of a genuine advocacy program is that these people are speaking for themselves. That means they might say things you wouldn't have approved. They might give a mixed review. They might be honest about a limitation, but that's part of what makes it credible. The brands that try to control the message too tightly end up with advocacy that reads exactly like the astroturfing they were trying to avoid.

A customer saying "I love this product but the onboarding is rough" is not a crisis. It's credibility. Treat it that way.

3. Reddit's rules vary by subreddit. Your program participants need to understand that each community has its own culture and its own mod team. Something that's totally acceptable in one subreddit might get them banned in another. Training on Reddit norms in general is table stakes. Subreddit-specific guidance is often necessary too.

4. One bad actor can tank the whole thing. If one employee from your company goes off-script in a way that violates subreddit rules or Reddit norms, it doesn't just affect that person. It can reflect on your brand and make it harder for everyone else on your team to participate in that community going forward. Vetting and training matter.

Here's the honest framing: building a Reddit advocacy program from scratch (aka one that's well-designed, ethically grounded, and actually works) is not a DIY-in-an-afternoon situation. It requires strategic groundwork before you mobilize anyone.

But you don't have to boil the ocean on day one. A pilot makes sense, and here's roughly what that looks like:

1. Start with one program type. Don't try to build employee, customer, and creator advocacy simultaneously. Pick the one that maps best to what you have right now. For most B2B brands, employee advocacy is the right starting point because you have the most control and the most context. For consumer brands with an active, vocal community, customer advocacy might be the better first move.

2. Identify 3-5 people, not 50. You want willing participants who are already engaged, not a company-wide mandate. Quality of participation matters infinitely more than volume. Five people who show up consistently and helpfully will do more for your brand than fifty who post twice and disappear.

3. Do the subreddit mapping first. Before anyone posts anything, do the work of identifying where your audience actually is, what the rules of each community are, and what participation looks like from the brands and individuals who are already doing it well. This is research, not theory. You need to know where your advocates should be and where they definitely should not go.

4. Build lightweight guardrails, not a script. Your people need to understand what disclosure looks like, what topics are in and out of bounds, and where they can escalate if something goes sideways. That's it. Don't over-engineer it into something so bureaucratic that nobody wants to participate.

5. Measure before you scale. Run the pilot for 60-90 days. Track engagement on your advocates' comments, watch for shifts in brand sentiment in your target subreddits, and check your AI search citations. If it's working, you'll see the signals. Then you scale. If it's not, you iterate before you've committed to a program-wide rollout.

The brands that get this right aren't the ones who moved fastest. They're the ones who built a foundation that could actually hold weight before they added more floors. (I know that metaphor is slightly tortured. You get what I mean! 🏗️)

Building this well takes strategic groundwork, the right people, and a real understanding of Reddit's culture. If you want help designing a program that's actually built to work and won't blow up in your face, well, that's exactly what I do. Schedule a discovery call and let's chat.

See you next week 🫶

KD