Corporate reputation is no longer something you can broadcast

How we’re helping the National Police Association win on LinkedIn by designing for what people say.

In 2026, corporate reputation is built on LinkedIn.

Not in the way most organisations still think about it, legacy methods were through carefully planned brand posts, polished campaigns, or executive announcements. Now they’re built through something far less controllable, but also more powerful: what other people choose to say.

And it’s the reason we’ve been working with the NPA to rethink not just their LinkedIn content, but their entire approach to messaging.

The problem to solve, brand pages are no longer the centre of gravity. One of the clearest insights from recent research is that brand content is no longer influencing reputation in the same way as it has done in the past.

As outlined in The People Generation research, LinkedIn has become a platform where:

• People are 2.25x more likely to post about a brand than engage with its content

• Top-performing organisations are talked about 6.1x more than average

• And critically, 59% of posts prioritise the individual’s reputation first, with the brand as a secondary benefit

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That last point is the most important. People don’t post to promote organisations; they generally post to promote themselves. If a brand benefits, it’s a by-product.

What this means in practice (and why the NPA needed to laugh with a different approach)

The NPA operates in a space where credibility, trust, and influence matter on a grand scale, they speak to officers they aim to represent, to the public, to government officials, to families, victims of crime... As such, we needed to move them away from traditional levers:

• organisation-led announcements

• Centralised messaging

• Campaign bursts tied to key moments

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The issue isn’t that these don’t work per-say. It’s that they don’t scale in the way LinkedIn now rewards and when launching a new organisation this is really key.

Instead of asking:“What should the NPA post?”

We reframed the question as: “What would make someone choose to talk about the NPA in a way that benefits them?”

The strategic approach was to design for advocacy, value and engagement, not directly for output.

This draws directly on three key areas of research:

1. Person first. Brand second.

Posts that perform don’t feel like endorsements, they should feel like personal narratives.

So we’ve worked with the NPA to:

• Reframe messaging around individual benefits and perspectives

• Equip spokespeople and stakeholders with angles that enhance their expertise, not scripts or tag lines or basic detail everyone with AI can access

• Prioritise the value of the content, not what the organisation wants to say

The result is content that doesn’t feel impersonally distributed.

2. Physical = digital

Over two-thirds of LinkedIn posts are triggered by real-world moments. That insight has reshaped how we approach NPA events and touchpoints.

Instead of treating events as standalone experiences, we’re using them to define the right:

• Content

• Social triggers

• documentation

Practically, that means:

• Covering moments where multiple stakeholders can appear together

• Designing environments that can work visually to support an outcome

• Enabling real-time sharing where possible  

• Focusing on the ask and the outcome, the “doing”, what’s happened, why, and what next

  
  

3. People hold the potential

The research shows that over 60% of brand advocacy comes from employees. Yet most organisations (including the NPA initially) don’t have structured ways to activate this.

So we’ve focused on:

• Building a lightweight advocacy framework to support posting and ideas  

• Supporting and offering guidance aligned to diaries and events

• Reducing friction in the process, making it easier to post than not to

This isn’t about forcing participation at all, it is about making participation feel natural, timely, and valuable.

An important nuance, of the more counterintuitive findings is that people often see brand content without engaging with it but still go on to post about the brand.

In other words:

• Brand content creates awareness

• But advocacy is triggered elsewhere

This has informed how we structure the NPA’s ecosystem:

• Brand content plays a supporting, narrative-setting role

• Third-party voices drive reach, credibility, and interpretation

  
  

For membership organisations like the NPA, this model is particularly powerful, because their credibility doesn’t just sit with the business, it’s distributed across:

• Members

• Stakeholders

• Industry voices

• Policy influencers

  
  

What we’re building with the NPA is not just a new messaging framework, it’s a refined behavioural approach - a way of generating ongoing momentum to future proof the organisation through enabling:

• More people posting

• More perspectives emerging

• More consistent presence across the network

  
  

Ultimately, reputation on LinkedIn isn’t what you say at all, it is what gets said about you because it reinforces the underlying perception.

The research points to a clear direction, third-party content will increasingly shape not just perception, but discoverability too.  Particularly as AI-driven search begins to learn from these signals.

For organisations like the NPA, this has to be a part of the strategy, we’ve moved from trying to control the message, to designing for how it travels and reaches our audience.

Work with us at JAM.

info@jamgroupmedia.com