Learn how to activate and engage informal influencers from expert Jason Anthoine who shared this as a LinkedIn update:
We partner with our great friends at Innovisor to help our clients uncover and work with their internal influencers. You know, these are the people everyone goes to for “the meeting after the meeting” for clarity, insights and direction, the trusted folks who influence outside of any kind of formal leadership role/title.
Once they are uncovered, we counsel our clients to proceed with a bit of caution. The moment your internal influencers get tagged as “the influencer” in front of peers, you’ve converted organic trust into a double naught spy/management mouthpiece perception, which is often the fastest way to kill the very credibility that makes them useful.
Our advice:
Give them information, not a platform
- Early or embargoed access to key messages before broader release, framed as “wanted you to know before it’s public” rather than “you’re on the briefing list.”
- Route this through their existing manager or an existing 1:1/skip-level, not a new standalone “influencer briefing” meeting that would visibly group them.
Use them as a listening post, not a megaphone
- Ask for their read on how messages will land before finalizing them: quietly, individually, and treat it as informal feedback rather than a formal review panel.
- Aggregate what you hear back into your comms planning without ever surfacing who said what, even internally in materials that could leak.
Embed comms in what they already do — don’t create new visible structures
- Give them shareable content, FYI-style, that they can pass along through channels they already use (team chats, shift huddles, lunch/parking lot conversations) not “official talking points” that read as scripted.
- Avoid a named cohort, council, badge, title, or any org-chart-visible designation. The instant there’s a list, a Slack channel with a name, or swag, it becomes a status marker that their peers notice.
Vary and rotate touchpoints
- Don’t always tap the same 10 people in the same way; vary who gets early context on what, so no single visible pattern of “these people always know first” forms.
Don’t talk about Fight Club: keep the mechanics internal to Comms/HR
- Any network mapping, pulse tracking, or “who influences whom” data should never surface in employee-facing materials. Your internal influencers initiative is an internal targeting tool for your team, not a program to publicize.
Reward the behavior broadly, not the person specifically
- If you want to recognize communication behavior, do it through a broad, everyone-eligible mechanism (e.g., a “great question asked in a team meeting” shoutout norm) rather than singling out identified influencers, so the recognition doesn’t retroactively expose who is on the list or that there even is a list. This is about trust and respect, not subterfuge.
Anything that makes their access to information visible or attributable is what erodes the very thing that makes them valuable.
The goal is to make them better equipped, not better known.
Jason speaks at the ICology Flyover Festival in Sioux Falls, SD, 2026
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