How Harness Turned Employee Advocacy Into a Core Distribution Channel for Campaigns

CASE STUDY

How Harness Turned Employee Advocacy Into a Core Distribution Channel for Major Campaigns

Harness built a scalable employee advocacy program with DSMN8, making it easier for teams to promote major campaigns, stay active on LinkedIn, and increase employee participation without adding manual work.

Client

Harness

Headquarters

California, USA

Industry

Software Development

Company Size

1,200+ employees

Summary 👇

The challenge

Harness wanted employees to support major campaigns and launches on LinkedIn, but the existing workflow didn’t scale. Social copy and assets lived inside documents, sharing was inconsistent, and busy commercial and technical teams didn’t always have the time (or the right content) to post regularly.

What Harness did with DSMN8

Harness launched an employee advocacy program with DSMN8 and treated it as a distribution channel alongside paid, email, and organic social.

They made sales sharing frictionless (including auto-scheduling), segmented technical content so it reached the right audiences, and built onboarding into the company’s operating rhythm.

Harness’s program moved employee advocacy from an ad hoc activity to an always-on channel, improving campaign distribution, strengthening the day-to-day LinkedIn presence, and increasing the proportion of employees posting.

Results

$0.31 cost per click (CPC)
$200k+ earned media value (EMV) in 1 year
Reach nearly 9x Harness’s corporate social following

The People 👋

Harness is a software delivery platform designed to help companies accelerate cloud initiatives and adoption of containers and orchestration tools like Kubernetes and Amazon ECS, making software delivery easier and giving developers their nights and weekends back.

At the heart of Harness’ employee advocacy program is Jason Meyers, who manages employee advocacy alongside corporate social and community responsibilities. Working closely with internal stakeholders, Jason became the operational owner of the program, ensuring advocacy wasn’t treated as a one-off initiative, but something woven into how Harness launches and communicates.

The Challenge? 🤔

Before DSMN8, Harness faced a familiar set of challenges:

A manual content distribution process
Social copy and assets were shared via documents. That made content easy to miss and difficult to use in the moment, especially for busy commercial teams.

Inconsistent employee activity
Harness wanted LinkedIn to reflect the reality of the business: high-quality product work, a strong culture, and teams who were proud of what they were building. But without an easier way to share, posting remained sporadic.

A content relevance problem
Harness creates both technical and non-technical content. Sending the same posts to everyone risked employees sharing content that didn’t match their audience.

The goal was clear: create a program that helped employees participate confidently, consistently, and with minimal effort.

”We learned that with our sales team, getting them to post on social media can be hard, right? You forget about it because you’re so caught up in your day-to-day and you’re chasing a client or a prospect. Auto-Scheduling meant that our teams could essentially just set it and forget it, allowing them to focus on other tasks while this worked in the background.
Jason MeyersHead of Social & Community

The Strategy? 🧠

Harness didn’t introduce DSMN8 as “another tool.” They treated employee advocacy like a distribution channel alongside paid, email, and organic social. They chose to:

1) Launch around a major campaign
The initial driver was a major campaign: a multi-stop roadshow across the US and UK, culminating in a virtual summit. Harness needed an easier way to mobilize employees around campaign promotion and maintain consistent visibility.

2) Make sharing work for sales reality
Harness replaced the old approach of embedding content inside a weekly sales document. Instead, employees could access ready-to-share posts directly, reducing friction and making sharing more “in the flow of work.” To support time-poor teams, Harness leaned into automated posting, enabling employees to queue content in advance and stay consistently active without manual effort.

3) Segment content to protect relevance
Harness introduced a technical content track so that in-depth product content reached the right groups (engineering, technical SMEs, sales engineers, and relevant marketing roles). This ensured employees weren’t asked to share content that didn’t fit their audience.

4) Operationalize advocacy as part of the marketing mix
Rather than treating advocacy as an ad hoc activity, Harness built DSMN8 into the campaign workflow. When announcements and releases are planned, DSMN8 content is prepared in parallel with the rest of the marketing plan, just like scheduling organic LinkedIn posts, building email comms, or launching paid support. This ensured advocacy stayed consistent and always-on, rather than relying on one-off pushes.

”One of the things we learned over time was for some people, such as individuals in marketing or sales, we didn’t want them to auto-share content that was super technical and well beyond their audience. So, we used DSMN8's Groups feature for content segmentation and created multiple categories, such as technical content and marketing-specific content so that it went to the right people.”
Jason MeyersHead of Social & Community

The Execution 💪

With DSMN8 in place, Harness built a rollout designed to create long-term habits and not a short spike in activity.

Interactive onboarding and enablement
Jason set up office hours and proactively reached out to team leads ahead of time to let them know the program was coming, gauge interest, and identify any subject matter experts who could help curate content for their area.

During sessions, the platform was demoed group-by-group, with the value proposition tailored to each audience, while keeping the core idea consistent: employees could subscribe to content relevant to them, and Harness would tag and distribute posts to the right people.

Built into onboarding for new joiners
To ensure the program scaled as Harness grew, DSMN8 was added to the new employee onboarding process. A deck is presented to all new employees that includes a dedicated slide about DSMN8, so new joiners learn what the platform is, why it matters, and how to get started.

Harness also uses provisioning to set up employees as they join, reducing admin overhead and helping the user base grow in step with headcount.

Always-on internal promotion (so it stays top of mind)
At least quarterly, the company shares program updates internally, highlighting activity and performance (e.g., number of posts, program metrics, and what DSMN8 has driven). On a week-to-week basis, internal channels are updated via integrations to keep DSMN8 visible:

Slack: links to DSMN8 are shared frequently, especially around customer-facing announcements.
Internal comms: when announcements go out internally, the comms team also shares the DSMN8 link alongside assets like the corporate LinkedIn post, press releases, and coverage, making it easy for employees to share.
All-hands meetings: Harness holds a bi-weekly all-hands. When DSMN8 is referenced, Jason drops the universal registration link in the live chat for anyone who’s new or hasn’t registered yet.

The Impact 🚀

From a performance standpoint, the program has delivered:

$0.31 average cost per click (CPC)
$200k+ earned media value (EMV) in 1 year
Reach nearly 9x Harness’ corporate social following

Harness’ leaderboard jump
In DSMN8’s employee advocacy leaderboards for the Software/SaaS industry, ranked by the % of employees who posted on LinkedIn over a 30-day period, Harness saw a significant jump:

March 2024: Ranked 54th with 18.74% of employees posting.
November 2025: Ranked 4th with 31.16% of employees posting.

This is a simple but powerful indicator of the program’s success: more Harness employees were showing up on LinkedIn more consistently.

The “this is working” moment
The program’s impact became visible at the leadership level. Jason noted that the CEO referenced (unprompted) that every time he opened LinkedIn, he was seeing Harness employees posting about the company. That’s the outcome most SaaS teams want: not just content shared, but a noticeable increase in presence and share of voice.

Harness ranked 4th in computer software employee advocacy leaderboard.

Key Features & Tactics Used:

Groups & Teams

Get the right content to the right employees.

Auto-Scheduling

Allowed busy individuals to put posting on auto-pilot.

Analytics Suite

Monitor performance & demonstrate ROI.

Conclusion ✍️

Harness didn’t build an employee advocacy program as a side project. By launching around a high-profile campaign, designing for how commercial and technical teams actually work, and treating advocacy as a distribution channel, Harness created a scalable program with longevity.

The results speak for themselves: strong performance metrics, an increased employee posting rate, and a noticeable uplift in the company’s day-to-day LinkedIn presence.

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$0.31

Cost-Per-Click

$200k+

Earned Media Value

9x

Reach vs Corporate Page

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