When NieuweStroom launched the first Dutch energy contract to combine dynamic pricing with a price cap, they didn't just take out a full-page ad in the FD and NRC, but they had employees across the company share it on LinkedIn, each in their own words. Here's what every company can learn from this example of employee advocacy.
On Saturday the 26th of September, NieuweStroom introduced Dynamische Stroom en Gas met PrijsBescherming: a dynamic energy contract for entrepreneurs with a price ceiling built in. It's the first product in the Dutch energy market to combine the two, for gas and electricity both. NieuweStroom marked the moment with a full-page spread in the Financieele Dagblad and NRC, but the newspaper articles weren't the whole campaign.
How NieuweStroom shared the news
Founder Thijs de Graaf opened the run-up days earlier with a teaser that named no product at all: "Flexibel. Zeker. Tot nu toe moest je als ondernemer kiezen. Vanaf zaterdag niet meer." Flexible. Certain. Until now, as an entrepreneur you had to choose. From Saturday, not anymore. He closed with a teaser of his own: "hou de media in de gaten", keep an eye on the media.
On launch day, he came back with the full pitch: a fixed contract carries a risk premium the supplier keeps whether prices rise or not, a dynamic contract saves money but leaves you exposed to spikes, and PrijsBescherming is what happens when a company stops making customers choose between them.
Every voice, its own angle
What followed wasn't a copy-paste campaign with swapped names. At least eighteen NieuweStroom employees, and that's without combing every profile in the company, posted their own take within three days of the launch.
- Amy de Greef, on the brand team, tied the launch to the name itself: "als je merknaam ook een belofte is, moet je die waarmaken", if your brand name is also a promise, you have to keep it.
- Siem Simonis kept his to one line over morning coffee: "De beste ideeën zijn achteraf bezien eigenlijk best simpel", the best ideas are, looking back, actually pretty simple.
- Jorian Haas led with the objection everyone raises about dynamic pricing, then answered it in the next sentence: "Vast of dynamisch… Waarom zou je kiezen?"
- Jeroen Hartman posted from a trade show floor in Joure, proud of "a wonderful team of colleagues," and invited people to book a meeting on the spot.
- Tom Custers switched languages entirely for his second post: "NieuweStroom was the first disruptor in energy with their dynamic concept, more than a decade ago! They're back!!"
- Arnout Goeman closed his post with a line that doubled as the whole campaign's thesis: "in het tijdperk van AI zijn het toch de mensen die het verschil maken", in the age of AI, it's still people who make the difference.
Strategy, coaching, and comms showed up too, not just sales
Participation wasn't limited to people whose job is to sell. Wouter Steegmans used the launch to make a point about strategy itself: real strategy means translating ambitions into concrete choices, and he framed the question NieuweStroom had been sitting with (how do you let entrepreneurs benefit from low prices without full exposure to spikes) as the reason PrijsBescherming exists at all.
Sofia Schoubben, an internal organisational coach, used the same moment to write about a different tension: slowing down to recalibrate versus moving forward with execution, "kunnen vertragen zonder stil te vallen, en versnellen zonder voorbij te lopen aan wat aandacht nodig heeft."
On the financial side, Leo Houben reshared the announcement with his own pitch to entrepreneurs, and colleague Simone Skibicki passed it on again.
Chantal Broeders, who leads the team that ran the campaign, used her post to credit Erik van der Schelling for taking the project on the moment he joined her team.
Martijn Verschoor, working on the customer journey, closed his with NieuweStroom's new line: "we begrijpen dynamisch. Logisch toch?", we understand dynamic. Logical, right?
The company page's own post picked up 13 reposts from colleagues on top of that, and Vera Vos, Bart van Rooijen, Thiemo Boef, Jeffrey Van Wezenbeek, Danny Heins, and Anotsj Ratnam all added posts of their own, each pointing back to the same launch.
Great work Thijs, Amy, Siem, Sofia, Wouter, Jorian, Jeroen, Leo, Vera, Chantal, Martijn, Bart, Thiemo, Tom, Arnout, Jeffrey, Danny, and Anotsj. But especially congratulations to Erik van der Schelling, who took on running the campaign the moment he arrived, and to Jesse Zelissen and Michelle Janssen, credited for making it happen across procurement, billing, IT, and marketing.
The reach didn't stop at NieuweStroom's own payroll, either. Edgard Vermeersch, CEO of Itineris (a Willow customer), reshared the announcement and tied it back to his own company's platform going live just weeks earlier:
"Great to see NieuweStroom already bringing new innovations to market, only weeks after the successful go-live of UMAX."
That's the founder of a partner company doing unpaid, unprompted amplification, the kind no media plan can buy.
Why it works
From a social media marketing perspective, what NieuweStroom executed is a textbook example of why employee advocacy consistently outperforms brand-only communication on LinkedIn.
Network multiplication
Eighteen individual profiles each reach their own network, on top of whatever the company page reaches on its own, and that's before a partner CEO reshares it into a network of his own. A founder, a coach, a financial specialist and a customer journey owner don't share an audience. Together they reach entrepreneurs, energy-sector peers, and colleagues who'd never see the company page's post at all.
Trust transfer
People trust people. A post from a colleague or a founder carries more weight than a brand account announcing its own launch. When someone sees a real person at NieuweStroom explain why the product exists, in their own words, they're more likely to stop scrolling and believe it. It reads as conviction, not a campaign.
Authentic stories
By letting each person tell it their own way, from a strategist's framing to a coach's reflection to a one-line reaction over coffee, NieuweStroom turned one product launch into eighteen different entry points, plus one more from outside the company entirely. Different angles reached different corners of the same market. For a Dutch entrepreneur weighing energy contracts that week, this launch was hard to miss.
Looking ahead
NieuweStroom has done the hard part: proving to the team that this kind of participation is both possible and worth it. The challenge now is keeping that energy alive between launches.
- Build a shared content bank so employees always have something worth posting without starting from a blank page.
- Keep a light cadence between big moments: product updates, customer wins, and team news, so profiles stay warm.
- Plan smaller coordinated waves around future milestones, so this becomes a repeatable playbook rather than a one-off.
Willow's 2026 LinkedIn Research Report (43,738 posts across 488 company pages) found that pages posting sporadically generate ten times fewer impressions than ones that show up every week, see the consistency report. The same logic applies to personal profiles: the value compounds with repetition, not with one good week.
Key takeaways
NieuweStroom's launch is a strong example of coordinated employee advocacy in the Dutch energy market. What stands out as genuinely replicable for any company planning a big announcement:
Brief for authenticity, not uniformity. Forcing eighteen people to share one message is easy. Getting a founder, a coach, a campaign lead and a customer journey owner to each find their own honest angle on the same news is not, and that's what made this land.
This kind of launch doesn't happen by accident. It needs trust between leadership and the team, a culture where people are proud to represent the company in public, and the organisational muscle to actually pull it off in a three-day window. NieuweStroom showed all three. That's worth celebrating, and worth building on.
Appendix I - LinkedIn posts
NieuweStroom (company) · Thijs (teaser) · Thijs (launch) · Amy · Siem · Sofia · Wouter · Jorian · Jeroen · Leo · Vera · Chantal · Martijn · Bart · Thiemo · Tom (teaser) · Tom (launch) · Arnout · Jeffrey · Danny · Anotsj · Edgard (Itineris)
Disclaimer
NieuweStroom is not a Willow customer (as of now). We just want to share a great example of employee advocacy that caught our attention. We do have a lot of other success stories worth reading.